The structure of modern cultural theory 9781847791849

Table of contents :
Front matter
Dedication
Contents
Preface and acknowledgements
Introduction
Culture – an antinomical view
Adorno as educator
Foucault and the ethics of subjectivity
Bourdieu, ethics and reflexivity
A note on postmodern cultural theory
Conclusion
Index

Citation preview

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The structure of modern cultural theory Thomas Osborne

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave Macmillan

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Copyright © Thomas Osborne 2008 The right of Thomas Osborne to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed exclusively in the USA by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed exclusively in Canada by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 7823 1 hardback

First published 2008 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Typeset by Action Publishing Technology Ltd, Gloucester Printed in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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For Abigail, Harry and Miranda

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Contents

Preface and acknowledgements Introduction

page viii 1

1

Culture – an antinomical view

14

2

Adorno as educator

35

3

Foucault and the ethics of subjectivity

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Bourdieu, ethics and reflexivity

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A note on postmodern cultural theory

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Conclusion

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Index

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Preface and acknowledgements

This little book is about the scope and structure of modern cultural theory. The argument is that modern cultural theory is – or perhaps was – a critical and ultimately ethical enterprise as opposed to just an ‘epistemic’ one. The implications of this and whether or not it should matter – or should have mattered – will, hopefully, become clear over the course of the argument. Whether the book should be seen as an obituary for modern cultural theory or an attempt at a renewal of it is best left to the reader’s judgement. Aside from its status as an argument, the book is, at least after the introduction and chapter one, fairly straightforward commentary – designed as it was initially for a postgraduate student audience. It focuses on the work, in the main, of Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. Seasoned experts on these thinkers will not find anything, except perhaps errors, to shake them out of any epistemological slumbers they may be in. Nor does the book seek to say everything about these three, not even everything about what they have to say about culture, but only seeks to be selective in relation to its specific argument. Given that the book is not written by a dedicated specialist on any of its chosen trio, it is all the more necessary to acknowledge – in addition of course to all those many authorities whose works have been consulted but not exhaustively referenced in the text itself – the real kindness of friends who have taken the time to read an earlier version in manuscript and who provided extensive criticisms and comments on it: Graham Burchell, Gregor McLennan and Charlie Turner – plus a sceptical but generous reader from Manchester University Press.

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Introduction Ethics and educationality – Disciplinarity – Principles of reading – Theory and detachment – Problematics – Reconstructing modern cultural theory – Adorno, Foucault, Bourdieu

This book is concerned with the scope of cultural theory in its modern – it might even be said in its modernist – form. This introductory chapter considers what this concern might mean, and why it might be of interest. Ethics and educationality The three thinkers under most consideration in the pages that follow – Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu – might hardly be seen as representative of cultural theory per se if that enterprise is taken to be what it is often taken to be. But this book is not about cultural theory in, say, its Spenglerite form, the analysis of the cultural predicament of such grandiose, epochal and over-schematic concepts such as ‘Western man’ or Occidental reason. Instead, for all their manifest dissimilarities, these writers are taken as paradigm cases of a certain kind of specifically modern agenda in cultural theory – which is, in fact, a much more modest enterprise. This book is an attempt to outline what that relatively modest agenda is, arguing that the texts in question possess more than just ‘positive’ or epistemic relevance to cultural expertise but are – recalling a phrase from Michel Foucault – something like ‘“practical” texts which are themselves the object of a “practice”’.1 The contention is that the agenda of modern cultural theory is strategically or ultimately ethical – to do with the cultivation of particular critical attributes – rather than prima1 M. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. R. Hurley (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1985), p. 12.

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rily epistemic – to do only with the production of objective knowledge; and that these texts in modern cultural theory refer, overtly or implicitly, to the ultimately ethical quest for autonomy as a guiding, if quite possibly impossible, ideal. But we need to be a little careful as to what is meant by notions such as ethics and autonomy here. In claiming an ethical status for these texts, the contention is not that they are highly normative, providing us with guidelines as to how to live or what to do in certain situations under certain circumstances. Modern cultural theory may be, so to speak, ultimately ethical but ‘ethics’ refers for the most part in these pages to something rather narrower than this: to the reflexivity of the intellect – that is, specifically to critical ethics. This is why it will often be claimed here that modern cultural theory has an ‘ethico-critical’ constitutive interest. Of course such a restricted understanding of ethics will have plenty of implications for wider ethical views – who we think we are, what we might do and so forth – but, none the less, should not be confused with them. There are plenty of things going on out there that have ethical relevance, and modern cultural theory is no doubt only a very minor and rather limited one. Modern cultural theory is an intellectual – though not necessarily a narrow, boringly academic – enterprise which, though part of the real world, should not be viewed as seeking to be co-extensive with it, not least because the real world deserves more due than that. In any case, if there is any specificity to modern cultural theory in relation to ethics, even aside from the necessary restriction of its concern with such matters to ethics of the intellect, it is that it is fundamentally a critical – even at times seemingly negative – enterprise. This critical character gives it something of a paradoxical aspect: serving not so much to put forward positive theories of or propositions about ultimately ethical conduct as to be, in fact, quite often counter-ethical, challenging the existing conceptions and preconceptions that we may have. This is why there are occasions in this book when the notion of ethics is contrasted with that of morality: understanding morality as the codification of right or wrong forms of living, and ethics as the reflexive aspect of morality – where morality, if anything, undoes itself.2 In any case, whatever its ethical ambit, 2 Variants on this distinction can be found in the work of Foucault (see Chapter 3 below); but see also G. Deleuze ‘On the difference between the Ethics and a morality’, in Spinoza: practical philosophy, trans. R. Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988), and T. Osborne, Aspects of Enlightenment: social theory and the ethics of truth (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).

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modern cultural theory has absolutely nothing to do with any given system of morality. What, then, is the aim of the critical ethics espoused by modern cultural theory? If there is a predominant aim it is that of critical autonomy – the Enlightenment ideal, discussed further in Chapter 1, of maturity in understanding, of not being dependent upon another’s judgement. And again, such critical autonomy is obviously tied to but hardly co-extensive with autonomy in a wider sense: the autonomy – not necessarily just of individuals but of collectivities – against the forces of heteronomy in general. But this is autonomy in a very ‘thin’ understanding. In this sense, modern cultural theory is only ultimately ethical, not immediately so; it does not typically purvey concrete views of what autonomy is; it does not straightforwardly seek to ‘inculcate’ this or that concrete form of autonomy but only to prepare the ground for it, as a value, through critical, intellectual work; it is a kind of exercise, then, not the thing itself.3 Intrinsic to this ‘thin’ and limited idea of critical autonomy in modern cultural theory is an idea that is captured here by a rather horrible neologism – educationality. Broadly speaking, the idea of educationality is designed to capture the sense that those writings that can be considered as being emblematic of modern cultural theory are not, for all that, necessarily ‘pedagogical’, seeking to teach this or that specific set doctrine or rubric. Educationality is different from pedagogy. Adorno, Foucault, Bourdieu – these are not really experts, but educators, perhaps in a sense that is not wholly unrelated to that invoked by Nietzsche in his essay ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’: somebody who stirs things up, who challenges our ‘anthropological’ preconceptions but – importantly – not someone who should or can be necessarily followed.4 Disciplinarity Our three thinkers are tied very loosely together in thematic terms, and even more loosely in ideological or methodological terms. If the argument of this book is that there is a distinctive agenda to modern cultural theory that separates its scope from those of other kinds of 3 See in a very different, but related and relevant, register P. Hadot, ‘Spiritual exercises’, in Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). 4 F. Nietzsche, ‘Schopenhauer as educator’ (1874), in Untimely Meditations, trans. J.P. Stern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

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inquiry, including other types of cultural inquiry, we can be forgiven some scepticism as to whether we should ascribe the status of a ‘discipline’ to it or even whether it matters whether we do so or not.5 Within the social sciences, economics could be described as a discipline, and so might psychology. Being disciplinary is not necessarily a good thing however. For example, it is highly questionable as to whether political science is a discipline, or whether it should be. The argument here, anyway, is not that modern cultural theory is a discipline. Or not exactly. The thinkers considered most prominently in this book amount to two philosophers (Adorno and Foucault) and a sociologist (Bourdieu). Perhaps that is how they should remain to be seen in actual disciplinary terms. By describing them as (modern) cultural theorists, the contention is not that they consciously adhered to an academic or disciplinary enterprise called (modern) cultural theory. It is to claim that they can be understood, according to a common thread, an agenda, or ‘genre of inquiry’. Cultural theory, as reconstructed here, is nothing more – or less – than a genre of discourse, and that genre is what this book aims to reconstruct. But it is not exactly a discipline that will appear, only a kind of thematic thread or ethos; a thread bound, as already mentioned, by a very simple idea which is also an ideal – that of critical autonomy. More on this in due course, indeed throughout. Principles of reading Adorno, Foucault and Bourdieu wrote in very specific – and mutually heterogeneous – registers. We shall come back to the question of the mutual coherence of their work, or lack of it, in the conclusion. In any case, rather than taking their own methodological conceptions of what they are doing entirely at face value, this book seeks to pass their work through the unifying lens of certain, rather basic, principles of reading. We start with the principle of maximisation. Here the aim is simply to seek to do honour and service to those writers considered here. It is to be hoped, anyway, that the versions of the cultural thought of Adorno, Foucault and Bourdieu that appear here are entirely free of the ressentiment of ‘interpretation’. The aim is to maximise the value of each example, even if on occasion this will entail reading an author 5

G. McLennan, Sociological Cultural Studies (London: Macmillan, 2006).

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against himself, or at least attempting to distinguish the force of an argument from its content. For example, there is the celebrated – or perhaps notorious – case of Adorno and jazz.6 Adorno sincerely hated jazz. No ironies on that score. But, still, one can read Adorno on jazz in a way that maximizes his argument to the extent that it can be pushed beyond a local argument with jazz aficionados and the like to become more generally an argument with – ultimately ethical – implications for ways of thinking about maturity, responsibility and autonomy. Yes, Adorno hated jazz. But the force of the argument goes beyond jazz and is relevant for its diagnosis of forces that – just as Adorno, rightly or wrongly, regarded jazz – impede our ethico-critical sense of autonomy. There is a second principle of reading – that of coherence. In this sense the book is perspectival and deliberately so. In each case, the emphasis is not so much upon the work of an author as a whole as upon the critical and educational value of their works in relation to culture: works that are portrayed as, to put it too elaborately, rhetorical ‘technologies’ that guide our thinking towards certain themes and problems and away from others. Of course, texts and oeuvres are leaky. As already suggested, the emphasis here is no doubt a construction, or at least a rationalisation; and if there are merits to this, these lie precisely in the coherence it provides. There is also – a third principle of reading – a redemptive motive. The concern is to free these thinkers from what are, in fact, often rather bleak misconceptions about them; pessimism in the case of Adorno, a sort of determinism or fatalism in the case of Foucault, and reductive sociologism in the case of Bourdieu. In each case, albeit with the partial exception of Bourdieu whose example is ambiguous (but illuminatingly so), it is argued that there are grounds for thinking that the opposite emphasis is actually the correct, more coherent, more relevant, more satisfying one. The fourth principle relates – perhaps oddly – to a certain empiricism that is to be found in the work of each thinker. That is not to say that they are not theorists at all; for theory is not necessarily opposed to the empirical; it is opposed only to a refusal of reflection – or to put it more provocatively, to stupidity. But in each case here, the argument is that the work of these thinkers is not simply ‘grand theory’, about just about everything there is, but is quite closely 6 See, most accessibly in English, T. Adorno ‘Perennial fashion – jazz’, in Prisms, trans. S. & S. Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981).

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focused on specific problems. This makes the texts as much about doing things as about stating, or theorising, things. But what then becomes of the theoretical aspect of cultural theory? What in fact is theory in this context? Answering these questions brings us to a fifth principle of reading – detachment. Theory and detachment This book is not against theory but is sceptical about the idea of abstract, general or ‘grand theory’. Indeed one of its aims is to show the extent to which thinkers such as Adorno, Foucault and Bourdieu themselves often, in effect, resist this idea of theory. There is certainly no grand theory in Foucault. There is a lot of repetitive methodological reflection in Bourdieu and a lot of what is, for some, undoubtedly somewhat tortuous German philosophy in Adorno, but perhaps not much theory. But this lack of grand theorising is a good thing, not because grand theory is bad but because it is not really theory at all. Theory is not to be opposed to the material, the empirical, the problematic, the case-study. Rather theory is, if it is anything, only the activity of reflection itself – which is why its opposite is only non-reflection, or just passivity, or even, as already mentioned, just stupidity. Of course it depends on how you define theory. Theory with a small t is not about building pyramids of ineluctable connections, or even about putting forward concepts designed to seize upon great parts of the world and connect them all up. Rather, it is preferable to think of theory as having a deflationary function. Theory is just those sets of means by which we seek to detach ourselves from an object. That is why the idea of reflection is invoked in relation to it. This sort of theory is a means of disaggregating things, of gaining a distance from them. When we do close empirical research we can become involved with our subject matter to the extent of identifying with it. Theory is what we resort to in order to detach ourselves from this involvement which, taken too far, can make us myopic. All good, genuine empiricists will tell you that they are theorists too. Perhaps this may come across as an eccentric understanding of what theory is. So be it. This view separates us, certainly, from the rather grandiose image of theory as being about ideational pyramidbuilding. And it gives us an idea as to how theorising is not itself some kind of separate activity from working with particular materials but is, rather, itself a means of working with such materials in a

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particular way, in order to gain a perspective. The Greeks: theorein – to see. So theory means distance, perception from a detached point of view, reflection. Obviously it is best not to read too much into this idea of detachment. It is adapted loosely from the work of Norbert Elias.7 Detachment does not imply self-satisfied ideas about one’s ‘objectivity’. There is an ethical aspect to it. It involves a kind of work, a labour of thought. Michel Foucault’s final books illustrate this idea very well. In the preface to The Use of Pleasure, Foucault reflected on the aims of research: not to say the same thing over and over again, not just to present and interpret data, but, as he put it, to get free of oneself. ‘There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently from what one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on seeing and reflecting at all.’8 In sum, modern cultural theory in just this sense is ethico-critical work rather than finished ‘knowledge’ – it is work upon ourselves, or at least our self-understandings, not, so to speak, the finished article. It is not a morality system. Yet we can use cultural theory in a benignly critical way: to reflect upon ourselves, to distance ourselves from ourselves in ways that, in certain contexts, might be useful from an ultimately ethical point of view. Problematics Maximisation, coherence, redemptive critique, empiricism, detachment. These broad and basic principles of reading, however, are not to be confused with close-knit, watertight methodologies, philosophies or ideologies. In any case, with regard to each thinker considered in these pages, the role of methodologies as such is somewhat downgraded. Adorno, certainly, was a Marxist, a Hegelian and a dialectician, Bourdieu was a realist sociologist engaged with questions of structure and agency, and Foucault was – what? – a post-structuralist discourse analyst or some such esoteric animal. That, anyway, is what the textbooks tend to say. But actually methodological concerns are just about the least interesting things about these thinkers. Methodologies usually come along after the fact. To take the most obvious example, Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge was 7 N. Elias, Involvement and Detachment, trans. E. Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978). 8 Foucault, Use of Pleasure, p. 8.

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more of a postscript to his empirical works of the 1960s than a methodologically minded explanation of them.9 What come before methodologies are problems or problematics: spaces of concern, object-domains that are essentially constructs.10 Truth is not relative; there are right and wrong answers to particular questions. But answers themselves are, for all that, only relative to problems. One has to know what questions one is asking, what questions are relevant, what is at stake in any discursive field before one can assess the merits or pitfalls of an argument. The worst form of violence that one can do to an author is not to contradict his or her arguments but to misunderstand his or her problems. And problems are never simply ‘methodological’ since methodologies materialise only in relation to particular spaces of problematisation themselves. Problems always have priority. Reconstructing modern cultural theory To analyse modern cultural theory as a genre of discourse, then, is to reconstruct its scope in problematological terms, and not in terms of methodology or the history of ideas. So what are the kinds of problem that will be at issue here in this book? There are general problems, those proper to modern cultural theory qua modern cultural theory; and particular problems, characteristic of the signature of each thinker in question. Obviously all three thinkers are concerned, in different ways, with the question of culture. A difficult term obviously.11 Adorno thinks that our very notion of culture has been utterly colonised by the culture industries; Foucault, amongst many other concerns, conducts historical investigations of subjectivity, understood as a – more or less – cultural artefact; and Bourdieu attempts to demystify forms of cultural power. So much is obvious, and hardly distinguishes modern 9 M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. Sheridan-Smith (London: Tavistock, 1971). 10 T. Osborne, ‘What is a problem?’ History of the Human Sciences, 16:4 (2003), pp. 1–17. 11 See of course R. Williams, ‘Culture’ in Keywords (London: Fontana, 1976): ‘Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’, p. 76. See also F. Mulhern, Culture/Metaculture (London: Routledge, 2000). More influential for our own ethico-critical emphasis has been Ian Hunter’s landmark study, Culture and Government (London: Macmillan, 1988). See also Zygmunt Bauman’s still provocative Culture as Praxis (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973).

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cultural theory from other genres of enquiry. Rather, modern cultural theory – as will be argued a little in Chapter 1 – is cultural in three quite specific ways: in so far as it is concerned with the critique of conventions of creative autonomy; in so far as it itself can be seen to be a cultural discipline, which is to say an ethico-critical or reflexive one; and in so far as it has a concern with the status of modernism. In modern cultural theory, culture might be regarded more often than not as a synonym for creativity, or – better – the idea of creative autonomy. This is the first specific sense in which modern cultural theory is actually a cultural form of enquiry at all. The reasons for this are out of something like philosophical anthropology: not because culture happens to be an interesting subject but from a concern with the understanding of humans in so far as they are creatively autonomous beings. But there is some support for this emphasis in our usual semantics of culture. In the conventional anthropological sense, cultural practices are those which are specific to a particular group; as such, they are the creative means – practices and institutions – of autonomisation from nature and from other groups who ‘do’ culture in different ways. A seemingly very different concept of culture – that associating it with questions of art and expression – is, for all that, likewise founded on this question of creative autonomy: the idea of ‘disinterested’ art, for instance, seen as separate from matters of immediate human concern, or the notion of a cultural ‘sphere’ of practices separated from those of the economy, politics and other social spheres. In either basic sense – culture as, so to speak, the creation of conventions or culture as the conventions of creativity – the notion of creative autonomy does seem central to the idea, or rather the ideal, of culture, at least from the perspective of modern cultural theory. But if modern cultural theory has – to turn to our second specific sense – a concern with the ideal of creative autonomy then it is not a pedagogy in the form of those self-help books that tell you how to be creative in five easy steps. On the contrary, more often than not it is not ‘positive’ at all but functions only as a critique of existing or historical conventions of creativity. So the idea of creative autonomy here is an ethical ideal rather than a substantive notion: a regulative ideal rather than an accomplishable goal. One cannot easily have a ‘theory’ of autonomy in the sense of a formal definition of it. Autonomy, in the usage implied here, is itself a speculative notion, a goal that is never reached. This gives it a highly paradoxical character: if we think we have reached it then we are really heteronomous

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because we have become subjects of a finite view of what autonomy is. Autonomy is what is never present. It has to be indirectly investigated. So modern cultural theory is itself cultural in so far as it attempts to free up our understandings of culture in the direction of critical autonomy, that is, as a reflexive and ethico-critical exercise and not as a ‘science’ – whether that be of culture, of creativity or of autonomy itself. The third specificity is that modern cultural theory typically investigates the fate of critical autonomy on the terrain, if anywhere, of the modernist arts: again, a theme to be developed somewhat further in Chapter 1 (and the outlines of that connection can be only very briefly traced here). Modernism stands for a certain kind of autonomy in the arts; but it is seen here in an ethico-critical sense: not as a particular – narrowly aesthetic – movement but as a kind of ethical principle of reflexivity, a genre of reflection the object of which is precisely to reflect on its own status.12 As we will say, the question of modernism implicates the ethical issue of autonomy in that to be modern is to reflect on the conditions of one’s own practice, and the inheritance of the conditions provided by one’s ‘tradition’ or past. If it is the case that the problem of modernism is always-already entwined with the problem of autonomy, that is because in modernism there is introduced the idea of art as the epitome or, better, the analogue of an autonomous form of existence. The artwork is a sort of material condensation of the quest for autonomy. As such this quest is ultimately ethical, even if its form of expression is aesthetic. Ultimately ethical, but not immediately so – for immediately so the modern artwork is, just that, a piece of art. And invocation of the idea of autonomy does not mean that any particular artwork is thereby autonomous from the orders of, say, politics, morality or epistemology; only that, if it seeks to embrace them, it has to do so within a logic of its own – otherwise we would need no separable category of art at all. We should not make too much of this. Certainly, we need not be committed to any particular ‘theory’ of art. All that really needs saying is that, in modern cultural theory, the investigation of the arts 12 For some brief but suggestive reflections: S. Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 201–2, 219–20; also useful on modernism, for our purposes, is C. Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chapter 24. Cf. the opening chapters of R. Williams, The Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 1989).

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typically becomes a kind of laboratory for the investigation of the historical conditions of certain kinds of autonomy, a theme we see quite clearly in Bourdieu’s work for example.13 The creative arts are important to modern cultural theory for modernist – and ultimately critical and ethical – reasons, rather than modernism being important simply for aesthetic reasons. Adorno, Foucault, Bourdieu Each of our thinkers is, of course, guided by particular concerns and each, equally obviously, has a particular style or working signature. We start in Chapter 2 with Adorno (1903-1969) not just because he is first chronologically but because his work is an apt way to introduce further some very basic themes of this book: in particular those of critical autonomy and educationality. Adorno’s reflections on art and culture are contributions to the ethical understanding of autonomy, emphasising the importance, above all, of the cultivation of critical reflection. Adorno is often cast as a cultural pessimist and elitist in matters of the arts. The argument here is that he is, rather, an ethico-critical theorist of democracy and a philosopher of hope. Adorno’s mode of critique is directed not towards denouncing the world as it is but in clearing the way for ethical – and ultimately by that, political – modes of subjectivity founded on a state of cultural and political ‘maturity’. His aims are critical: not just to put forward positive theories of this or that phenomena but to denounce the forces that lead to all limiting forms of pseudo-creativity, pseudo-heterodoxy and pseudo-autonomy and – by highlighting the characteristics of high art as a beacon of resistance to the formulaic monotony of the culture industry – to illuminate and promote the continuing possibility of autonomous, critical reflection. In this sense, the use of Adorno’s work is to be seen not simply as a sociologically realist portrait of a wholly repressive society but as an educational and ethical ‘exercise’; one that is designed to release potentialities for our critical reflection and ‘enlightenment’. On this view, the knowledge-constitutive interest of cultural theory ceases to be posited in terms of a ‘positive’ or epistemic discipline (concerned, objectively, with the production of ‘knowledge’) as much as in terms of an ethico13 See the essays collected in P. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, trans. R. Johnson (Cambridge: Polity, 1993).

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critical discourse that works against the limited and limiting forms that have tended to govern our interpellation as cultural subjects. Chapter 3 situates the work of Michel Foucault (1926-1984), in other ways so different from Adorno, in terms of a broadly – if minimally – parallel agenda in modern cultural theory. Foucault is definitely a modernist, as evidenced not least from his late essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’14 In this context, Chapter 3 outlines some of the importance of Foucault’s notion of an ‘aesthetics of existence’ in relation to his work as a whole. This notion is not so much part of a normative project as it is a ‘limit-idea’ or regulative ideal which makes sense only in relation to Foucault’s general project of an ‘ontology of ourselves’. The idea of an aesthetics of existence is in fact – and here not least lies Foucault’s modernism, in spite of the fact that it derives from work on the ancient world – an image that serves to register the twin values of human creativity and ethical autonomy, and one which ultimately has implications for political culture. Not least of what is really interesting about Foucault’s work is that this image is borrowed from the history of asceticism rather from that of nihilism. Aesthetics and autonomy are coded alongside self-discipline rather than in opposition to it. Foucault’s cultural theory takes the form of a nominalist history of kinds of asceticism and ‘technologies of the self’. But this nominalism is ethico-critical rather than just epistemological. It is a question not of saying there is no such thing as the self but rather of working upon the idea of the self by excavating its very conditions of possibility. In short, Foucault’s is like that of Adorno less of a purely epistemic discourse than an ultimately ethical discourse of knowledge. The image of critique here is not that of the positive, epistemic social sciences but that of an ongoing work upon ourselves using the resources of history as our material; and Foucault’s oeuvre as a whole represents a particular ethics of enlightenment: the creative project of an escape from history rather than, as is sometimes thought, an insistence upon our bondage to it. Chapter 4 invokes related themes in the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), one of the few mainstream social theorists of recent times to have taken culture and the arts as being of central importance to the very structure of their work.15 Rather than seeing Bourdieu just as a sociologist 14 M. Foucault, ‘What is enlightenment?’, in Essential Works: ethics, trans. C. Porter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997). 15 See, for a cogent overview, B. Fowler, Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory (London: Sage, 1997).

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of culture, we attempt to resituate his work within the genre of inquiry of modern cultural theory, that is, again, as a series of ultimately ethical reflections on problems of autonomy and creativity. Bourdieu’s is also a more obviously critical problematic, aimed at exposing those forces which block the conditions for autonomy. His work amounts to a critique of the continuing power of the sacred in our societies: in institutional terms, in the form of a critique of forms of symbolic power – not least in the modernist arts themselves – and in terms of subjectivity, in the form of a critique of all ‘charismatic’ conceptions of human agency. However, there is a tension in Bourdieu’s work at, so to speak, the level of educationality itself: a tension between the positive ‘scientific’ project of locating the sociological determinations of symbolic and cultural power, and the ‘reflexive’ project of providing an ultimately ethical self-understanding of our conditions for action. This tension is not, perhaps, so much a limitation of Bourdieu’s work as itself part of an attempt to ‘work through’ the tension between the ‘scientifically’ objectivising and the ‘ethical’ aspects of knowledge itself, in order to establish the limits and conditions of our critical autonomy. So much for modern cultural theory. The fifth chapter moves things in a different direction, towards postmodernism, invoking – no doubt all too briefly – the increasing role of the cultural and aesthetic dimension in contemporary experience that is often taken as a central aspect of the postmodern turn. This chapter argues that the main casualty of postmodern discourse is not, for instance, the category of truth (postmodernism is still obsessed with truth) so much as an ethico-critical conception of cultural theory. Postmodernism is a return to a positivist or epistemic conception of cultural theory in which the category of culture loses its ethico-critical aspect and is, in effect, substantivised and thereby collapsed into the category of society more generally. So perhaps ironically given the scepticism of so much postmodernism towards sociology, postmodernism can itself be seen to be a variety of sociologism. But that is not quite the end of the story. This book is not really an anti-postmodern tract. It seeks to redeem the idea of postmodernism to an extent, claiming that the persistence of postmodernism may make the principle of an ethics of autonomy that was important to modern cultural theory even more relevant, precisely because of our postmodernism. In postmodern times, it may well be that we need modern cultural theory more than ever, precisely for reasons of educationality – that is, because of its outdatedness, its apparent redundancy, irrelevance, stubborn obsolescence.

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Culture – an antinomical view Culturalisms – Truth – Enlightenment and autonomy – Reason – Norms of modernism – Culture, creativity and reflexivity – Institutionalisation versus reflexivity – Simmel: an excursus – The antinomy of culture

This chapter seeks to get clear of – if hardly to refute – various understandings of culture so as to make way for the conception of the scope of modern cultural theory which is to animate our treatment here. The first section – Culturalisms – is, then, largely about what modern cultural theory is not. It attempts only to lay the basic elements of some distinctions between modern cultural theory and other types of discourse such as cultural studies, cultural sociology and cultural anthropology; and also, more generally, to distinguish modern cultural theory from other ways of thinking about culture; the metatheoretical, the epochal or ‘culturological’, the anthropological, and the sociological. Then, reiterating some of the comments made in the introduction, we get on to our own sense of what modern cultural theory actually is, attempting – partly by way of Georg Simmel – to convey the antinomical idea of culture that is fundamental to it. (Readers wishing to avoid conceptual throat-clearing, however, may go to chapter two.) Culturalisms In trying to get free of some rival views of culture, let us start immediately with some scepticism. After all, what – at least when considering human and social existence – is not culture? What use can this concept be to the social and human sciences when it does not mark things out in a delimiting and usefully restrictive way? Surely, culture is everything, and hence the concept itself is more or less useless? It covers lots of cases, perhaps, but does very little work. So

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possibly we should do without the term altogether and find some other terminology.1 This view is understandable yet harsh. If the term is so elastic as to be surely just about meaningless it still, none the less, has two broad uses. On the one hand – as will be argued over the course of this book in the context of modern cultural theory – the notion of culture can be narrowed usefully. On the other hand, it just seems inevitable that the notion of culture will continue to serve as a sort of metatheoretical background to certain kinds of intellectual work within the human and social sciences and philosophy. To be convincing and to get away with using the notion of culture in this latter sense one needs the sort of erudition that necessarily eludes most of us. For Max Weber, for example, culture is – to paraphrase somewhat – the ascription of meaning and significance to a meaningless world, specifically from the particular standpoint of particular human beings.2 Or in the usage of Weber’s contemporary Georg Simmel, culture is likewise more or less everywhere. It is the ‘subjective’ side of human endeavour, as materialised in institutions and artefacts. I understand it to be that improvement of the soul which the latter attains not directly from within, as with the profundity that is the fruit of religion or with moral purity and primary creativity, but indirectly, by way of the intellectual achievements of the species, the products of its history: knowledge, lifestyles, art, the state, a man’s profession and experience of life – these constitute the path of culture by which the subjective spirit returns to itself in a higher improved state.3

For Simmel there is a theoretical distinction between objective culture and subjective culture. But not the least of his originality lay in his ability to use his metatheoretical stance on culture as a lever for a veritably empiricist cultural turn of attention – to investigate money, adornment, fashion, bridges and doors. He wanted to relate cultural forms, in all their complexity, to patterns of social organisation. He 1 See for fairly sceptical accounts from a huge literature T. Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), and A. Kuper, Culture: the anthropologists’ account (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). 2 M. Weber, ‘Die “objektivität” socialwissenschaftlicher u. sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis’, in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftlehre (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1973), p. 180. 3 G. Simmel, ‘The crisis of culture’ (1916), trans. D.E. Jenkinson, in D. Frisby & M. Featherstone, Simmel on Culture (London: Sage, 1991), pp. 90–1. See also C. Turner, ‘Weber, Simmel and culture’, Theory, Culture and Society, 37:3 (1989), pp. 518–29.

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looked at culture, as it were, from the inside out, devoting himself to a series of close, careful and impressionistic studies of differing cultural forms. In contrast to this notion of culture, an even wider usage could simply be labelled ‘culturology’. This looks, so to speak, more from the outside in than from the inside out. Culture becomes an object of prognostication. Famous epochalising texts come to mind. Spengler’s monumental Decline of the West would be a good case in point, or Herbert Marcuse’s cult One-Dimensional Man, Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death or even – to cite a more recent manifestation – Samuel Huntingdon’s The Clash of Civilizations. These are noteworthy, portentious tomes. Epochal culturology has many manifestations, and certainly not all of them are to be ruled out of court or simply written off as reactionary or vacuous. But they have little to do with the narrower view of (modern) cultural theory to be outlined here. But likewise, in fact, with those other ‘cultural’ disciplines – the anthropology of culture, the sociology of culture, cultural sociology, cultural studies – that have been so prominent as paradigms in the social and human sciences over the past few decades. These latter areas of inquiry can be divided into two kinds of outlook: the anthropological and the sociological, whereby anthropologists take a viscous and sociologists a stratified view of culture. There are anthropologists and others (for, in spite of our terminology, the notion should not be reducible to this or that specific discipline) who invoke the notion of culture in a very broad sense. Clifford Geertz, doyen of cultural anthropology, is a useful guide. He invokes the notion of culture ‘not as complexes of concrete behaviour patterns – customs, usages, traditions, habit clusters – but as a set of control mechanisms – plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call “programs”) – for the governing of behaviour’.4 It is the totality of symbolic forms that do not just serve for purposes of human ‘expression’ but which orient humans in relation to the world: Undirected by cultural patterns – organized systems of symbols – man’s behaviour would be virtually ungovernable, a mere chaos of pointless acts and exploding emotions, his experience virtually shapeless. Culture, the accumulated totality of such patterns, is not just an ornament of human existence but – the principal basis of its specificity – an essential condition for it.5 4 C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1993), p. 44. 5 Ibid., p. 46.

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Anthropologists (and others) do not have too much trouble in understanding the concept of culture in this sense, and it has obviously been a useful concept to them. Cultural anthropologists study everything about tribal (and other) cultures – even the economy is ‘cultural’ in that sense. Matters are more problematic when we come on to those large, complex societies that are characteristic of the contemporary, post-traditional era. These, to adopt the sociological jargon, can be understood as being functionally stratified.6 That means that they are often understood to be characterised by different strata or levels of activity – the economy, politics, law, culture itself. Here, the level of culture is regarded as being increasingly sequestrated from other levels. This means that it is more difficult to think of culture in these contexts as a generally co-ordinating form of symbolic activity. Typically, culture comes to be understood as a particular ‘sphere’ of social existence in its own right. This is the stratified view of the sociology of culture and of much cultural sociology: forms of social science that typically take just one aspect of social organisation – ‘culture’ – as their demarcated object. Whereas on the anthropological conception, culture is, so to speak, seamless and viscous, on the stratified, sociological conception, it is or is part of the ‘superstructure’. To do the sociology of culture or cultural sociology, then, is to examine those aspects of human existence that entail the production of symbolic forms.7 An influential example of this sort of analysis in the English-speaking world might be Raymond Williams.8 The thinkers dealt with in this book seem also to come close at times to this perspective – Adorno perhaps, or Bourdieu – but are hardly, as should hopefully become clear, reducible to it. Equally, cultural studies implicitly adopts a variant on this sociological conception, with the focus on questions of popular culture, on the one hand, and media cultures and policies on the other. Again, there are overlaps with some of the concerns of modern cultural theory, especially with Adorno and Bourdieu. The aim here, in any case, is certainly not to oppose modern cultural theory to cultural 6 See N. Luhmann, The Differentiation of Society, trans. S. Holmes & C. Larmore (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) for an influential version of this idea. 7 See for instance J.B. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture (Oxford: Polity Press, 1990). 8 For example, R. Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), or the compendious Politics and Letters (London, Verso, 1979).

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studies in any antagonistic way. 9 However, cultural studies as a discipline is not typically animated by the ethico-critical concerns of modern cultural theory, tending, rather, to code questions of critique and politics more directly on to cultural production and consumption in a manner obviously inherited from Marxism. In cultural studies, politics is not typically mediated by ethics, a point that will be made again in the conclusion to this book. This is not to dismiss cultural studies. Far from it. If cultural studies is beset with its own epistemological challenges and limits and if its differences from modern cultural theory are mentioned here it is only to isolate it as – precisely – a different and thereby legitimate form of enquiry, one with epistemic and critical norms of its own. It might also be emphasised that the two versions are not exclusive to each other. For one thing, the superstructure can of course be important to the structural whole. Bourdieu and Raymond Williams certainly thought so, as do latter-day proponents of cultural sociology such as Jeffrey Alexander.10 There is no reason why anyone should lose too much sleep in holding to both the viscous view and the substantive view at the same time. Plenty of thinkers have done so, usually more implicitly than explicitly, and without necessarily finding themselves bogged down in horrendous contradictions. The aim here is not to dismiss any of these conceptions, only to distinguish them from something else – from modern cultural theory. Not the least of the basic differences lies in the contention that what distinguishes modern cultural theory is that it is not straightforwardly an epistemic enterprise or form of ‘expertise’ at all, and does not have ‘positive’ or ‘scientific’ pretensions in quite the usual way. On the contrary, it has ethico-critical pretensions and, relatedly, tendencies to what we are calling educationality; in other words, a different relation to truth, perhaps, as compared to other kinds of cultural enquiry. Truth What unites some aspects of the work of thinkers such as Adorno, Foucault and Bourdieu and what makes them, in spite of their substan9 See for example A. McRobbie, The Uses of Cultural Studies (London: Sage, 2005), for an insightful discussion which might be used to stress the similarities with modern cultural theory as conceived here. 10 S. Emirbayer, ‘The Alexander school of cultural sociology’, Thesis Eleven, 79 (2004), pp. 5–15.

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tive and ideological differences, modern cultural theorists as opposed to anything else, is a particular, critical relation to truth: that in their different ways they do not simply or only partake of a positive genre of discourse but are, rather, ultimately – if not always immediately – ethical thinkers. This distinction can be developed rather schematically. The argument is that if a positive discourse seeks to tell the truth about a particular domain, and it seeks to do so in neutral terms – in other words, it does not really matter who its addressees are because the truth, according to this genre of truth-telling, is always the same – then modern cultural theory relates to the truth in a somewhat different way from such a positive discourse. It is not that it seeks not to tell the truth, or to tell lies, or even that it seeks to be interesting and (for example) provocatively Nietzschean; only that it relates to the truth specifically, and limitedly, with regard to a particular – ethical – interest. It is concerned with the fortunes of critical autonomy. More specifically, modern cultural theory is not just or only about stating some positive truth about the world, but is – critically speaking – about bringing us to recognition of the forces that work against our autonomy. So, paradoxically enough, and as noted earlier, it does not, typically, offer positive theories or particular hopes of autonomy at all. It tends to be critical or, rather, one might say, albeit cumbersomely, ‘counter-heteronomical’ in its outlook. Its interest often lies typically – as in Adorno’s and Bourdieu’s cases – in diagnosing the forces of heteronomy and – as in Foucault’s – in historicising varying cultures of subjectivity and self-constraint. Here, then, truth is not neutral but particular; it works not, so to speak, simply in an ‘objective’ sense but on our senses of our selves, our subjectivity. This, by the way, is not least of what we are getting at with the notion of educationality. It might even be said – using what is these days rather discredited terminology – that modern cultural theory is ideological in orientation, or rather counter-ideological in so far as it seeks to have effects – often open-ended rather than specific – ‘in the realm of the subject’.11 Modern cultural theory in other words is a means of working upon whom or what it is we think we are: a means of working critically upon ourselves, upon our judgement, our understanding. And it is in this context that modern cultural theory often functions as an antidote to something – tendencies, forces 11 L. Althusser, ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses’, in Essays on Ideology (London: Verso, 1976).

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– that it counteracts. It seeks to disrupt particular ideological effects that make us conceive of ourselves in certain ways. It works with images of ourselves, images of fate, and seeks to counteract them. In being ethico-critical, it is also tactical, provisional. It should be noted that the idea of educationality is intended to be an indicative term rather than a rigorous concept; albeit indicative only of the fact that there is a strong educational or performative element to all three thinkers considered here. As mentioned in the introduction, education in this usage is not mere pedagogy, teaching. In teaching, there is a clear distinction between the subject of knowledge and the object of knowledge. Not so with what we are calling educationality. Adorno, Foucault and Bourdieu are more like educators than – or at least as much as – positive cultural experts; they are seeking subjective effects as much as contributions to knowledge. As observed earlier, Nietzsche said about his predecessor Schopenhauer that he was a great educator in something not too distant from this sense. The parallel should not be overdone. If Schopenhauer was an educator for Nietzsche, then this was not least in the sense that his work was, so far as Nietzsche was concerned, somewhat limited and that an aspect of its uses – for him, Nietzsche – was that it should be overcome, in other words by him, Nietzsche. In this book the notion of educationality is understood in a less romantic direction: to convey the sense that the works of writers such as Adorno, Foucault and Bourdieu are there to be read, to have subjective effects, as monuments rather than just documents, as ethico-critical resources as well as sources of information; as sources of truthfulness as opposed to just truth.12 If such distinctions are to make any sense at all, they can do so only under the umbrella of a certain minimally normative notion of what the aims of intellectual work are: a notion associated, here, with the idea of enlightenment, as derived loosely from some of the reflections of Michel Foucault on this matter. Enlightenment and autonomy There is enlightenment and there is the Enlightenment. The differences need not be too troubling. Foucault, anyway, distinguished between two kinds of thinking about the question.13 12 On truthfulness see B. Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 13 See M. Foucault, ‘What is enlightenment?’, trans. C. Porter, in Essential Works: Ethics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997) on which our subsequent remarks are quite

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On the one hand, there was a certain positivist – perhaps scientistic, even dogmatic, no doubt rather moralistic – way of thinking about the Enlightenment. This manner of thinking stressed that the Enlightenment was a particular movement of ideas, rooted in eighteenth-century Europe, devoted to the ideals of secularism and freedom, and, above all, given over to the application of the idea of applying the powers of reason to human affairs. On this view, science has no limits – and not even society is immune. Humans live in societies; therefore we need an enlightened science of society to govern human relations, once and for all. This, then – to adopt Zygmunt Bauman’s influential terms – is the category of enlightenment as legislation.14 Reason is applied, as it were, from above. On the other hand, there was – is – the ethico-critical conception of enlightenment. Here enlightenment is in the lower case and without the definite article – enlightenment in general, not the Enlightenment. This sort of enlightenment, is awkward, tentative, questioning, critical. Its differentia specifica is not least that we do not know what it is. For to have legislative ‘theories’ of enlightenment is to be dogmatic and moralising about it, to state what it is in advance – and so to undermine it. Those who speak ‘in the name of’ enlightenment, without reflexivity, expose themselves to the charge of becoming just another legislative priesthood; and so we would need another enlightenment to rid ourselves of them. As Foucault reminds us, the philosopher Kant defined enlightenment as maturity: being able to use one’s own reason for oneself.15 Maturity is autonomy. And that is the basic principle of enlightenment – the ideal of autonomy. So to be ethical about enlightenment is quite different from the legislative option. It is to invoke an ethics of thought, a deliberate and no doubt delimited scepticism. This ethics would hold that we do not know what it is to be free. We must be perpetually alert to the forms of bondage that determine us, and even freedom itself – or its invocation – can be a form of bondage. Freedom can become totemic. This ethicofreely based. Also, C. Gordon, ‘Question, ethos, event: Foucault on Kant and enlightenment’, in S. Whimster & S. Lash, eds, Max Weber: rationality and modernity (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987); and T. Osborne, Aspects of Enlightenment: social theory and the ethics of truth (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998). 14 Z. Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters (Oxford: Polity, 1989); and compare Chapter 5 below where Bauman’s work is briefly discussed. 15 I. Kant, ‘An answer to the question: “What is enlightenment?”’ (1784), in Political Writings, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 55.

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critical form of enlightenment has at its basis a horror of, to use a wrongly discredited term, the reification of freedom. So, here, the ideal enlightenment would not just consist of the endless reiteration of the dogmatic, moralising and – as such – empty mantras of freedom and Reason (and so on) but of a critical ethics of escape; the escape from all forms of reification, even from the reification of enlightenment itself. According to the ethico-critical conception, the idea of enlightenment is not ‘scientific’ – it has no dogmatically defined ‘substance’ – but is, rather, a form of concern. What matters to the ethos or attitude of enlightenment is the ideal of autonomy – individual, collective; it is the reflection upon, the exercise of (at least in thought) the conditions of autonomy. That is the question of enlightenment – and it is precisely that, a question not an answer; a matter of critique and not simply of ‘science’. Reason Now, this preoccupation with a critical attitude towards enlightenment can basically go in two related directions. One direction is towards social theory. The work of Max Weber might, arguably , be one paradigm case of just such a conception of social theory based, albeit implicitly, on the idea of a critique of enlightenment.16 Actually, Weber’s own thought has been perfectly aptly characterised as a sociology of culture.17 True. But Weber was interested, as mentioned towards the beginning of this chapter, in a fairly wide notion of culture, one generally tied to the notion of a fate of reason in the modern West. What did the Enlightenment invent if not the idea of universal reason? These days few social theorists regard reason as a straightforward passport to autonomy (and nor of course did Weber), but for all that enlightenment and reason are connected. Weber’s great question, it might be said, concerned the fate of human autonomy in the face of ever more constraining processes of rationalisation and asceticism. Charisma may be irrational in some senses but at least it served to break up the fetishism of reason. For Weber, as with much subsequent social theory, reason was bondage as well as liberation. So much for social theory’s concern with the question of reason. 16 See on this, D. Owen, Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the ambivalence of reason (London: Routledge, 1994), and Osborne, Aspects of Enlightenment, chapter 5. 17 R. Schroeder, Max Weber and the Sociology of Culture (London: Sage, 1992).

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However, a second direction of the concern for enlightenment is more limited than this. It is to pursue the notion of a critique of enlightenment and culture more specifically into the aesthetic sphere and into questions of culture and creativity. That is where modern cultural theory comes in: not least as a discourse specifically of modernism. The two directions are not, of course, exclusive to each other.18 Adorno was clearly concerned with both, as – in a rather different way – was Foucault. A difference of emphasis perhaps. To emphasise reason is to be concerned with matters of knowledge in different spheres of rationality. To emphasise the cultural aspect of the concern for enlightenment is to focus above all on questions concerning the status of newness, innovation, creativity and critical autonomy. If social theory asks about the fate of reason in modern societies, the function of cultural theory is equally anthropological in a broadly philosophical sense: to ask about the fate of creativity and innovation (terms that nowadays are perhaps more like managerial buzzwords than precise concepts) as possible aspects of an ongoing ethics of critical autonomy; and to do so not least through an interrogation of some of the varied aspects of modernism. Norms of modernism Invoking the legacy of Baudelaire, Foucault noted that if we understand enlightenment less as a substantive moral idea than as an ethos then it can be closely tied to what he called the ‘attitude of modernity’.19 For Baudelaire, on Foucault’s reading, the essence of this attitude lies not least in the principle of creativity and invention. The ethos of modernity is housed above all in the sphere known as art because that is the sphere where creativity is given special value.20 What codes the sphere of art as a separable sphere of human endeavour is not simply the dichotomy of beauty and ugliness but that of 18 See for instance Osborne, Aspects of Enlightenment, in which a parallel – but not identical – ‘ethical’ vocation is outlined for social theory as is done here for cultural theory. (This, if nothing else, suggests a certain monomania of outlook.) 19 Foucault, ‘What is enlightenment?’, p. 309; and of course C. Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (1859), trans. P.E. Charvet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972); cf. S. Cavell, The World Viewed (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 41–6; D. Frisby, Fragments of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1985); and see on the importance of modernism as experience the well-known work of M. Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (London: Verso, 1983). 20 Foucault, ‘What is enlightenment?’, p. 312.

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creativity and non-creativity.21 Art – which is to say, more than anything, modern art – is the space where creativity is never assumed, but always in question. Accounting for this requires some focus on the issues of the status of convention and the creation of convention in the arts. Stanley Cavell has written some useful pages on this theme, and on why the arts are so important to it. It is not perhaps the general view of modernism. Cavell takes as his point of departure the work of Clement Greenberg on the relations between enlightenment and modernism.22 Once again, the key theme here is that of autonomy. Greenberg’s argument was that the modernist project in the arts derived from the process of autonomisation that had been inaugurated by the Enlightenment: not just individual autonomy or the autonomy of persons but the autonomisation of some human pursuits from other human pursuits, and in particular that of art from other pursuits. Henceforth, the pursuit of art became increasingly concerned with the interrogation of its own conditions of autonomy. Art became reflexive about its own conditions. But rather than seeing this in terms, say, of the self-referential narcissism of the modernist avant-gardes, Greenberg regarded this development as tied to the pursuit of critique. Modernist painting, for instance, is concerned with the critique of the existing conventions of painting. Cavell takes up this idea but modifies Greenberg’s emphasis on there being any essential vocation to painting, for instance to do with the flatness of the painted surface, but he might be said to preserve the essence of Greenberg’s own argument.23 For Cavell, modernist painting is the ongoing interrogation of conventions in painting. Modernist painters, in so far as they are modernist painters as opposed to anything else, are concerned integrally with the critique of existing conventions as pertaining to the essence of painting. To paint the new is to criticise the given. No conventions can be taken for granted. True modernism, as opposed to narcissism, romanticism 21 Cf. N. Luhmann, Art as a Social System, trans. E. Knodt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 22 See especially C. Greenberg, Modernism with a Vengeance: collected essays and criticism volume 4, ed. J. O’Brian (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993); cf. J. Gaiger, ‘Constraints and conventions: Kant and Greenberg on aesthetic judgement’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 39:4 (1999), pp. 376–91. 23 S. Cavell, The World Viewed (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 108–18; cf. M. Fried, Art and Objecthood (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988).

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or nihilism, is the attempt to reinvent conventions not to abolish them altogether. For Cavell, modernism, then, is tied not to the subversion of tradition for its own sake but to the pursuit of a certain kind of self-reflection. Modern art is part of the critical Enlightenment ideal of autonomy, or at least is a descendant of that ideal. But in modernist art the very idea of what is autonomous, what is new, is uncertain. Modern art and modernism specialise, so to speak, in the interrogation of newness. It is a matter of a questioning of the idea of the new, of creative ideals, and a questioning of enlightenment as much as a straightforward embrace of it. Modernist art typically distances itself, and self-consciously so, from mere ‘entertainment’, not for elitist reasons necessarily but in so far as entertainment is not autonomous in that it panders, by definition, to the demands of an audience.24 Modernist art is a search for the conditions of its own autonomy outside of such considerations. Culture, creativity and reflexivity So art is important. But aside from some remarks in the introduction we are yet to discuss – more widely – the concept of culture that will be in operation here. Since we have insisted that modern cultural theory is not a general cultural ‘science’ or an epochal culturology but an ethico-critical form of inquiry, then clearly it operates with a restricted notion of what is and is not cultural. In the introduction there were three aspects mentioned in relation to this: aside from the focus on modernism, invoked above, there was the emphasis on the analysis of culture as the institutionalisation of creative convention, and then the concern with something like the ethics of culture or critical reflexivity. We now consider these two a little further. There is, then, first – as it were, on one side of the coin – the notion of culture as the conventionalisation or institutionalisation of creativity. By this is meant all those rules and practices that govern understandings of creativity at any place or time. Now, to associate the idea of culture with that of conventions of creativity has a cogency on just about whatever definition of culture we take. Culture is what is created not found. When we talk of working-class culture or even cultures of cooking, we are invoking the idea that there are different 24 S. Cavell, Must We Mean What we Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), e.g. pp. 206, 210–11.

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ways – different crafts – of being a person, different ways of cooking, just as when we talk about a work of art as a cultural achievement we are alluding to the creativity that it embodies. Culture is, not least, invention; it is to cultivate something, to produce something that is otherwise undetermined.25 Why do humans have cultures? Because humans are not merely defined by either their genetic inheritance or simply their material conditions. Culture is what humans produce – whether individually, restrictively, in groups, en masse – for themselves. Culture ‘houses’ creativity; it is, in this sense, the institutionalisation of creative practices. In passing, let us note that an attention to the conventionalisation of creativity is of some modest relevance today not least because creativity itself has become a kind of ‘positive’ cultural value, and an object of new forms of expertise.26 In some ways this creativity revolution is disconcerting. Managers and entrepreneurial gurus exhort us to be creative; psychologists analyse the mental conditions of creativity; philosophers explore the foundations and limits of creativity. From being an aspect of ‘genius’, as it was in the nineteenth century, creativity has been de-aestheticised and democratised. This may be well and good, but there are costs: not just in the commercialisation of creativity but not least, also, in a certain compulsoriness about creativity as a value in its own right, rather than a principle of questioning. Creativity, in short, has become the object of positive expertise, even of a certain kind of morality. This is at some remove from modernism’s attitude to creativity. At least the modernists were unsure what creativity might be, so having recourse to the space of the arts to interrogate it, a space precisely where its nature was a matter of continual critique and questioning and never of finite answers, morality or expertise. There is, on the other hand, something characteristically postmodern about the current creativity explosion. Creativity is simply what it is; everything and anything can be creative. The only proviso, however, appears increasingly to be just that we should be creative. That is why it is possible to suggest that if creativity has been de25 See E. Kahler, ‘Culture and evolution’, in M.F. Ashley Montague, ed., Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). 26 See on this T. Osborne, ‘Against creativity: a philistine rant’, Economy and Society, 32:4 (2003), pp. 507–25; and U. Bröckling, ‘Kreativität’, in U. Bröckling, S. Krasmann & T. Lemke, Glossar der Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004).

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aestheticised in this process it has also been moralised. For modernism creativity was an ethical problem to be explored through aesthetic means; now it is a moral injunction according to which everyone must be creative. And perhaps we need modern, as opposed to postmodern, cultural theory, not least so as to renew our sceptical, critical energies in relation to the compulsoriness of creativity, which is to say, ultimately, to renew the principle of creativity itself. And if modern cultural theory is concerned quite characteristically with matters of seemingly high culture this is because it is in high culture, especially in its modernist forms, where the sceptical pursuit of creativity becomes a matter, so to speak, of vocation, as opposed to other interests, whether these be entertainment, distraction or moral uplift. Recalling Cavell’s observation that not the least of the characteristics of modernism is that the artist is not constrained by the demands of an audience, what is specific to high culture in this context is not straightforwardly that it is ‘better’ than so-called low culture but, more complexly, that it is more autonomous, more reflexively involved, as it were – breaking free from itself. High culture is not an intrinsic ‘good’, in this sense, but a convenient laboratory for the scrutiny of questions of autonomy and creativity. So this does not necessarily imply an elitism about high culture. The claim is rather that high art is that institutional space where the question of creativity – and hence the question ultimately of freedom – is most at stake within the general domain of culture as a whole. Then – second, on the other side of the coin so to speak – there is the more subjective usage of culture in modern cultural theory, captured, we hope, in part by the idea of educationality. This is the sense in which modern cultural theory itself performs the part of a kind of cultural ‘technology’: it is the ethico-critical model of culture, or better – simply its reflexive aspect. The very ideal of culture itself implies critical reflexivity, at least in so far as it is understood as a kind of process of cultivation that one exercises upon oneself whether as an individual or as a community. In this sense, those ‘with culture’ are not just those who belong to some kind of given elite, or those who simply have more information or educational capital than others. Rather, the ideal of having culture can be seen (whatever the cynical reality of the matter) as much as an ethico-critical – reflexive – attainment as an educational or an aesthetic one. This seems to be just part of the semantic structure of the idea. Of course there have been other connotations too. The philosophy of romanticism for a long time burdened the idea of

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culture. The Bildung tradition in Germany posited culture as a maturational phenomenon, associated with the development of one’s capacities as a rounded human being.27 There was a certain romantic teleology to this: to come into yourself, ‘to become what you are’. But, still, culture required work: it related to an ethical and processual labour as well as to various holistic substantive attributes. For Matthew Arnold, the pursuit of culture was the pursuit of perfection and the pursuit of wholeness – sweetness and light. But the idea of culture in itself is attached irrevocably to neither of these notions of perfection and wholeness.28 We can retain the critical idea of culture as process, but not the teleological aspect of this – that culture is about producing well-rounded persons or anything like that. In any case, culture, in this second sense at least, is processual, critical, reflexive, ongoing, open-ended. If there is anything substantively attachable to this conception at all it is the – ultimately ethical – ideal of autonomous, critical existence as opposed to that of the heteronomy of consciousness. To be cultured in this particular (no doubt limited, no doubt idealised) context is to be free from determination, ungrounded from the constraints of one’s nature – even if the plasticity of our culture is itself, paradoxically, a ‘natural’ attribute. In this usage, the notion is processual rather than fixed, formal as much as substantive: the pursuit as opposed to the attainment of autonomy, and vigilance against the forces that would subject us to their powers – that is the work of culture. Now, there is something utopian or, better, deliberately speculative about this, in the sense that complete autonomy is an impossibility – we are all in large part in fact determined, by our up-bringing, by our genes, by our circumstances and so forth. Why deny that? We can do so only ethically – as a kind of ‘exercise’ – but not ontologically or epistemically. One can exercise autonomy not in the sense that one can simply embody it but rather in the sense that one can exercise for it, not least by attempting to imagine things otherwise or by dramatising things as they are so as to isolate – through accentuation (as in so much of Adorno’s work) – the particular constraints that exist upon us. The point being made here is that modern cultural theory aims, in 27 R. Koselleck, ‘On the anthropological and semantic structure of Bildung’, in The Practice of Conceptual History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). Cf. R. Geuss, Morality, Culture and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 28 M. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963).

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its limited and restricted way, to be exactly such an exercise. It is a sort of intellectual or ethico-critical ‘technology’. It is a work we do upon ourselves rather than – or as much as – straightforwardly a positive mode of thought that tries to describe the world in an objective way. That is the sense in which it is ethico-critical rather than, or as well as, only epistemic; but nor is it a moralising technology. This ethical dimension of cultural theory is only a provisional, delimited and reflexive ‘educational’ ethos, not a general morality for living; hence reflexivity is a strategy but not a condition. And so the invocation of the notion of ethics is not meant to entail advocacy of another ‘world view’ or course of action that must necessarily be followed. Rather, it is to invoke the idea of exercises in thought: ‘spiritual exercises’ in a way (a notion we shall mention later in the context of the work of Foucault and Bourdieu) but not absolute moral or epistemic rules as to how to live.29 In this sense, the notion of ethics – and by extension that of educationality – is narrower and more limited than that of the morality system or a moral code. So invoking the idea of critical reflexivity in the context of ethics is not to invoke just anything at all but only something quite restricted – the specific ideal of a critical ethics of autonomy. Modern cultural theory is a reflexive, ethico-critical work – no doubt one of a kind amongst many – on our capacities for autonomy in matters of understanding, critical reflection and, ultimately, judgement. Institutionalisation versus reflexivity Now, not quite enough has yet been said about these last two notions of culture – culture as convention and as reflexivity – because we have not considered their interrelations. They exist, in fact, in a dynamic – even contradictory – relation to each other. Culture is both the institutionalisation of creativity and the reflexive, critical escape from such institutionalisation. Culture, for our purposes, is integrally an antinomical idea; it is both, so to speak, allusive of the conventional and yet pitted inexorably and reflexively against itself. Should this need further illustration, nowhere is this antinomical character more in evidence than in the work of a figure who is often regarded as the ‘founding father’ of some kinds of cultural theory, namely Georg Simmel. His work is just about ignored in this book partly because his vitalism (especially in his later writings) actually 29 P. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

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brings him close to an elaborated, moral view of the world, and partly – and relatedly – because Simmel’s particular style of thought, his ability to generalise modernist themes into more general social and cultural contexts, places him, perhaps rather ambiguously for the argument here, on the cusp of modernism and postmodernism.30 But if nothing else his work usefully embodies, certainly better than that of any other thinker, the tension implied in the notion of the antinomy of culture. Simmel: an excursus In Simmel’s work the antinomy of culture is played out at its most basic level in the tension or antinomy between life and form. Life is movement, ongoing creativity, invention; form is what contains, shapes, frames, institutionalises life. Life needs form, yet in a sense form is contrary to life. Or anyway, life is at once the enclosing of form and the breaking of form: ‘the unified act of life includes both the state of being bounded and the transcending of the boundary, despite the fact that this seems to represent a logical contradiction’.31 There is an ethical side to this: ‘as an ethical agent, man is the limited being who has no limit’.32 Here is Simmel’s motto, at least from his later work: transcendence is immanent in life.33 Life needs form to find expression; but it is also the antithesis of form. Life resists form and breaks free to go beyond itself. Life, as Simmel puts it, is always both more-life and more-than-life. So culture is inherently contradictory, or better – antinomical: it presupposes a tension between life and form. Life freezes into cultural forms, or as Simmel puts it, rather dramatically: This can, in the long run, accumulate as a pervasive cultural malaise in which all form comes to be felt as something forcibly imposed on life which then tries to break out of any form, not just one specific form or other, and to absorb it into its own spontaneity, to put itself in the place of form, to allow its force and plenitude to gush forth in their primal untrammelled spontaneity, and in no other 30 For Simmel’s later vitalism see G. Simmel, Lebensanschauung: vier metaphysische Kapitel (Berlin: Dunker & Humblot, 1918), partly in English in Simmel, ‘The transcendent character of life’, in D. Levine, ed., Georg Simmel: on individuality and social forms (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991). 31 Ibid., p. 370. 32 Ibid., p. 359. 33 Ibid., p. 363.

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way, until all cognition, values and structures can only be seen as the direct revelation of life.34

Simmel also shows why art – especially the modernist art of his time – is important for this antinomical view of culture: for if anything resists the freezing of life into form it is modernist art. For Simmel, modernity is just such a period where life is characteristically perceived to have been frozen by form: hence that constant demand for originality where ‘life is purely itself and that no external, objectified, rigid forms have been absorbed in its flux, or its flux in them’.35 The demand for the new is, then, contingent upon the existence of a society which is freezing form ever faster into fixed institutionalised formats; the two aspects – institutionalisation and anti-institutionalisation presuppose each other. Take Simmel’s brilliant discussion of Expressionist painting: I imagine the creative process, in its purest form, of an Expressionist painter (and similarly, though less simple to formulate, in all the other arts) as a process whereby the emotional impulse is spontaneously transferred into the hand holding the brush, just as a gesture expresses an inner feeling or a scream expresses pain. The movements of the hand obediently follow the inner impulse, so that what eventually takes shape on the canvas is the direct precipitate of an inner life, unmodified by any external alien elements.36

For Simmel, if such modernist forms of art do have form then this is strictly speaking extraneous to the work of art itself: rather, the work is intended as a direct barometer of the intensity of life. Hence the indifference of this kind of art to beauty or ugliness. And hence the importance, typically, of the late works of particular artists; because here creativity is most purely itself: ‘Having perfected his creative powers, the great artist is so purely himself that his work shows only the form spontaneously generated by the flow of his life: form has lost its autonomy vis-à-vis this life.’37 Simmel’s ‘spontaneist’ view of aesthetic modernism is not at issue here, though it is obviously at some odds with the conception of modernism sketched earlier. Suffice to say that, because of this tension between life and form which it is the business of art to 34 G. Simmel, ‘The conflict in modern culture’, in D. Frisby and M. Featherstone, eds, Simmel on Culture (London: Sage, 1997), p. 77. 35 Ibid., p. 84. 36 Ibid., p. 81. 37 Ibid., p. 82.

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address, it is in art itself that the expansive, restless forces of life are most in evidence. Hence Simmel refers to the something ‘beyond’ which appears in some works of art: where, as in the later work of Beethoven, we feel ‘the form of art itself being overwhelmed by something different, vaster, something from another dimension’; and as with Van Gogh, where one feels more than with any other painter ‘a passionate vitality far transcending the limits of painting’.38 In time, we might add, Van Gogh’s work itself was to freeze, so to speak, into form, almost into fetishism; to become a cultural ‘artefact’, kitsch. The tension between life and form continues. The antinomy of culture Art was important for Simmel, then, for sociological-cum-anthropological reasons – because art embodied, in a kind of ‘pure’ (that is, detached, autonomous) state, the tension between life and form. In this context, modernist art is, so to speak, symptomatic of the more general antinomy at the root of all culture. For Simmel, then so for modern cultural theory. Such cultural theory, on the other hand, does not typically operate with an epistemic dichotomy such as that between life and form but, rather, implicitly substitutes for this opposition the antinomy of culture as ethico-critical reflexivity and as the institutionalisation of convention. The results are more by way of a negative – but not denunciatory – critique, but not, for all that, anything amounting to an overall systematic ‘theory’ of modernism, culture or anything else. The critique of cultural convention is what animates this reflexive concern: with the effect, it is true, that modern cultural theory can sometimes seem as if it were simply a negative discourse. But such an ethos of critique – for instance of the sort conducted even by a ‘reductionist’ such as Bourdieu, or a Marxist dialectician such as Adorno – is an aspect not of the denial of cultural values but ultimately of the renewal of culture itself, which is to say, a renewal of our attentions to questions of creativity and autonomy. As Adorno knew, to be in favour of culture you have to be against it. Take, as just one instance, the work of Bourdieu. The modern idea of the arts as autonomous, as separate from society, is something that Bourdieu (who, as we shall see, is a thinker very used to thinking in 38 Ibid., p. 82, p. 83; cf. M. Heinich, The Glory of Van Gogh: an anthropology of admiration (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

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antinomical terms) finds to be both extraordinary and restricted. In its own way it is an admirable idea because within art and culture the notion of autonomy has its most serious incarnation. Bourdieu’s conviction appears to be that without some kind of institutional incarnation the very idea of autonomy would have no meaning. Hence the importance of understanding the conditions – the rules – of just such an institution, namely art, for an understanding of the very idea of autonomy.39 However, the idea of aesthetic autonomy is restricted – so far as Bourdieu is concerned – because art and culture function also as principles of distinction, which is to say exclusion. There is, then, an antinomical relation in each; as freedom and as determination. The idea, then, is not to come down on one or other side of such an antinomy but to subject the doings of culture to an ongoing critique. This can sometimes look like denunciation, but such a perception would be wrong. When Bourdieu analyses the work of Flaubert, for instance, and appears to reduce the advent of modern literature to a series of games in the social field of art, the aim is not so much explanatory in a denunciatory sense but provisional and reflexive: to renew the ideals of culture by subjecting their forms to critique.40 Bourdieu – and Adorno and Foucault do something analogous, although taking very different paths in the process – is always seeking out the determined element of creative action, the aim being not necessarily to level out everything in a sort of conspiratorial sociological reductionism (although, as we shall see, there are indeed elements of this in Bourdieu) but to disclose the social conditions of culture and creativity themselves: to demystify the mystique that is often associated with them, and so – and again this is ultimately of ethical import – to liberate culture from its reification. Here, then, is one aspect of the antinomical notion of art in particular and culture more generally. We have autonomy, but at a cost. Exposing these costs is not a question simply of negating the powers of art and culture but actually – ultimately – of reaffirming them. For Bourdieu, to continue with that example, it is in the name of autonomy that we critique the limits of autonomy in the arts. And the interest in culture and aesthetics is not taken, as it were, for merely cultural or aesthetic reasons but for more general – ‘anthropological’ – ones: that is, to shed light on the pursuit of autonomy itself, its 39 P. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: genesis and structure of the literary field, trans. S. Emanuel (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996). 40 Ibid.

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limits and conditions. Cultural theory here is a kind of anthropological fieldwork in our ethics of freedom. It is a critique in the sense not of a negation but of a questioning: an ethico-critical and reflexive critique, then. This in the end is what separates modern cultural theory most of all from other forms of inquiry such the sociology of culture or cultural studies, or even, in the end, Simmel’s work. Far from taking culture as a positive domain of inquiry, modern cultural theory is in some senses actually quite hostile to any fixed idea as to what culture is. It is even an educational means of using the exercise of criticism to interrogate the anthropological. ‘culturological’ and aestheticist notions of culture in order to break free of them. In this sense, modern cultural theory is actually against culture. It is strategically philistine.

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Adorno as educator Miserabilism and hope – Dialectics – Paradoxes – Principles and themes – Counter-heteronomics: an overview – Culture industry – Jazz and jazzness – Dependency – Authoritarianism – High art – Liquidations – Autonomy – Postmodernism – Benjamin – Ethics and educationality

It is commonplace to invoke Theodor Adorno as probably the greatest Marxist cultural theorist of the twentieth century. If there is any reason to read him in the twenty-first century, however, this is as much for ethical as for respectable Marxist reasons. At one stage of his life he signed his work with the surname Rottweiler. This seems an appropriate indicator of the stringent, even fearsome tone of some of his writings. English-speaking readers can usefully start on Adorno by consulting the essays translated in a volume, edited by J.M. Bernstein, entitled The Culture Industry.1 These are for the most part recognisably ‘sociological’ pieces. But then go and read Adorno’s essays on the philosophers Hegel and Husserl, the baroque Minima Moralia or his writings on music. Here we have, obviously enough, Adorno the philosopher and dialectical theorist, Adorno the follower of Hegel – and of Kant – rather than simply of Marx, and, of course, Adorno the avant-garde musicologist 1 T. Adorno, The Culture Industry (London: Routledge, 1991). German-speaking readers can of course happily plough through the impressive twenty-volume Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971–1986). For useful entry to Adorno in English see B. O’Connor, The Adorno Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); T. Huhn, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Still indispensible as overviews are G. Rose, The Melancholy Science: an introduction to the thought of Theodor W. Adorno (London: Macmillan, 1978), and S. Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics (Hassocks: Harvester, 1977).

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and die-hard enemy of jazz. But this is also not just a more difficult Adorno, it is the same Adorno – if an at times alarmingly intemperate, opinionated, miserable, fatalistic, utterly uncompromising Adorno. But this is not least of what is good about his work – its educational possibilities. Miserabilism and hope The overriding impression most people have on first encountering Adorno’s thought is one of bleakness and pessimism. But it makes little sense to describe Adorno as a pessimist. A pessimist thinks that things are going to get worse. Adorno thinks they have already hit the depths. He is better seen simply as a miserabilist. His Marxism is certainly bleak. The high capitalism of the nineteenth century was bad enough. The twentieth century has seen the emergence of culture as an instrument of social control. Only, there is no such thing as culture – only the capitalist machinations of the culture industry, the capitalist exploitation of cultural form. Hollywood, bad radio music – these are all provided to desensitise us to exploitation. The workers have been duped. Marxism can hope no more from them. Only high culture – the esoteric music of Schoenberg for example – offers, it seems, a small blink of hope in the devastated landscape that is Adorno’s world. Was he a proper Marxist? Of course he was. But Adorno hardly shared Marx’s belief in the inevitability of the end of exploitation. Marx was a revolutionary, a progressivist, in many ways a thinker of the Enlightenment. Adorno on the other hand appears to think that all prospect of revolution is at an end; that enlightenment has reverted to myth; that the working class has been bought off entirely by the lures of the modern culture industry; that even liberal capitalism shares fundamental elements with the horrors of fascism. One of Adorno’s favourite writers was that great fellow twentieth-century miserabilist, Samuel Beckett. Enough said, perhaps. Nothing to be done. But is this, in fact, all there is to Adorno? Surely, if he were just another epochalising culturologist like Spengler then he would scarcely be very interesting. Actually, Adorno is nothing if not a philosopher of hope. To appreciate this we need to reconstruct some of the buildingblocks of Adorno’s intellectual edifice. But we need to reconstruct them in a particular way. Should we read Adorno literally? Of course. That is the only way to read him. But we should read him bearing in

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mind what he once wrote about Freud: that, here, perhaps only the exaggerations have real truth-value. We might add another statement of Adorno’s, to the effect that the dialectician’s duty is to tell the ‘fool’s truth’ to power – even if this saying has arguably become as much a cliché amongst practitioners of cultural studies as the idea of creativity amongst the management gurus.2 In any case, if it is in their extremes that Adorno’s writings have their pertinence for the modern world, this is because we need to read those writings not in fact either as realist sociology or as a variant of post-Hegelian metaphysics but as contributions to critical ethics. Dialectics The endlessly paradoxical character of Adorno’s thought is central. And certainly, the reliance on paradox (or more exactly, contradiction) derives from a philosophical lineage – that of G.W.F. Hegel. Actually, we do not, for our limited purposes here, need to worry too much about Hegel. What Adorno takes from Hegel is not so much his overall system but his practice – that of dialectics; or more bluntly a somewhat curmudgeonly adherence to the productive paradoxes of antinomy and contradiction. Everything inheres in everything else; opposites not only attract but subsume each other if negatively and partially. But dialectics, writes Adorno, is not a standpoint; unless, that is, it is that of an intransigence towards all forms of reification.3 The dialectical method holds antinomies not exactly together but in continued, tensile juxtaposition to each other. If there is no Hegelian system in Adorno, however, this is because the dialectical strands tend, with him, to remain in opposition. There is no Hegelian closure or synthesis, which is not least why, in Minima Moralia, Adorno wrote famously that ‘The whole is the false’.4 Adorno, in his own way, was as hostile to the ideal of totality as any fashion-conscious postmodernist. Any philosophy ‘that would still set itself up as total, as a system, would become a delusional system . . . the only responsible philosophy is one that no longer imagines it has the Absolute at its command’.5 But in fact, as has been pointed 2 T. Adorno, Minima Moralia (1951), trans. E. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), p. 73. 3 T. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (1966), trans. E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973). 4 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 50; cf. pp. 16–17. 5 T. Adorno, Critical Models: interventions and catchwords (1963/69), trans. H. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 7.

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out by various critics, there are senses in which this methodological tendency could be aligned not so much with Hegel but more straightforwardly with the philosopher Immanuel Kant and the analysis of the fundamental antinomies in The Critique of Pure Reason.6 Kant will reappear towards the end of this chapter. For now, he is mentioned only as an important connection to Adorno’s sense of ethics. Adorno’s entire ethical problem-space is Kantian. This problematic concerns the fate and possibilities of human ‘maturity’, a topic already briefly addressed in the previous chapter. Enlightenment, for Kant, is emergence from immaturity, ‘the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another’. As Kant had put it in his essay on ‘What is Enlightenment?’ the motto of enlightenment ought to be Sapere aude! – dare to know. ‘Have courage to use your own understanding!’7 All of Adorno’s work revolves around this problem. And (in this sense) serious Kantian that he is, Adorno connects up this question of maturity with the question of critique.8 But critique is not just an epistemic matter in Adorno, but ultimately an ethical one. The highest value that we can embody is that of critical self-reflection. ‘The single genuine power standing against the principle of Auschwitz is autonomy if we might use the Kantian expression: the power of reflection, of self-determination, of not cooperating’.9 That is what Adorno is about. Paradoxes It is not necessarily what he is all about. If that were all at stake in Adorno then things would be relatively simple. The problem, it appears, is that we can have no straightforward – advance, ‘theoretical’ – knowledge of what truly autonomous critical self-reflection might be. In a sense, such a thing cannot exist. We come again and again upon this paradox in Adorno; in relation to the culture industry, to art, to the idea of emancipation. The principles of autonomy and freedom are tainted by their bourgeois origins certainly. But, 6 See for example H. Brunkhorst, Adorno and Critical Theory (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999). 7 I. Kant, ‘An answer to the question: “what is enlightenment?’” (1784), trans. H.B. Nisbet, in Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); and see D. Owen, Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the ambivalence of modernity (London: Routledge, 1994), chapter 1. 8 Adorno, Critical Models, p. 281 – from the important article ‘Critique’. 9 Ibid., p. 195.

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more than that, they are impossible as ultimate, problem-free values because they are always in part defined by the – partial, oppressive – social conditions that have made them possible. Art itself would be a good example of this predicament. Serious art is both autonomous and not autonomous in Adorno’s thought. The principle of autonomy is both ideological and real, both a mask and a genuine value: just as, analogously, the ancient Greeks, members of a society which relied upon the institution of slavery, invented the notion of freedom. But that is dialectics for you – you think you have freedom but you cannot have it without slavery. So this means, all in all, that Adorno is not in a position simply to affirm the values of freedom and autonomy in a positive or epistemic way. His very principle of ‘negative dialectics’ in fact suggests the opposite. ‘Freedom can be defined in negation only, corresponding to the concrete form of a specific unfreedom.’10 One cannot simply posit freedom as if it could be unproblematically known: one is better occupied on a more negative task, in diagnosing the forces of unfreedom. And that is exactly what Adorno does with dogged obsession in all of his work. But things are made even more complicated precisely by the fact that categories such as freedom themselves have such persuasive rhetorical and ideological force in modern societies. ‘The semblance of freedom makes reflection upon one’s own unfreedom incomparably more difficult than formerly when such reflection stood in contradiction to manifest unfreedom, thus strengthening dependence.’11 It is a question, then, of advocating – if that is the right term – an emancipatory project in the name of an unknowable, or at least almost certainly impossible, freedom in the face precisely of our more manifest perhaps ideological (pseudo-)freedoms; and of resolutely occupying the paradoxical position of an exteriorised critique in relation to a social order from which one is unable ever fully to exteriorise oneself. So when it comes to enlightenment and emancipation, for Adorno this is less a question of being ‘committed’ or ‘progressive’ than of being non-cooperative, difficult. In fact it might help to put all of this a little differently and say that Adorno’s work is governed by two closely related paradoxes of emancipation. There is the ontological – or put more simply, the sociological – paradox, just considered, that our positive values rely 10 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 231. 11 T. Adorno, Prisms, trans. S. & S. Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967), p. 21.

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on negative values – freedom and slavery, for which see Nietzsche passim ... ‘Not only were all good things, as Nietzsche the philosopher knew, once bad things; the gentlest, left to follow their own momentum, have a tendency to culminate in unimaginable brutality.’12 Capitalism invents massive inequalities and individual freedoms, the bourgeoisie represses the workers and provides the conditions for the invention of autonomous art; capitalism invents the commodification of everything; the bourgeoisie invents the culture industry; and so on. Then, on a somewhat different plane, there is another paradox, relating to the worry that affirming or theorising something can serve to undermine its realisation. This is a variant of the phenomenon of ‘willing what cannot be willed’.13 It is at the very source of Adorno’s famous repudiation of Brecht, whom he regarded as a political moralist, and his dislike of the notion of commitment and of the ‘oppositional’ status of forms of so-called popular culture such as jazz. At the centre of Adorno’s critique here is the idol of good intentions; that if we proclaim our oppositional status then we are ipso facto oppositional beings. It is also why there is actually quite a powerful anti-theoretical strand in Adorno. You have a ‘theory’ of particular notions such as freedom, autonomy or creativity – and you predetermine their nature, and hence, in effect, undermine them. Principles and themes If, then, there are principles that we should adopt when reading Adorno perhaps these sum to the idea that we should bear in mind that what concerns him is less the diagnosis of the awfulness of the world in any absolute sense, even if his work is certainly expressed more often than not in just that way, so much as – an ultimately ethical question – the specification of the obstacles to our autonomy. It is not really jazz or television or those sorts of things that are important in themselves. It is rather that we should, ethically speaking, be exercising to build up our critical immune systems to the forces that have power over us and threaten our autonomy. Adorno’s work can be used as being about just such sorts of exercise. In that sense it is less a question of miserabilism than of something like consciousness-raising. But, none the less, the despairing rhetoric is important and is more 12 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 79. 13 See J. Elster, Sour Grapes: studies in the subversion of rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 44–52.

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than rhetoric – precisely because it helps us to see these obstacles in their starkest, most urgent, form. So this miserable, cantankerous rhetoric in Adorno is not just an instance of bad faith or anything like that. On the contrary, it has educational uses: as an antidote to the bad faith that inheres in any smug self-satisfaction that things are fine and emancipatory as they are (that being keen on jazz is somehow ‘rebellious’ for example). Adorno, for all his difficulty, is an antidote to posturing, whether ethical, moral, political or intellectual. Note how this ethical and educational view actually limits the circumference of Adorno’s vision. For another point to make here is that if Adorno’s work can look at once like a sociology and a metaphysics of just about all of contemporary Western existence, that would be a misleading view. In spite of his wide empirical and theoretical range his focus is quite limited. He is interested in those forces which restrict or act as blockages or which suffocate our potentiality for critical self-reflection. Considering the forms that these blockages take will structure much of the rest of what follows here. Counter-heteronomics: an overview First of all, the most fundamental form of blockage is the commodification of everything brought about by capitalism itself. Adorno finds his ‘stigmata of capitalism’ everywhere. With the triumph of monopoly capitalism everything is commodified, even the putatively hallowed products of ‘culture’. Hence, most obviously, the culture industry itself has to become a principal object of analysis: film, television, radio, astrology columns, jazz. Everywhere, what draws Adorno’s attention is not so much issues to do with the positivist sociology of culture – anyone can see that the essays on jazz or astrology are not contributions to positivist sociology – as issues to do with the limiting of our human capacities to act and think for ourselves. Hence the thematic emphasis on, above all, the formulaic characteristics of the products of the culture industry and above all on issues of what might be generically termed pseudo-creativity (novelty in jazz, in technology and so on). Second, alongside this obsession with the question of commodification runs another thematic emphasis; that of the ubiquity of tendencies to authoritarianism. Adorno was a refugee from the Nazis. But in fact, Adorno rarely writes about fascism as such, that is, as a political system. His focus is not the political or sociological system of the fascist state but the forces and mechanisms which lend them-

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selves to authoritarian tendencies more generally, instanced above all in forms of dependency of all kinds. Third, we have something that can be described, not without reservations, as at least approaching the ‘outside’ of these bad, limiting forces; the realm of art, the world of Aesthetic Theory, the Notes to Literature and the writings in the philosophy of music. But as we shall see, these realms of high art are not spaces of redemption, where one might go for some sort of relief from modern existence. Art is not about beauty and reconciliation in Adorno’s world. These space are themselves, for Adorno, spaces of critique; or at least spaces for exercising our powers, such as they may remain, for critical self-reflection. Culture industry Now, most obviously what strikes people in reading Adorno is that, unless one makes exception for some in any case rather ambiguous comments about the Marx Brothers, he was not exactly an admirer of modern ‘mass’ culture.14 He was, however, an attentive reader of Aldous Huxley. Look at the famous chapter on ‘the culture industry’ in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.15 This is Brave New World where nothing ever changes and the masses are brought off perpetually by mindless distraction. Culture has become a generalised narcotic. Earlier drafts invoked ‘mass culture’, but as Adorno later explained, ‘we replaced that expression with “culture industry” in order to exclude from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that it is a matter of a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art’.16 But there is no longer a popular art to be differentiated from serious art. The Magic Flute and perhaps Mahler were only residual instances of that. Now there are only the endlessly repetitive machinations of the culture industries themselves. ‘Culture now impresses the same stamp on everything. Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part.’17

14 See Adorno, The Culture Industry; cf. generally, M. Paddison, Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture, second ed. (London: Kahn & Averill, 2004). 15 T. Adorno & M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), trans. J. Cumming (London: Verso, 1979). 16 Adorno, Culture Industry, p. 85. 17 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 120.

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Movies and radio – we are before the era of mass television here, a fact which makes the theses of Dialectic of Enlightenment all the more prescient and extraordinary, that is more not less relevant – are dominated by the monopolies of big business. They no longer even pretend to be art. Culture is manufactured for uniform consumption and imposed upon reality such that real life and the world of cultural production become indistinguishable; everything is filtered through culture. In Adorno’s world, the masses are reduced to imbecilic passivity; addicted in their boredom to the mindless consumption of the everthe-same. The culture industry has extinguished the very raison d’être of art; the production of the new. Rather the basic principle of the culture industry is passivity, mimesis. ‘The culture industry is geared to mimetic regression, to the manipulation of repressed impulses to copy.’18 Again and again Adorno and Horkheimer invoke in Dialectic of Enlightenment the formulaic essence of the culture industry; standardised products, producing the same thing again and again; where all plots and tunes and themes and styles are utterly predictable. Or rather they invoke something more like the standardisation of the new itself. For the culture industry appropriates for itself the very idea of the new. Novelty and creativity are in fact at a premium in the culture industry. But this is pseudo-creativity. It is pseudo partly because it only conceals the endless repetition of sameness. So the ideological invocation of novelty does not, for all that, amount to novelty. The new is not always the new. Adorno is obsessed by this issue. In spite of the severities of his style he is in some ways not unlike an eighteenth-century satirist exposing the vanities of humanity. It is vanity to assume that we know what novelty actually is. And it is pseudo because even nonconformity serves only to confirm the powers of the formulaic. ‘Whenever Orson Welles offends against the tricks of the trade, he is forgiven because his departures from the norm are regarded as calculated mutations which serve all the more strongly to confirm the validity of the system.’19 Many readers of Adorno’s writings on the culture industry are disappointed to find that there is only a paucity of empirical reference here. Adorno’s claim that this was because the culture industry works through the unconscious and so cannot be analysed at a conscious level does not do justice to the fact that in truth this is not an empir18 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 201. 19 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 129.

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ical argument at all but something, once more, like an ethical one. Or rather, it uses epistemic, empirical description, of a sort, to ethical ends. One might say that Dialectic of Enlightenment, for example, is a sort of ethical device that induces hope by the very force of its negation. Instead of describing the horrors of the culture industry Adorno uncovers the forces within it that restrict our capacities for critical self-reflection. But there would be no point in doing this were there not a basic optimism to Adorno; that such obstacles were worth confronting. Let us take at this point the celebrated – for many, the infamous – question of jazz in Adorno’s work. Jazz and jazzness The least helpful way to approach Adorno’s work on jazz would be to treat it narrowly and epistemically; as an empirical description of a specific musical field, that is, as being simply relevant to something called jazz. Yes, Adorno does hate jazz. And of course it is easy to invoke exceptions or objections to his argument; to suggest that Adorno did not appreciate the originality of Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington or that his analysis would not fit the music of Miles Davis or Keith Jarrett. But this is to apply the wrong principles of reading to Adorno’s work. It is not simply jazz that is at issue but – if one seeks an elaborate formula for it – something like a series of ‘jazz effects’ on our ethical subjectivity in general: reducible, if it is not too much of a mouthful, to a practice of listening that relies on the self-congratulatory perception of formulaic repetition of sound elements ‘misrecognised’ as the creative and the new. What Adorno is interested in or, putting it better, what should interest us in Adorno, is not so much jazz itself but, so to speak, the sad but pretentious morality system that, for him, is exemplified by it – jazzness perhaps. There is, first, a musicological or structural element to this. ‘Jazz is music which fuses the most rudimentary melodic, harmonic, metric and formal structure with the ostensibly disruptive principle of syncopation, yet without ever really disturbing the unity of the basic rhythm, the identically sustained metre, the quarter-note.’20 Jazz, 20 Adorno, Prisms, p. 121 – the article ‘Perennial fashion – jazz’ (1936). For a latemodern critique of Adorno’s hatred of jazz, R. Witkin, ‘Why did Adorno “hate” jazz?’ Sociological Theory, 18:1 (2000), pp. 145–70; cf. the like-titled H. Steinert, Die Entdeckung der Kulturindustrie, oder, Warum Professor Adorno Jazz-Musik nicht ausstehen konnte (Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1992); A. Williams, ‘Frankfurt School blues: rethinking Adorno’s critique of jazz’ in B.

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then, might be best conceived as any kind of sound form that melds the formulaic with the invocation of the new. Jazz seeks to put itself, as Adorno observes, in the paradoxical state of perennial fashion: ‘It must be always new and ever the same.’21 Then there is, secondly, the misrecognition of this formulaic repetition of sameness for the perpetually new, the rebellious, the radical: ‘rebellious gestures’ that are just that – gestures. What is at stake is not novelty but false novelty. In fact these gestures form the make-up of a kind of social psychology proper to the jazz effect; for instance, in producing the self-congratulatory effect in the listener of ‘nothing is too good for us’.22 The typically Adornoesque paradox here is that there is a somewhat self-congratulatory conservatism at the heart of this sense of the new. Music that is fashion is conformist music. Thirdly there is an argument about the effect of music more directly on our subjectivity, our sense of ourselves: that music should be otherwise than this; that jazz partakes of a ‘regression of listening’ in modern life. Adorno’s point is that people do not really listen to popular music or jazz. In the article ‘On popular music’ Adorno argues that in pop music recognising the piece takes the place of actually listening to it. The point is that there is or should be, for Adorno, an ethical purport to the act of listening. Listening is not something we do at our ‘leisure’ but entails cultural work.23 Note the sense of culture here as a kind of straying away from oneself – that is, a straying away from any implicit norm. We work culturally to become different from what we were – it is ultimately an ethico-critical labour. Narcissistic forms of culture such as jazz and popular music simply indulge in pseudo-individualisation; they give us a pleasing feeling of individuality whilst subjecting us to their mechanical formulae. In this sense, they simply affirm our existing sense of identity, to make us go beyond our existing selves. In fact culture is ideally, for Adorno, a means of pursuing the ethical goal of freedom, not least freedom from our current sense of identity. Hoeckner, ed., Apparitions: new perspectives on Adorno and twentieth century music (London: Taylor & Francis, 2006). A useful collection in English for Adorno and music generally is now T. Adorno, Essays on Music (ed. R. Leppert), trans. S.H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), especially part 3. 21 Adorno, Prisms, p. 126. 22 Ibid., p. 124. 23 T. Adorno, ‘On popular music’, Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences, 9 (1941), pp. 17–48; cf. Adorno, Culture Industry, pp. 26–52, and Adorno, Critical Models, pp. 167–75 – the article on ‘Free time’.

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What, overall, is useful here is not any sense that this is a critique of jazz as such but that it is an exposé of the forces – exemplified, certainly, in Adorno’s understanding of jazz, even though we need not reduce such forces to such a specific musicological form – that delude us into believing ourselves to be more heterodox than in fact we are. Anyway, Adorno is ethically rather than just musicologically useful. Where the argument is specifically reducible to that musicological form known as jazz, then Adorno’s interpretation is indeed highly vulnerable. For instance, there is – fourthly? – a functionalist critique at the heart of Adorno’s argument that is no doubt detachable from it: to the effect that jazz is a form of symbolic castration, serving to glorify weakness. ‘The aim of jazz’, Adorno writes, ‘is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. “Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated!”, the eunuchlike sound of the jazz-band both mocks and proclaims, “and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite”.’24 But perhaps this is to fix the form too closely to its sociological or moral functions. Doubtless jazz has social and moral functions but there is no reason why these should be reducible to one type, in a kind of essentialism of form. For our purposes, we can subtract the specific analysis of form from the analysis of the effects on subjectivity of this particular kind of form which happens to be jazz. Adorno’s argument only has uses for us, then, if it is not just reducible to a theory of specific forms but is understood as being a theory of what might be called subjectivity-effects; and ethically, as being about the forces that we encounter when engaging with different cultural forms in the context specifically of modern capitalism. In other words, his thought is, so to speak, tactical rather than propositional, ethico-critical rather than only epistemic. His animus towards pseudo-creativity is not part of a general theory but is designed to counter specifically modern capitalism’s ideological vaunting of novelty and creativity. The culture industries perhaps seem to be concerned with novelty and newness. Against this, as exemplified by the analysis of jazz, Adorno wants to argue that the novelty they propagate is false; and also to expose the extent to which such an emphasis panders, in any case, to our narcissism and deludes us into believing

24 Adorno, Prisms, p. 129.

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that we are having a ‘radical’ effect on things outside our control. This is important, and – again – for reasons that are ultimately ethical. To many readers, Adorno’s argument about the cultural industry seems an expression simply of despair. And Adorno himself was attacked for not being a so-called ‘committed’ intellectual. But the assumption that one is ‘radical’ can itself be a form of narcissism, an unthinking unwillingness to engage in critical self-responsibility. Failure to be responsible for oneself leads to authoritarian susceptibilities. And it is to partake of that form of engagement with the world that Adorno diagnosed as pivotal to modern capitalism’s understanding of itself – pseudo-activity: ‘action that overdoes and aggravates itself for the sake of its own publicity’.25 The argument is not that one must not act or take a stand but that one must interrogate the forces that shape such action and which are shaping us to undertake such action. The epitome of pseudo-activity for Adorno is, in fact, the jazz fan, or indeed any ‘fan’ of the products of the culture industry; those ‘vague, inarticulate followers . . . intoxicated by the fame of mass culture’.26 What conditions the adherence of the fan is the fact that there is no actual substance to what is worshipped. What counts is the mere fact of belonging; ‘identification . . . without attention to its content’.27 The fan can be a fan of anything; what counts is identification itself. Again, we see here why the analysis of such an apparently innocuous form as jazz can partake of the order of ethical or even political philosophy; jazz and the other products of the culture industry serve to lock subjectivity in shallow and fundamentally non-creative forms of identification. They have ethical and, finally, even political effects. Clearly, for Adorno, the apparent triviality of the examples should be seen as isomorphic to their actual importance. Dependency The great enemy for Adorno is not, then, just bad culture, bad art, but bad ethics, bad morality – dependency. Take the well-known essay, ‘The stars down to earth’ (dating from 1952–53), an analysis of astrology that is in fact a major statement of Adorno’s views on the 25 Adorno, Critical Models, p. 291. 26 Adorno, Prisms, p. 128. 27 Ibid., p. 128.

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status of subjectivity in the era of the culture industry.28 The essay is less an analysis of the mechanisms of astrological discourse per se than a sketch of some of the products of the culture industry understood as a kind of technology of subjectivity. The greatness of the essay is best appreciated by following certain principles of reading: by assuming not that its goal is epistemic and simply characterological, to describe the psychological states of readers of The Los Angeles Times in 1952, but that it is to isolate the mechanisms by which astrology seeks to work, paying special – ethical – attention to the way that it hinders our pathways out of dependency towards maturity. Just as we described Adorno’s essay on jazz as a study of jazz-effects or jazzness rather than the form of jazz itself, so can we describe the astrology essay as a study of subjectivity-effects in the culture industry. Of central importance here are several related paradoxes. First, astrology illustrates what might be described as a paradox of rationality. Modern astrology is a ‘rational’ enterprise or at least, in so far as it is irrational, it is so to speak rationally irrational – certainly, the product of a rational society and no other. In a society governed by the principles of expertise, science and rational administration, astrology offers a short cut; it is itself pseudo-expertise that parodies the expertise of the serious sciences, supplying a form of pseudo-erudition for those ‘in the know’. Yet in the process, astrology serves to underline the fact that life for the individual in an administered society consists merely of a series of practical decisions. All metaphysical longings are short-circuited: ‘The slogan “business as usual” is accepted as a kind of metaphysical maxim.’29 There is a second paradox here; what we could call a paradox of freedom. For in a sense, the astrological subject is both wholly determined and yet simultaneously free. Astrology embraces and satisfies the paradox that it gives advice on conduct to those whose fates are as it claims, in any case, wholly determined by the stars. As such, Adorno thinks, it both mirrors and reinforces aspects of real life. There is freedom, but it is circumscribed within the limits of the preordained, the formulaic. And perhaps people like things like this; they want the illusion of freedom rather than the real thing. Astrology reinforces our defences against the anxiety of freedom by offering us 28 See T. Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth, trans. S. Crook (London: Routledge, 1994), and the useful introduction by Crook. 29 Ibid., p. 49.

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a little but not too much. Fundamental here is the principle, again, of pseudo-individuality, whereby individuality per se is substituted for ‘rudimentary archaic qualities’ such as charm, personal magnetism, dynamism, sociability.30. Then there is, third, what can be called a paradox of individuality – the subject as both ‘epic’ and demeaned at the same time. Astrology flatters subjects into thinking that they are special, singled out by superior forces. But such flattery also plays to their anxieties, suggesting that they are constantly threatened, thwarted by outside forces beyond their control. Reality is opaque, beyond them, beyond us. Yet the causes of their – our – problems are always understood to be not with the world of objective social conditions but with the individual; the carrot of specialness is mitigated by the stick of impotence. Adorno characterises this subjectivity-effect in terms of the category of ‘vice-presidency’: astrological discourse flatters people that they are in a superior position in life, making decisions all the time – but plays to their resentment of authority and fantasies of autonomy; they are not actually the president. So we are both important and yet not so important as to take responsibility for anything. And even our dependency is itself gratifying in a sense. ‘The column attempts to satisfy the longings of people who are thoroughly convinced that others (or some unknown agency) ought to know more about themselves and what they should than they can decide for themselves.’31 The most striking feature of the astrology essay is the very banality of its subject-matter. Surely Adorno can not be serious in equating the powers of astrology with those of capitalist social control? But that is not the half of it. If absurdity can be power, then, as we shall now see, power can be utterly absurd. Authoritarianism In fact, this last paradox of Adorno’s recalls his characterisation of Adolf Hitler as a ‘composite of King Kong and a suburban barber’, a parallel that itself recalls Adorno’s insistence that the experience presupposed by the culture industry and that of authoritarianism were themselves fundamentally in tandem. But is this the eccentric and perhaps even irresponsible parallel that it has sometimes been made out to be? It is not. For Adorno is not necessarily equating, socio30 Ibid., p. 82. 31 Ibid., p. 38.

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logically, liberal democracy and fascism as political systems, but only indicating, as it were, the networks of dependency woven within each. The key to his outlook here does not relate to sociological issues to do with ‘fascism’, or even ‘authoritarianism’ but to something to do with subjectivity – above all encapsulated in the notion of antisemitism.32 The point is that anti-semitism is a morality in the bad, negative, passive sense. Anyway, the anti-semite’s problems are not least, if not only, moral. The anti-semite is, above all else, immature – dependent on the guidance of authority. Suffering from chronic weakness of the will, the anti-semite has recourse to leaders and exemplars of the most manipulative type. The anti-semite is in Adorno’s writing something akin to a general symbol of such dependency; anti-semitism in Adorno’s thought functions as a kind of emblem for that form of psychic vulnerability that leads subjects away from any capacity for independent critical consciousness. As Fredric Jameson puts it: ‘Antisemitism, then, which betrays the regression of the psyche under industrialization and rationalisation, along with its violent mesmerization by the archaic modes of appropriation and relationships to nature its victims seem to represent, is grasped as a form of cultural envy that reveals the relationship of the subject to the social totality under modernization in a particularly privileged way.’33 Why does Adorno find Freud’s work to be of such use in relation to anti-semitism? Because he sees Freud to be as much a political thinker as a psychologist per se. Politics, in this context, begins with the family. In Adorno, the general theme – largely derived from the writings of Eric Fromm as well as Freud – is that in monopoly capitalism the father’s authority as an ‘ego-ideal’ decreases. People then become susceptible to fascist and authoritarian ideologies. Actually, it is not really just a question of the rise of anti-semitism that concerns Adorno here. It is something more like antidotes to anti-semitism that he is concerned with. Critical maturity inoculates people from childish dependencies such as anti-semitic ideologies. So, for instance, the famous F-Scale of The Authoritarian Personality studies does not really measure anti-semitism or even the potential for it.34 Rather it 32 See ‘Elements of anti-semitism’, in Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment; ‘Research project on anti-semitism’ and ‘Anti-semitism and fascist propaganda’, in Adorno, Stars Down to Earth. 33 F. Jameson, Late Marxism (London: Verso, 1990), p. 38. 34 T. Adorno, E. Frenkel-Brunswik, D. Levinson & R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950).

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measures, as it were, the lack of anti-anti-semitism. In other words, it measures the lack of possibilities for the development of critical self-reflection and maturity. That, as always, is the problem. Critical immaturity can have socio-psychological roots.35 Aggression is not resolved but turned backward on to the ego, and then outward on to out-groups; masochism turned outwards becomes sadism. At the same time, these weakly developed egos develop leadership fantasies – or rather follow-the-leader fantasies. But these are ultimately auto-erotic. It is not just love of the leader that is at stake but love of the leader as oneself. An erotic tie is established between the leader and the mass: hence the masses actually desire authority and their own repression. The fascist leader is an object of identification, a quasi-father. Therefore the leader is an ‘ego-ideal’: not a superego – somebody who dominates – but a projection of the mass. So, yes; predictably enough, we are back – as always with Adorno – not just with the rather dubious question of sociological descriptions of character-types or even positivist typologies of society but with the ethical problem of critical self-reflection. Fascistic authoritarianism is in part the product of weak ego-development, of emotional immaturity. As such it has something in common with the infantile pseudo-individualism produced by the culture industries. In both cases, people are duped into being followers of crass formulae and failing to think and act for themselves. The parallel, put in these terms, is not surely so eccentric. What Adorno held to be common to both liberal-capitalist and state-authoritarian systems is the range of mechanisms that produce dependency. This does not mean that the outcomes are the same in liberal democracy as they are within fascist political systems, that the systems are the same in a political or a sociological sense; but it does legitimate the parallel at the level of what we have been calling subjectivityeffects and, if one allows, ethics. But if dependency is the basic problem, what is the solution? The answer is nearly but not quite high art . . . A benignly pretentious way to put it might be to say that high art is not the right answer but it is, for Adorno, the right question.

35 See ‘Freudian theory and the pattern of Fascist propaganda’, in Adorno, The Culture Industry.

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Adorno is quite often denounced as a sort of art-snob, perceived by his critics as pitting the esoteric virtues of the music of Schoenberg and the second Viennese school against the spontaneous expressions of jazz. This is a wholly misleading view. In fact, Adorno’s work intrinsically bemoans the fate of modern art as an esoteric domain of culture. It is all the worse for us, he thinks, that gone are the days when the popular and the high could be combined. We are ‘condemned’ to high art just as we are condemned to the culture industry. If the domain of high art is important for Adorno it is, then, not least for ethical reasons. This has to do, again, with the issue of critical self-reflection. Indeed, high art in some ways is the last refuge of the values associated with such self-reflection precisely as a constant rebuke, by its very obscurity of existence, to the existence of the culture industry and all the dependencies and immaturities that it provokes and sustains. In this sense, the basic theme at stake here is not actually either the culture industry or art – but the split between them itself. ‘The division itself is the truth’, Adorno famously wrote.36 High art has to be high art not straightforwardly because it is ‘better’ than other forms of cultural production but precisely as a critique of mass culture, a site of resistance to it. In a much-quoted letter to Walter Benjamin, Adorno wrote that both high art and consumer art ‘bear the stigmata of capitalism, both contain elements of change (but never, of course, the middle term between Schoenberg and American film). Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up.’37 Fredric Jameson has argued quite plausibly that this quotation refers more to the opposition between high art and ‘light’ art rather than to the products of the mass culture industry, but the opposition still holds good for culture as a whole, not least because Adorno’s reference is to American film not European film – certainly not a sphere of high art in his understanding.38 This does not, anyway, amount exactly to an 36 Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 135. 37 Quoted in Adorno, Culture Industry (introduction by J. Bernstein), p. 2; see T. Adorno, Letters to Walter Benjamin (letters of 1935, 1936 and 1938) in Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1977), p. 123; also, more generally, T. Adorno & W. Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1920–1940, trans. N. Walker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). 38 See Jameson, Late Marxism, p. 133.

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endorsement of high art over mass culture. It is rather that they deserve – or at least presuppose – each other. But the way we negotiate the split is, in a sense, ethical. Adorno recognises that high art is, to put it rather simplistically, an impossible ideal; hence, not least, his persistent invocation of the notion of guilt in relation to it.39 High art is ‘guilty’ on account of its own autonomous existence in an oppressive world. Genuine culture would be a lie in a capitalist society; but for all that the ideal of such a genuine culture should not be given up: ‘in face of the lie of the commodity world, even the lie that denounces it becomes a corrective’.40 Or in the terms of the beautiful sentence from Minima Moralia: ‘No work of art, within the organisation of society, can escape its involvement in culture, but there is none, if it is more than mere handicraft, which does not make culture a dismissive gesture: that of having become a work of art.’41 That is what high art is, then – a rebuke, a corrective and even a dismissal. Liquidations But a rebuke, a corrective and a dismissal in the face of what? As always, the key for Adorno is in the ethical critique of subjectivity; specifically, what he calls the ‘liquidation of the individual’, the blockage of the subject capable of critical self-reflection. High art is no more the site of the redemption of the individual than is the culture industry; but high art at least registers the fact of liquidation itself. Thus Adorno writes of music: ‘Between incomprehensibility and inescapability there is no third way; the situation has polarized itself into extremes which actually meet. There is no room between them for the “individual”. The latter’s claims, wherever they still occur, are illusory, being copied from the standards. The liquidation of the individual is the real signature of the new musical situation.’42 Serious music too, under these conditions, must distance itself as far as possible from the formulae of the entertainment industries: from, in musical terms, die Unterhaltungsmusik – entertainment music. Adorno values Schoenberg above all, if not only, for formal reasons: because he incarnates this position of serious music as sundered from popular culture and takes it to its limit. Schoenberg 39 40 41 42

T. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: RKP, 1970), p. 130. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 44. Ibid., p. 214. Adorno, Culture Industry, p. 31 – from the article on ‘The regression of listening’.

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‘consciously resists the phenomenon of regressive listening’. In fact his work is not incomprehensible; it is, as Adorno insists, all too comprehensible. Schoenberg and Webern ‘are called individualists, and yet their work is nothing but a single dialogue with the powers which destroy individuality’43 – which means, ultimately, that this work has ethical, and ultimately political, overtones; being against regressive listening this music challenges the reification of culture which is responsible for the liquidation of free critical self-reflection. So for Adorno Schoenberg is much more ‘progressive’ than someone who trumpets their radicalism in a moralistic sort of way, like Brecht. ‘In art’, writes Adorno, ‘direct protest is reactionary.’44 Brecht is no good for critical self-reflection, so far as Adorno is concerned, since he more or less tells us how to think. Ethics comes before politics for Adorno. Brecht’s politics may be sound. But ethically he is on the side of the powers of immaturity. Only once we have got our ethics straight is there any hope for politics – which is why Adorno does believe in hope and (ultimately) in politics, for otherwise he would not bother with ethics. Either way, good practices of critical selfreflection will have better political consequences than pseudo-radicalism. Now, for Adorno, the liquidation of the individual is the signature of the literary situation as well. Hence the importance of Samuel Beckett to him. Adorno was a keen advocate of Beckett’s work and Beckett – the proposed dedicatee of Aesthetic Theory – was perhaps the only figure to whom he gave his full critical and aesthetic endorsement other than Schoenberg. Adorno was especially keen on Beckett’s play Endgame, a play which appears to depict, if that is the right term, the last, drastic remnants of life at the end of history, as acted out by a cripple, a wheelchair-bound egomaniac and two geriatrics who live in dustbins. ‘We’re on earth. There’s no cure for that!’ Certainly, for Adorno, Endgame embodies the collapse of all meaning and the impossibility of interpretation; but that – for Adorno – is what is good about it. In doing so, the play no more embraces straightforwardly the esoteric values of ‘high art’ than it does the propaganda of Brecht or popular theatre. The individual is certainly liquidated in such a work, but that for Adorno is only appropriate: ‘After the Second World War, everything, including a resurrected culture, has 43 Ibid., p. 52. See also T. Adorno, Sound Figures, trans. R. Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). 44 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 31.

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been destroyed without realizing it; humankind continues to vegetate, creeping along after events that even the survivors cannot really survive, on a rubbish heap that has made even reflection on one’s own damaged state useless.’45 But it is the same with art itself. Endgame yields ‘to both the impossibility of continuing to represent things in works of art . . . and to the insight that the subjective modes of response that have replaced representation as mediators of form are not original and absolute but rather a resultant, something objective’.46 Endgame satirises any possibility of true artistic response. So perhaps its greatest value to Adorno is as an anti-work of art: one which both uneasily inhabits the canons of high art yet which subverts them at the same time – exemplifying, as the slogan went, the very impossibility of culture after Auschwitz. This, then, is just the sort of radicalism that Adorno likes. It is not the pseudo-radicalism of jazzness or its equivalents. There is, rather, a chain of significance in Adorno’s thinking here. Endgame is radical aesthetically and therefore it is radical ethically and therefore – ultimately – politically even though it is hardly politically ‘radical’ in any direct, immediate sense. But, then, on Adorno’s logic if it were then it would not be. Autonomy Now, this question of the status of the work of art is one to which Adorno obviously gives some rather obsessive attention. So far as he is concerned, serious art as an autonomous ideal is a bourgeois notion, albeit one distorted by the collapse of the high bourgeoisie in late capitalism. Art is fundamentally impossible, yet this is precisely what gives it its interest. ‘Having dissociated itself from religion and its redemptive truths, art was able to flourish. Once repositioned, however, art was condemned, for lack of any hope for a real alternative, to offer to the existing world a kind of solace that reinforced the fetters autonomous art had wanted to shake off.’47 As Aesthetic Theory repeatedly stresses, the idea of a wholly autonomous, disinterested art is both absurd and necessary. Absurd because serious art is socially conditioned and socially relevant; necessary because the 45 T. Adorno, Notes to Literature, volume 1, trans. S. Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 244 – ‘Trying to understand Endgame’. 46 Ibid., p. 250. 47 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 2.

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idea of serious art holds out the continuing hope, by the very fact of its absurdity, of a critique of existing conditions. This is especially so of modernist art with its radicalisation of the ‘impulse to self-destruction’ which, according to Adorno, animates the very idea of art.48 In any case, the paradoxical situation of serious art both illustrates and encapsulates all the other paradoxes and antinomies that are to be found in Adorno’s work. Art is antinomical; it is both social and anti-social. Serious art, then, as part of this paradoxical status has social and sociological relevance. But in what way? Because art refracts social conditions; hence the favoured metaphor of the prism. Art is prismatic in relation to society. Artistic expression is the modification not the representation of reality. Yet nor is it the sublimation or repression or denial of reality; rather, for Adorno, aesthetic negation is not the same thing as denial. On the contrary. It takes us away from reality only to bring us back again all the nearer. ‘Expression negates reality by holding up to it what is unlike it, but it never denies reality.’49 Expression is clearly social. Yet Adorno is scarcely interested in the sociological origins of art in the sense of the social interests of artists themselves. The beautiful text from Minima Moralia on the notion of expression is indicative of this.50 Art, claims Adorno, is not the sublimation of the social experience of artists. Often at great cost to their own sense of individuality, artists – precisely in order to produce legitimate art – must break with the notion of psychological expression itself; all legitimate art today, for Adorno, is anti-psychology. Nor is Adorno simply interested in the question of the sociological relevance of art at the level of content; otherwise, of course, he might have been rather more favourable towards Brecht. The key, nevertheless, lies in this notion of the autonomy of art: Art . . . is not social only because it has been brought about in such a way that it embodies the dialectic of forces and relations of production. Nor is art social only because it derives its material content from society. Rather it is social primarily because it stands opposed to society.51

48 49 50 51

Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 75. Ibid., p. 213. Ibid., pp. 212–14. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 321.

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In other words, art is social precisely because of its claims to autonomy: precisely because it is the ‘social antithesis’ of society.52 In short, the artwork – especially the modernist artwork – is a form of critique and worthy of critical reflection in so far as it engages with the very problem of autonomy, with the possibility of escape that is held out by the existence of the project of a high or serious art from the forms of dependency induced by the culture industry or the myriad forms of critical lassitude. Yet, does not this entire conception run aground – if we are to consider its contemporary relevance – on the shoals of a postmodernism which would hold, to the contrary, that all distinctions between high and low have become blurred in the current era?53 Postmodernism The uses of Adorno’s work in this context are related to the fact that he is at once close to and distant from the perspective of postmodernism.54 Three themes are relevant to us here: enlightenment, anti-essentialism and art itself. First, enlightenment. Now, Adorno’s scepticism as to the continuing relevance of the Enlightenment might seem to chime well with the happy-sad fatalism of much postmodernism. Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment appears to be an uncompromising attack on enlightenment ideals – and hardly in a dialectical spirit at all. The dialectic of Adorno and Horkheimer’s title is not, in a sense, a dialectic of enlightenment, but a dialectic between enlightenment and myth. This leads to what might seem to be a remarkably all-encompassing understanding of enlightenment, such as to include just about any schema imposed upon the world. Enlightenment, on this view, would be almost synonymous with any form of rationalisation; mythic, religious, secular. But is this really to damn enlightenment? In fact, the very extremity of the position is the key to what is posi52 Ibid., p. 11. 53 Cf. A. Huyssen, After the Great Divide: modernism, mass culture, postmodernism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988). 54 See Bernstein, Introduction to Adorno, The Culture Industry; also M. Pensky, ed., The Actuality of Adorno: critical essays on Adorno and the postmodern (New York: New York University Press, 1997). Further to postmodernism, see Chapter 5 below, where a few names are given – rather than treating it, as here, simply as an abstract noun in its own right.

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tive and productive about Adorno’s conception of enlightenment. Adorno can seem to be an anti-enlightenment thinker. Yet he is hardly so in the manner of most of the advocates of postmodernism. One aspect of the difference is Adorno’s sheer uncompromising stance. If postmodernism is defined as the eclipse of all grand narratives then Adorno is hardly a postmodernist in that sense. Dialectic of Enlightenment clearly offers a grand narrative of the fate of modernity, and one which, in its seemingly implacable pessimism, is at some odds with the prevailing current of conceptual lightness and political indifference that is seemingly proper to postmodernism. But in a sense the pessimism is staged. As has been stressed, it is ultimately ethical in that it functions as a kind of provisional, critical, reflexive educational exercise to wake us up from our critical slumbers. The narrative of the eclipse of freedom makes sense only if one holds freedom, still, to be some sort of possibility. If we need a lack of compromise towards the question of freedom, then this is precisely because freedom is such a difficult proposition in contemporary societies, in which ‘the semblance of freedom makes reflection upon one’s own unfreedom incomparably more difficult than formerly when such reflection stood in contradiction to manifest unfreedom, thus strengthening dependence’.55 The fact is that we can not have a positive conception of freedom under such conditions. Rather, as mentioned earlier, freedom has to be defined, if at all, only through negation. This means that the critical game is not to denounce the enlightenment goal of freedom itself but to make way for freedom, so to speak, by revealing all the dimensions of our unfreedom, including those inaugurated by the very idea of enlightenment. Then, secondly, we have the question of anti-essentialism, a muchvaunted shibboleth of postmodernism. The critique of the essentialism of subjectivity would be a useful case in point, and here we have a real difference between Adorno and postmodernism. Both are critical of the bourgeois concept of the person. Perhaps the postmodern subject in keeping with Adorno’s non-identitarian principles in general would be one precisely of non-identity; yet Adorno himself is more dialectical when it comes to subjectivity; which is only to say that he is more paradoxical, more complex, since, for him, to embrace the ‘non-identical’ one actually needs a strong identity. Again, the ethical implications are obvious. Only the character

55 Adorno, Prisms, p. 21.

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capable of critical self-reflection would be able to embrace non-identity as a kind of ethos. Subjectivity itself depends upon the non-subjective. Paradoxically, in order to be a subject one has to recognise this. ‘The subject is the lie, because for the sake of its own absolute rule it will deny its own objective definitions. Only he who would refrain from such lies – who would have used his own strength, which he owes to identity, to cast off the façade of identity – would truly be a subject.’56 Typically with Adorno, it is preferable to hold on to an antinomy than to embrace either subjectivism or antisubjectivism. Then, thirdly, we have the critique of art. Like the postmodernists too Adorno puts a large emphasis upon matters of art and aesthetics. But unlike them he might seem to be rather conservative in this. The postmodern position is usually to document and generally condone the convergence of high art and low art; whereas Adorno wishes, as we know, to condone – with however much ambivalence – the relative merits of high modernist art such as that of Schoenberg’s music. As has been argued, this is not simply a conservative defence of the principle of high art. And there is an irony here because, in fact, what postmodernism regards as the current state of affairs – the interchangeability of high and low – Adorno regards more as an aesthetic and hence ethical ideal. The magnificent sentences on Mahler which close the ‘Regression of listening’ essay indicate that this is not simply a question of esoteric or elitist art. Mahler – that scandal of all bourgeois musical aesthetics. They call him uncreative because he suspends their concept of creation itself. Everything with which he occupies himself is already there. He accepts it in its vulgarised form; his themes are expropriated ones . . . What is worn out yields pliantly to the improvising hand; the used parts win a second life as variants . . . A beat-up melody, straining under the pressure of clarinets and oboes in the upper register, arrives at places which the approved musical language could never safely reach. Such music really crystallizes the whole, into which it has incorporated the vulgarised fragments, into something new, yet it takes its material from regressive listening.57

56 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 277. 57 Adorno, Culture Industry, p. 52.

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But Mahler aside, not least of Adorno’s differences from the postmodernists is that he does not think, like them, that the split between high art and low art has been overcome even though it might be desirable that it should be. Perhaps the best way to approach this question, and also to isolate further what is specific to Adorno’s own way of doing things, is via the work of that proto-postmodernist and brilliant Adorno-interlocutor, Walter Benjamin.58 In his celebrated ‘Work of art’ essay, Benjamin sought signs of aesthetic and political redemption in the fate of contemporary cultural production.59 We can scarcely do justice to the subtleties of that essay here. Suffice to say that for Benjamin, the situation of art in the modern era has not regressed as such, but has rather been transformed. We are in the epoch of the decay of aura. Because of the limitations in the means of technical reproduction of artworks and images in previous eras, the notion of the work of art was associated with a singular, auratic power. But with the advent of photography, for example, the presence of the original gives rise to the problem of ‘authenticity’: the era of technical reproducibility undermines the question of authenticity, because the authority of the original is lost, that is, because of the displacement of the original from its original context. ‘The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room.’60 For Benjamin this is not necessarily cause for dismay. Because modern experience just is technological it is right that art itself should be expressive of this. Art can serve as a means of mastering the elemental forces of a technological second nature. Photography and film accustom humanity to the new apperceptions conditioned by technology. Technological art – like film and photography – becomes the site of exploration of future relations between the technology and the

58 Our comments on Benjamin are cursory. For scholarly work on Adorno and Benjamin see Buck-Morss, Origin of Negative Dialectics, and A. Benjamin, ed., The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1989). Useful collections in English on Benjamin include G. Smith, ed., Benjamin: philosophy, aesthetics, history (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), and G. Smith, ed., On Walter Benjamin (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). 59 W. Benjamin, ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, originally translated in Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992). 60 Ibid, pp. 214–15.

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human which as Howard Caygill has noted ‘will create unprecedented experiences of space and time, which will bring with them the dissolution of previously valid experiences of identity . . . and of politics’.61 In many ways this is a progressive argument. Aura equals elitism. So, contrary to Adorno, the end of aura is not necessarily negative in its consequences. Certainly, in the ‘work of art’ essay Benjamin praises film for its undermining of aura: not just for what it says but for what it does as an aesthetic genre – effectively to transform our very idea of aesthetic autonomy, effectively to bury aura. It is true that perhaps this is not uniformly a good thing. ‘The film responds to the shrivelling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio.’62 However, modern technologies allow for a kind of interchangeability between producers and consumers of culture; a sort of ‘reversibility’ principle between art and public. Anyone can be in the movies because, as Benjamin says, acting is not involved. Likewise everyone in the audience is immediately an expert on film. Across all the arts: ‘At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer’ – literary licence becomes common property. Against Benjamin’s ‘optimism’ – which is not really what it is – is usually pitted Adorno’s ‘pessimism’, particularly as supposedly expressed in the regression of listening essay. But this, anyway, would be a misguided opposition. True, Adorno responds to the reversibility principle with the more negative notion of ‘despecialisation’.63 Moreover where distraction is given a positive interpretation in Benjamin’s treatment of modern mass culture, Adorno responds with the notion of ‘deconcentration’ and the regression of listening itself.64 And where Benjamin sees possibilities of the actualisation of the new in Baudelaire and the Paris arcades, Adorno holds, rather, that the ‘cult of the new, and thus the idea of modernity, is a rebellion against the fact that there is no longer anything new’.65 Mass modernity’s notion of the new, for Adorno, is only a narcotic, a concept chained to the decay of experience. But there is more to this than just the tit-for-tat of critical point61 H. Caygill, Walter Benjamin: the colour of experience (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 107. 62 Benjamin, ‘Work of art’, p. 224. 63 Adorno, Culture Industry, p. 48. 64 Ibid., p. 43. 65 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 235; Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, pp. 28–33; cf. W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland & K. McLaughlin (Harvard: Harvard UP, 1999).

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scoring. This is a question not simply of different interpretations of the modernity of culture, but of different critical games being played in each case. In spite of the mutual influence of each upon the other, they are talking about different things, even different problems. Indeed, their very domains of evidence are different; Adorno’s focus being the culture industry, Benjamin’s more typically avant-garde yet, in a sense, mass art – not Louis Armstrong or Hollywood but the films of Eisenstein, the photography of Atget. But there is more to it even than that. Benjamin is diagnosing the progressive or at least redemptive potentiality of modern forms of mass art. Adorno’s whole question seems to be quite different from this: to measure the modern culture industry in ultimately ethical terms, that is, in terms of its relation to the forces of critical self-reflection. Where Adorno sees regression, Benjamin sees possibility; but this is a difference that is the product of their differing critical styles more than anything else. Actually, it is not just that they are saying different things. Each requires different principles of reading. Adorno’s critical method is ultimately ethical; or at least, it is centred on dramatising the forces that hinder critical self-reflection. He is not really looking for epistemic reasons to hope at all. If anything, it is as if he wants to free up hope by staging the utter denial of its possibility under modern conditions. Benjamin’s concerns, on the other hand, are – for all his gnomic innovations in style – epistemic and directly aesthetic; he wants to find evidence of hope out in the world, albeit in the unlikeliest, and hence the most aesthetically enlightening, of places. The repetitive mantra of Adorno’s critical letters to Benjamin concerns his lack of a dialectical perspective.66 Not being dialectical enough was damning judgement from Adorno and was probably even worse than being accused of being a jazz fan. But this did not mean simply having the right attitude to Hegel. Putting it crudely, it meant that Benjamin’s position was not good at holding together – or better, apart – antinomical relations and paradoxes. In particular, Benjamin had too direct a notion, so far as Adorno was concerned, of the relation between aesthetics and politics. We do not presume to take sides on this issue here. But for Benjamin, at least in the ‘work of art’ essay – and however gestural it is – the aim is to further the cause of revolution. Aesthetics and politics are closely melded on to each other. 66 See E. Bloch et al. Aesthetics and Politics, trans. R. Taylor (London: Verso, 1977), pp. 110–20 (letters from 1935, 1936 and 1938).

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Adorno will label this – perhaps rather unfairly – Benjamin’s ‘proletarian romanticism’, and derive its current ultimately from the supposedly malign influence of Brecht.67 It is true that Adorno’s attitude to Benjamin is sometimes patronising, even at times cruel. But perhaps that is because, personal superciliousness aside, he saw that he was playing such a different critical game from that of Benjamin and that it frustrated him precisely in so far as he thought Benjamin should be playing the same game he was. But Adorno’s concerns were – in contrast to those of Benjamin – primarily ethical not immediately aesthetic-political. Adorno wants to retain – however pregnant with paradox, and against Benjamin’s consignment of the auratic work of art to the status of myth – some sense of the continuing autonomy of art. That is not just because Adorno believes in the autonomy of art itself but because his question is not the aesthetic-political one about the fate and potentiality of the masses at all, but the ethical one about the status of freedom, autonomy and critical self-reflection. The work of art is the entity that is consciously produced: not inspired but made. It is the product of agency. Technology has not eclipsed the work of art and turned it into something else, with new possibilities; no, the autonomous work of art still exists, and not least because the best modern art – Schoenberg’s serialism for instance, or even, one might add, more obviously the music of his successors such as Pierre Boulez – is itself already technological. Technology is not opposed to art and art here is not just the ‘expression’ of technological experience. What more hopeful judgement could there be? Ethics and educationality As J.M. Bernstein has written, Adorno’s is not so much an ‘objective’ analysis as a perspectival one.68 This deceptively straightforward comment gets to the essence of Adorno. Objectivism gives you epistemic analysis, perspectivism gives you ethical diagnostics. But invoking perspectivism and ethics is not a matter of reading Adorno against himself. It is not that Adorno does not mean what he says – he does – or even that Adorno is not actually in despair – which of course he is. It is more a question of what he means when he means what he says, and in some respects it is a question of how he means 67 Ibid., p. 123. 68 Introduction to Adorno, Culture Industry, p. 3.

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it when he means it, and of how he does his despairing when he does his despairing. This brings us close to the core of Adorno’s educational relevance. His exercise in educationality is oriented towards the cultivation of a very particularly kind of hope: the hope for an unknowable autonomy. It is as if every fact, tendency and institution in cultural, economic, social and intellectual life is measured by Adorno in terms of its relevance for providing the conditions for – or opposition to – the possibility of autonomy. His work is not only a discourse about society, a theory of art, a methodology, or even a politics (although it has massive relevance for all of these); it is an ethical inquiry into what sort of humans we have become in the light of what sort of humans we might be.69 Everything in Adorno is adjudicated from the particular perspective of the individual – not necessarily an individual person but why not a community or an association? – that is ideally autonomous rather than heteronomous or dependent. For instance, against the star-system model of ‘personality’ that is characteristic of the culture industries, Adorno posits something related to Kant’s ethical model of personality. Here personality is an ethical principle: that of giving oneself the moral law from one’s own use of reason. Now in a world dominated by the culture industry ‘instead of having personality in Kant’s sense, one is a personality’.70 Nowadays, personality is a sham; it simply means conforming to the prevalent forces of social existence. Whereas ‘authentic’ personality would be, more precisely, a refusal of just those forces. Adorno recognises the limits of the liberal conception of autonomy yet also wants to redeem it. ‘The concept of personality cannot be saved. In the age of its liquidation, however, something in it should be preserved: the strength of the individual not to entrust himself to what blindly sweeps down upon him, likewise not blindly to make himself resemble it.’71 This suggests that there is a certain pragmatism to Adorno’s ethics. We do what we can. But there is a speculative aspect too, one which is even, perhaps paradoxically, at the basis of this realist conception: in fact, it may be there precisely because Adorno is aware of the impossibility of the classical liberal conception of individual auton69 For a more sophisticated and systematic treatment of Adorno and ethics generally see J.M. Bernstein, Adorno: disenchantment and ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 70 Critical Models, p. 165 – ‘Gloss on personality’. 71 Ibid., p. 165.

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omy in his own, contemporary world. In this context, we need a perspective that is, in some senses, artificial. ‘The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.’72 Perhaps we could say that the absolutely autonomous person is a sort of ego-ideal rather than a realisable entity, and perhaps that speculative ideal is what separates Adorno from more obviously humanist, liberal notions of such autonomy, including that of Kant. Yet we know, or think we know, that Adorno is also a miserabilist. But perhaps this is only because one has to project the worst because such a speculative model of redemption gives us no doubt ludicrously high standards. Then again, if there is a perspectivism here it is actually that of hope: one projects the worst only in so far as one still has hope, that is, in order to provoke the good. ‘Hope is soonest found among the comfortless.’73 Moreover, hope – in the world of the compulsory optimism of the culture industries – is a ‘damaged’ concept. In order to be on the side of hope, perhaps we have to appear to be against hope. There is an echo here of what Adorno himself said of Freud: ‘I suspect that Freud’s contempt for men is nothing but an expression of such hopeless love which may be the only expression of hope still permitted to us.’74 So there is hope but a somewhat perverse hope, then, in Adorno. And also in many ways a negative one. For it is not that Adorno ever fixes his ethico-critical outlook into a substantiated, that is, moral conception of how to live. There is no ‘vision of man’ in Adorno. He does not tell us how to conduct ourselves in ‘everyday life’. The full life, indeed, would be a contradiction in terms. ‘If a life fulfilled its vocation directly, it would miss it.’75 This refusal of a complete and substantiated morality of living is again a consequence of Adorno’s perspectival approach, which does not seek to impose a wholesale, determinate objective moral system upon us. The essay on ‘Resignation’ provides a twist here.76 For although he was a Marxist, Adorno was hardly a believer in the intrinsic virtues of political action as an ideal in itself. Yet his conclusion to that essay is, in its way, still extraordinary. Adorno’s line is that the one who really thinks criti-

72 73 74 75 76

Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 247. Ibid., p. 223. Quoted in M. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (London: Heinemann, 1973), p. 105. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 81. Adorno, Critical Models – ‘Resignation’.

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cally is the one who has not given in to dogma of any kind; so those who have given up and those who still believe are as bad as each other. It is a question, dare one say it, of a sort of third way. Commitment entails the will to keep thinking autonomously and this can mean in large part negatively. So what we have here is a case, lastly, of an ethics of critique. Negativity – but not simply denunciation – as ethos. The capacity for critique becomes the highest value, and particularly in a democratic age. From this ethico-critical point of view, Adorno emerges not as some demented, miserabilist Marxist but as one of the essential thinkers of the ethical preconditions of democratic existence: ‘Critique and the prerequisite of democracy, political maturity, belong together. Politically mature is the person who speaks for himself, because he has thought for himself, and is not really repeating somebody else; he stands free of any guardian.’77 This is a magnificent quotation. It sums up what there is to be loved in Adorno; the ethical commitment to critical self-reflection and autonomy without the self-indulgence or hubris of stating what this would consist of, beyond the argument – surely valid – that only such critical maturity, however conceived, can ever lead straightforwardly to political maturity. But, then again, there is further thought implicit here. Perhaps the significance of Adorno actually lies not least in the way in which by being so cantankerously intolerant of the modern world, that is in the very extremes of eccentric severity with which he went about his cultural and other judgements, he more or less deliberately undermined any ultimate authority he might have exercised over his readers and successors as a cultural, political, aesthetic or moral mentor. He comes, in this sense, somewhere between Max Weber’s dichotomy of ethical and exemplary prophecy. He is exemplary, but he can not be imitated. With his obsessive and uncorruptible dialectical rigour, his peculiarly liberated dogmatism, his very ludicrousness on occasion, Adorno cuts us off from the ties that might otherwise have bound us to him. Adorno is genuinely inimitable: in effect setting us free whilst providing an example of what critical freedom might look like. He is – in a manner that would be entirely consistent with his own doctrine of maturity – forbidding us to follow. But that is absolutely why he is important. It is what gives him his peculiar status as a ‘classic’ of modern cultural theory: something unsurpassable, necessary, inescapable yet also unmasterable. 77 Ibid., p. 281 – from the article ‘Critique’.

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Foucault and the ethics of subjectivity Culture and subjectivation – Interpretations – Power – Creative singularity – Aesthetics of existence – Relevance – Truthfulness and ressentiment – Art and creativity – Pastoralism, bio-power and the artistic life – Asceticism – Creative ethics – Political ethos – Resistance – Liberalism as critique – Culture – Critical virtue – Educationality and style

Michel Foucault wrote next to nothing specifically about the concept of culture, did not publish too much about art and barely addressed in a direct way the specific issue of creativity. He is sometimes assumed to be a postmodernist, and something of a pessimistic one. This chapter will argue that, to the contrary, Foucault was a modernist and that his work, especially in its late period, was saturated with the question of aesthetics – and, for that matter, with that of creativity – which, for him, was part of a bigger question than the issue of the socalled status of ‘art’ but was connected, more broadly, to the ultimately ethical question of autonomy. And, as with Adorno, from ethics we get politics; not a political morality but perhaps a certain political ‘attitude’ or style; and not the completely miserable one that might perhaps be expected from some accounts.1 1 Integral to the understanding of Foucault offered here has been the work of Graham Burchell and Colin Gordon. Apologies are due to both for the ways in which their work is used here in the context of cultural theory. See, amongst various contributions, G. Burchell, ‘Liberal government and techniques of self’ in A. Barry, T. Osborne & N. Rose, eds, Foucault and Political Reason (London: UCL Press, 1996), and Colin Gordon, ‘The soul of the citizen: Max Weber and Michel Foucault on rationality and government’ in S. Whimster & S. Lash, eds, Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987); and Gordon,

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It is terminology he himself would have disliked. Foucault was a philosopher certainly, and a historian too. But a ‘cultural theorist’? Never mind ‘theory’ (his work is certainly not simply that), but – perhaps excepting the idea of a ‘culture of the self’, considered further below – one will scarcely ever find the notion of culture specifically and self-consciously deployed in Foucault’s writings. On the other hand, words are not concepts; and if the word is hardly there then the concept of culture, arguably, is – if critically – present, or at least implicated, in his work, and even (and perhaps especially) in his later work on ethics and governmentality. There are at least two aspects to this, one less interesting than the other. Least interestingly, it might be said that the concept of culture haunts, first of all and most generally, Foucault’s nominalism. Nothing is fundamental – that might be said to have been Foucault’s motto. What is nominalism? It is a species, really, of scepticism: the idea that the act of naming at least in part (there are different varieties of nominalism of course) determines the character of what is named, or more widely the idea that names have a contingent relation to what is named. Foucault often studied the history of institutions – the prison, the asylum, the hospital and so on. He also studied ideas and concepts such as those of ‘dangerousness’, discipline, perversion or mentalities concerning the nature of government – governmentality for short. And he also studied practices, such as the history of the confession. But in all these cases what is entailed is a certain attitude whereby Foucault hoped to show that the emergence of these concepts, institutions and practices was contingent not upon objective constraints in the world so much as upon – putting it bluntly – relations of power, forms of categorisation and anonymous human ingenuity. One can argue over what kind of nominalism it was that Foucault espoused exactly. The argument here is that Foucault’s was a strategic – even ultimately ethical – and not just an epistemic point of view, and not even a dynamic or dialectical nominalism.2 More will be said on this near the end of this chapter. But whatever that difference ‘Question, ethos, event: Foucault on Kant and enlightenment’, Economy and Society, 15:1 (1986), pp. 71–87. See also J. Rajchman, Michel Foucault: the freedom of philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 2 Cf. I. Hacking, ‘Making up people’, in T.C. Heller, M. Sosna & D. Wellbery, eds, Reconstructing Individualism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986).

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amounts to, if there is no essence to the categories of the world and much even if not everything is down to the contingencies of history, then surely everything is a matter of culture. In so far as this is the case, then yes Foucault was something like a theorist – or, better, historian – of culture. But this is to be engaged in the question of culture in quite a banal sense, one almost certainly far too generalised for Foucault’s own sensibilities. More often than not, Foucault is better seen as engaging in the history of ‘thought’ as opposed to the history of culture if all we mean by ‘culture’ is some kind of opposition to ‘nature’. In any event, the second sense in which the notion of culture is present in Foucault’s work is a little more interesting. This refers specifically to the question of subjectivity and, as we shall see, to something that is potentially almost anti-subjective – subjectivation. In one of the very rare discussions where he specifically addresses the concept of culture he clearly shows his unease with it, and takes considerable pains to delimit it, describing it as ‘a hierarchical organisation of values that is accessible to everyone but which at the same time gives rise to a mechanism of selection and exclusion’ accessible only via reflective techniques of conduct.3 The singularity of this definition lies with the connection between the idea of culture and the idea of an ascetic ‘reduction’ of the self. For Foucault there is not just culture in the abstract: when culture is invoked it is specifically in relation to ethics and techniques directed at subjectivity and the self. In his résumé of his own work, Foucault claims that the basic problematic of his entire oeuvre concerned the issue of subjectivity, or more particularly the ‘analysis of the conditions under which certain relations of subject to object are formed or modified, in so far as these relations constitute a possible knowledge (savoir)’.4 There is not really a ‘theory’ of subjectivity here, however. Perhaps we could say that, for Foucault, subjectivity is ineluctably plastic, always there to be transcended; which is not least why one might be interested in writing a history of it – to escape the sense that it is ‘given’. Gilles Deleuze insists upon the term subjectivation to capture this sense of Foucault’s interest as being focused on something that is actually, as it were, beyond subjectivity itself or beyond normal subjectivity. 3 M. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, trans. G. Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 179. 4 M. Foucault, ‘Foucault’, trans. R. Hurley, in Essential Works: Aesthetics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), p. 459.

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Deleuze is right to do that, for Foucault’s ideas here have little to do with sociological theories of ‘self-identity’ or any such thing. Subjectivation is creative, ‘artistic’ even – hence the later invocation of the idea of an ‘aesthetic of existence’, a central theme of the current chapter. Subjectivation is, then, broadly speaking an aesthetic matter, entailing arts of invention; a process of ‘personal or collective individuation, individuation one by one or group by group’.5 Now, if subjectivation is a cultural phenomenon it is so using ‘culture’ not as a substantive term but as a processual phenomenon, a form of ethico-critical work, even a means of escape. More will be said about this. But in invoking the notion of culture in relation to subjectivation at all, we need at least two caveats. First, Foucault is in no measure a culturalist – or what in chapter one was termed a ‘culturologist’ – in the sense of one of those writers who invokes cultural ‘totalities’ to explain mentalities of whole societies or social groups. Most of his work, even in a book such as The Order of Things with its notion of the (dispersed) episteme, was actually oriented against such totalising and epochal conceptions.6 So when we invoke culture in connection with Foucault, it is best to restrict it, in the main, to this quite limited sense to do with subjectivation and creativity. Second, we must not lose sight of Foucault’s emphasis on knowledge. In Chapter 1 it was noted that thinking about enlightenment tended to split into thinking about reason and thinking about culture. Foucault, in so far as he thinks in terms of culture, nevertheless also retains the emphasis upon reason. One might say that his cultural thinking goes via the way of reason. Or rather we might say that he is interested in the constitution of subjectivity not from some or other generally ‘culturalist’ perspective but from the point of view of the constitution of the subject specifically as a subject of reason or knowledge. What Foucault brings to questions of culture, then, is a ‘veridical’ twist: the culture of the self is also a culture of truth. Interpretations Surely even this rather restricted emphasis on culture and subjectivation goes against the grain of at least some prevalent readings of 5 G. Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. M. Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 115. 6 M. Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. A. Sheridan-Smith (London: Tavistock, 1970).

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Foucault’s work. There are too many of these even to begin referencing them here. But it is fair to say that Foucault is probably most famous for having coined the notion – in his most sociologically celebrated book, Discipline and Punish – of a disciplinary society.7 Surely that is what Foucault is all about? Foucault’s view of modernity is often – even generally – portrayed as being a deterministic and fatalistic one. Just as Adorno became the miserabilist prophet of the totally administered society, so Foucault became associated with the idea that power is everywhere, that nothing can be done, that we are all caught up in the webs of some massive carceral apparatus and so on and so forth. Readers who have got this far will not be surprised that the argument here will be that an ethico-critical reading of Foucault takes us in a different direction from that of the miserable, theorist of disciplinary power. Foucault, on the principles of reading proposed here becomes – not unlike Adorno – more of an ‘educator’ than a positive or epistemic thinker with a determinate ‘theory of society’ and our collective fate. Educationality, in this sense, is the antidote to laziness in thinking – and such a critical antidote, more than anything, was what Foucault’s work amounted to. For now, we simply assert that Foucault’s works are not just contributions to history, sociology or even philosophy – or not just to these disciplines – but are not least ethical exercises; strategic excursions of critical reflection upon what it means or might mean to be undetermined, free, autonomous. This is not such a drastic rereading, however. It does not entail complete repudiation of all the usual themes of power, governmentality and such like, or the absolute segregation of Foucault’s work into ‘early’ and ‘late’ periods and so on. It merely involves reframing familiar themes into another conceptual box – that of ethics: a box which of course is available to us, in any case, since Foucault did specifically invoke the notion of ethics himself, and – indeed – especially in his later work. Nor should the successive terms that Foucault uses – discourse, power, aesthetics, ethics – be automatically opposed to or contrasted with each other. Where Adorno’s concepts all seem to have deliberately paradoxical relations with each other, Foucault’s all appear to fold into each other. For example, we might possibly consider, as other writers have done, the extent to which Foucault does in his later work appear to oppose something to power – this 7 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1979).

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being not least aesthetics. But actually it might be better to say that aesthetics is not really the opposite of power in Foucault’s thought at all but is, rather, an alternative form of power: what the philosopher Heidegger termed, after Nietzsche, the will to power as art. But to see this we need to consider a little further the phenomenon of power, before turning to aesthetics and art and how these impact on questions of culture, subjectivity and the self. Power In commentaries on Foucault’s work, two things are often confused with each other – power and discipline. We are, says Foucault, in the disciplinary society. Consult Discipline and Punish, Foucault’s famous genealogy of the prison. There is a carceral archipelago spreading its tentacles across modern, supposedly liberal societies. We leave aside debates over Foucault’s implicit periodisation here (is the disciplinary society still with us?). More basic is the observation that the disciplinary society is not straightforwardly a negative phenomenon at all. There is something productive about discipline. Foucault’s work on power sits, in fact, uneasily within that dichotomy of power-to (positive) and power-over (negative) – or that between ‘constitutive’ power and domination – that is familiar to social and political theory.8 For Foucault, power-over itself entails power-to. It is not a zero-sum game between them. Take the example of military discipline. A soldiery without discipline is an unregulated mass; a disciplined military unit is a productive, composite body. Discipline confers power. The ‘docile body’ of the well-drilled soldier ‘may be subjected, used, transformed and improved’, not only representing power-over the soldier in question, but an enhancement of his own powers, a form of power-to.9 This ‘productive’ understanding of disciplinary power follows, in fact, from Foucault’s understanding of the notion of power more generally. As he said in a much-quoted interview, power itself is productive.10 This does not mean that we have to like power but, rather, that we can not a priori be for or against it. It opts for us to be almost empiricist about power; not ‘theorising’ it as such – and 8 S. Lukes, ed., Power (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 2–3. 9 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 136. 10 M. Foucault, ‘Truth and power’, trans. C. Gordon in Essential Works: power (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002), p. 120.

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Foucault was hardly a ‘theorist’, in the usual sense, either of power or of anything else – but following it in its actuality, according to what he once called the logic of a ‘nominalist reduction’. So power is not necessarily a bad thing any more than it is necessarily a good thing. Which does not, in turn, mean that we should become sanguine about power. Far from it. But the oft-quoted Foucauldian slogan that power is everywhere should perhaps have been reformulated to capture, rather, the idea that power is anywhere. Power is not just the sovereign or the State. Power is also psychiatry, medicine, criminology, social work; it is ‘in’ our bodies, and the practices we direct towards ourselves. In this sense, the power-is-everywhere slogan (if that is what it is) does not direct us towards a particular theory of power, but is merely suggestive of how and where we might look for power. If anything, it is an empiricist slogan rather than a theoreticist one. But there is a little more even to the theme of discipline than this. There is an aspect to it that is very typical of Foucault’s emphases, given that he was by background a historian and philosopher of the sciences. For discipline is concerned not simply with the regulation of the body but, likewise, with the production and regulation of truth. A disciplinary society is not referable simply to the sociological cliché of the relentless rationalisation of the world. What is important about disciplinary power is rather that, as a kind of mechanism, it gives us recourse to a particular way of stylising the link between subjectivity and the idea of truth. That is the key term here – subjectivity. A disciplinary society is one that is governed not so much by the rationalisation of the law or by totalitarian power as by the idea of the norm.11 Discipline produces normal subjects. This notion of normality is stranger than we might think, which is presumably why Foucault thinks we need a genealogy of it in the first place. Take for instance the idea of dangerousness, analysed by Foucault in an article, the English version of which appeared originally in the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry in 1978.12 Here he documents the eclipse of a view of criminal infrac11 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 184; cf. G. Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (1966) (New York: Zone Books, 1989), pp. 237–56, and M. Foucault, Abnormal, trans. G. Burchell (London: Verso, 2003). Cf. for a different emphasis F. Ewald, ‘Norms, discipline and the law’, in R. Post, Law and the Order of Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 12 M. Foucault, ‘About the concept of the dangerous individual’, now in Foucault, Essential Works: power, pp. 176–200.

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tion based simply on a relation between the law and the deed, and the rise of an emphasis – at least in practice if not in formal ideology – upon the person of criminals themselves, their normality, their individuality. The normal person is not the average person but the individual person. As with what is perhaps Foucault’s finest study, The Birth of the Clinic, what emerges here is not the individual as uniform cipher but the individual as singularity, as a ‘case’.13 The production of the idea – and technology – of the case is one way in which truth serves power in our modern, apparently liberalised societies. It is a chapter in the history of subjectivity and its relations with truth. Foucault’s vision of modern society is not that of the totally administered individual where the idea of individuality is only ideological. It is that of a society, precisely, of the individuation of individuals, not least on the basis of the truths of what is known about those individuals. So modern subjectivity is oriented to the normal and tied to questions of truth. How do we escape, or at least think ourselves ‘outside’ such a situation? Not, clearly, by accentuating our eccentricities. To be eccentric is not to be abnormal.14 Even wild individualists and eccentrics are not exactly abnormal, only perhaps interesting (and, equally often, just boring) – for what is normal may not be absolute but can be subject to variation. Even the so-called abnormals are only such in so far as they have been seized upon by the gaze of power; perceived, catalogued, ‘cured’ even.15 Perverts or child abusers are ‘abnormal’ but, on the one hand, bear a relation to the normal (from which they differ and to which they might be returned) and, on the other, in so far as they are classifiable and understood, are, in their own way, quite ‘normal’; classifiable as a particular kind of deviant. In a sense, then, there is no such thing as the normal. Rather normality has to be produced; it is a function of power. One thinks here, quite unsurprisingly, of the Nietzsche of On the Genealogy of Morality, a book which is of course hardly unrelated to Discipline and Punish, and which famously attempted to show how modern morality was produced. Yet there are differences from Nietzsche as well. The ambience of culturology is hardly absent from 13 M. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, trans. A. Sheridan-Smith (London: Tavistock, 1973). Cf. T. Osborne, ‘Medicine and epistemology: Michel Foucault’s archaeology of clinical reason’, History of the Human Sciences, 5:2 (1992), pp. 63–93. 14 Cf. Hacking, ‘Making up people’. 15 Foucault, Abnormal.

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On the Genealogy of Morality.16 Yet Discipline and Punish is not, for one thing, a general theory of culture: as already noted, if there is ‘culture’ in Foucault, it is not of the generalist, epochal, ‘culturalist’ sort that is even to be found on occasion in the culturologist Nietzsche. And in some ways Foucault’s perspective even reverses Nietzsche. Foucault’s idea, after all, is not that we need, morally, to be beyond good and evil but rather that the disciplines have made us so in any case; and that there may be even some negative consequences to this. Nowadays, the criminal is abnormal (or rather, less than normal – lapsed, recidivist) rather than bad as such. Dare one say that there is even a certain nostalgia for the idea of plain, downright badness in Foucault’s thinking? Creative singularity In any case, Foucault appears to be constantly on the search for indicators of experiences of subjectivity that are outside the established bandwidths of normality and abnormality too: experiences of, for want of a better term, something like ex-normality. It is as if he wants more just to register or exhibit these than straightforwardly endorse them in the manner of a so-called philosopher of ‘transgression’. The ex-normal is truly singular: it is outside. It is creative singularity. In that sense it has an aesthetic significance – as the philosopher Kant said of the aesthetic; it is that which cannot be subsumed under a rule. In its most banal formulation, the aesthetic is the outside, the singular, the autonomous, the creative. Foucault possessed a knack for finding this sort of thing in the most apparently mundane – certainly least obviously ‘aesthetic’ – of places. A text such as ‘The lives of infamous men’, much admired by Deleuze, bears this out well.17 Foucault focuses here upon narratives of apparently inexplicable depravity as recounted in various legal and official documents. His ‘infamous men’ are those who have found themselves suddenly illuminated by the spotlight of power. Would it be a mistake to say that this is a question of aesthetics? Not so long as we give the notion of the aesthetic a wide definition. The subjects of these accounts have both a sort of singularity and an exemplarity 16 See F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), trans. M. Clark & A. Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998). 17 M. Foucault, ‘The lives of infamous men’, trans. P. Patton, in Power, Truth, Strategy (Sydney: Feral Publications, 1979).

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to them. They are if anything images of autonomy: standing outside any attempt to seize or reduce them to straightforward functions of knowledge or power even though the forces of power are drawn to them precisely for this reason (an indeterminacy that the disciplines of psychology and psychiatry will find entirely useful to their purposes). But they remain as, so to speak, beacons of – certainly, diabolic – creativity, lying outside any recognisable norm. This aestheticism – if that is what it is – is not, anyway, a romanticism of infamy on Foucault’s part (something for which Foucault’s work has been taken wrongly to task by some so-called commentators). Rather it is to treat infamy for what it is. As something that breaks in, unawares, from the outside. It also discloses some perhaps rather wishful but none the less honourable thinking, on Foucault’s part, just to leave it at that – as infamy, as the outside. Let us not dwell on matters of infamy or the abnormal. The point is simply to observe what should anyway be obvious: that the question of aesthetics in Foucault’s work, even in this protean form, is part of a wider concern with autonomy – what it is to be outside power – and that the aesthetic, for him, is not typically what we think it is. It is not necessarily ‘art’ or ‘culture’ but creativity in the domain of subjectivity; and creativity, in this sense, is housed in the unlikeliest, sometimes even the most diabolic, of places. Of course Foucault is never interested in such ‘aesthetic’ questions as divorced from actual forms of subjectivity and power. Again, there is no abstract ‘theory’ of the aesthetic in Foucault’s work. Rather, this idea of the aesthetic, in Foucault as elsewhere, is an ethico-critical – almost at times a political – notion: strongly tied to the sense of being undetermined, free, creative; and contrasted against particular forms of power, such as discipline or pastoralism. Aesthetics of existence The only time that the notion of aesthetics does specifically and consistently make an overt appearance in Foucault’s work is with the ethico-critical idea of an ‘aesthetics of existence’, notably with the discussion of the personal sexual ethics of the ancient Greek world in The Use of Pleasure.18 The notion is used by Foucault more or less 18 M. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. R. Hurley (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1985), pp. 89–93. See also M. Huijer, ‘The aesthetics of existence in the work of Michel Foucault’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 25:2 (1999), pp. 61–85.

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as an index of the import of the category of freedom in ancient Greek thought. Those able to cultivate an aesthetic for their own life were deemed free men, even though to accomplish such an aesthetic entailed a work of submission to the values of order, beauty and remembrance. This already tells us something about Foucault’s view of ethics and freedom. Autonomy is not simply the absence of constraint. Rather, it has to be stylised. Not the least of what appears to fascinate Foucault is the extent to which the Greek view of freedom was not, so to speak, emancipatory but ascetic: based upon the elaboration of practices of renunciation and restraint. For the Greeks, the free man was one who deployed his mastery of self in order to overcome enslavement to the mere pleasures of the body. There is a marked Nietzschean echo to this ascetic concern of course. In a well-known aphorism from The Gay Science, Nietzsche emphasised that ‘it is the weak characters without power over themselves that hate the constraint of style’.19 With the Greeks, what was at stake according to Foucault was not a hermeneutics of desire (self-scrutiny, inwardness, confession) nor a ‘codification’ of how one ought to behave (moral codes) but, on the contrary, a stylisation of one’s existence in a broadly aesthetic sense. Note the extent to which this is an ‘ethical’ understanding of aesthetics, something which characterises all of Foucault’s approach to these issues. As such, aesthetics of existence are distinguishable from two alternative forms of regulating or shaping subjectivity – those based on moral codes and those based on forms of knowledge.20 Aesthetic forms of ethical work are different from those of the morality system or the codification of morals. In antiquity, in contrast to the world of early Christianity, it was not a question of the fabrication of identity through moral codes but rather an ethical fabrication of existence by aesthetic means: This elaboration of one’s own life as a personal work of art, even if it obeyed collective canons, was at the centre, it seems to me, of moral experience, of the moral will, in Antiquity; whereas in Christianity, with the religion of the text, the idea of God’s will and the principle of obedience, morality took much more the form of a

19 F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp. 232–3. 20 Foucault, Use of Pleasure, p. 93.

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Of course, a specific moral code is not the same thing as morality in general. Foucault was unhappy with the idea of a moral code as the basis of our understanding of morality and sometimes he seemed to be contrasting it with ethics.22 But, nevertheless, his aesthetics is clearly a question, in a wide sense, of a morality: not however a restrictive and renunciatory moral codification so much as an ethical stylisation. That is, not something which comes, so to speak, law-like from outside but which is generated on the basis of reflexive relations of the self with itself. It is senseless to argue over whether Foucault approves or disapproves of these Greek forms of subjectivation; and equally senseless to criticise his supposed value-neutrality on the matter.23 It is not about value-neutrality but about the ethical, critical work of distanciation. It is that Foucault sees something in Greek practices of subjectivity that distances us from forms of subjectivity that he is undoubtedly wary of. Contrast, then, the idea of an aesthetics of existence with forms of subjectivity in Christianity, which make us subjects on the basis of our sense of inwardness and guilt. Christians have to confess their sins.24 Foucault is not arguing, assuredly, that the Greeks are better than the Christians, but only showing us that there are other ways of linking truth to subjectivity than the moral technology of confession. What counted in Greek antiquity was not the morality of Christian interiority but something glittering and at the surface. Christianity then comes to seem the anomaly or at least something from which it is possible to escape: In the Christian morality of sexual behaviour, the ethical substance was to be defined not by . . . a domain of desires that lie hidden among the mysteries of the heart, and by a set of acts that are carefully specified as to their form and their conditions. Subjection was to take the form not of a savoir-faire, but of a recognition of the law and an obedience to pastoral authority. Hence the ethical subject was characterized not so

21 M. Foucault, ‘An aesthetics of existence’ (1984), trans. J. Johnston, in Foucault Live (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989). 22 M. Foucault, ‘On the genealogy of ethics’ (1983), in Essential Works: ethics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997). Cf. Deleuze, Foucault, trans. S. Hand (London: Athlone, 1988). 23 T. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 384–95. 24 Foucault, Abnormal, pp. 167–99.

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much by the perfect rule of the self by the self in the exercise of a virile type of activity, as by self-renunciation and a purity whose model was to be sought in virginity.25

The idea is not that anyone should give up being Christian and become Greek, but to suggest that the idea of an aesthetic of existence has, at least, some contemporary pertinence in that we have again reached a stage in our ethical history without the predominance of overriding moral norms or decisive systems of knowledge: a stage in which the elaboration of an aesthetics of existence might once again be apposite: And if I have taken an interest in Antiquity, it is because for a whole series of reasons, the idea of a morality as obedience to a code of rules is now disappearing, has already disappeared. To this absence of a morality, one responds, or must respond, with a research which is that of an aesthetics of existence.26

Relevance So we should not necessarily become like the Greeks, but it is enlightening to refer to them. Not that Foucault has any particular, updated, alternative to offer. He explains the relevance of the idea of an aesthetics of existence but he does not tell us what contemporary form it might take. That there is no normative prescription emergent from Foucault’s work here – he does not tell us what we should actually do, or what normative stance we should actually adopt – should not be at all surprising. The vast literature on Foucault that has criticised him for his supposed normative confusions and his apparently selfdefeating notions of power and freedom has missed the point by applying inappropriate principles of reading. For Foucault to be normative on this score would in fact be a contradiction in terms. His stance on this point is quite in keeping with the notion of an aesthetics of existence itself. To provide a theory of an aesthetics of existence would be to contradict the idea itself. For one cannot specify the nature of an aesthetic of existence in advance of practising it, any more than actual aesthetic norms and practices are determined by theories of the beautiful or the sublime. This, then, is Foucault the educationalist. He is not a pedagogue, telling anyone what to do, but an educator, offering us examples, not 25 Foucault, Use of Pleasure, p. 92. 26 Foucault, ‘An aesthetics of existence’, p. 311.

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putting forward theories. Examples provide contrasts, distancing, ways of escape: means of escaping from the bonds of certain practical understandings of the idea of the self, for instance. And precisely what seems to have most interested Foucault here was that the aesthetics of existence in the Greek world was not based on anything that could meaningfully be called the soul or the self.27 That comes to culminate in Christianity: it first appears in the later Roman world with writers such as Epictetus and Seneca with the injunction that one takes care of oneself.28 As Foucault’s research shows, the notion of the self – in the later sense – was not there with the Greeks at all. Rather, what is at stake is an aestheticisation of life. ‘The idea of a bios as a material for an aesthetic piece of art is something which fascinates me.’29 Foucault tells us that he is thinking here of the techne ton biou of classical antiquity, a techne not exactly of the self as such, that is as interiority, but of existence, life. There is a Nietzschean echo to this. It is a question not of devoting one’s life to art in the narrow sense but of creating, one might say, a singular art for one’s life. Here we have, rather, a sort of subjectivation without the self. One cannot ‘theorise’ the self. It is a construct. There can always be other ways of doing subjectivity and selfhood. Why, then, this laborious interest in such a nominalist historicism of the self and its analogues? For ethical reasons of course. Because Foucault was, on his own account, fascinated by the idea that one could posit an art of existence without recourse to any determinate epistemic or moral category or theory of the self. How to be autonomous, even from the idea of selfhood . . . It was a question of creativity in the realm of self-culture, of ethics. For Sartre, there had been a notion of an authentic self. For Foucault the self has to be created. ‘From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art . . . [W]e should not have to refer the creative activity of somebody to the kind of relation he has to himself, but should relate the kind of relation one has to oneself to a creative activity.’30 Greek antiquity – with its model of freedom based on slavery – is neither the model nor the ‘source’, nor even the condition of possi27 Foucault, ‘On the genealogy of ethics’, p. 260. 28 See M. Foucault, The Care of the Self, trans. R. Hurley (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1986). 29 Foucault, ‘On the genealogy of ethics’, p. 260. 30 Ibid., p. 262.

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bility of such a notion of creativity. It is an example: something to pull from the archive to indicate, so to speak, that it could be done, or that things have been and so might be otherwise; a matter of showing, of exhibiting, the extent to which human capabilities are conditioned in ways such that human capacities can themselves be moulded in particular, historically variable, forms. What can be moulded can be remoulded otherwise – that is the ethical point. Foucault’s critical outlook, then, has to do more with disclosure than legislation: not to promote the existence of particular things so much as to ‘un-conceal’ without ahistorically ‘disembedding’ the appearance of particular forms of subjectivity; to disclose the potentialities for difference that reside in history – which means, in turn, that nominalist historicism is itself as much a matter of ethico-critical as of epistemic work. Truthfulness and ressentiment So much for the contrast of aesthetics with moral forms of codification. As for relations of knowledge, as one would expect, the Greek idea of an aesthetic model of existence is related to a certain understanding of truth, or what Bernard Williams labelled ‘truthfulness’ – an understanding according to which subjects owe themselves the duty to speak truly of themselves, albeit not necessarily in ‘confessional’ mode.31 This elaboration of the self is something that is not meant to be based on a scientific knowledge any more than it is concerned with a practice of a denial of the self. Rather, its aesthetic character is given by its resistance to conceptualisation; or, rather, it is a domain where concepts are, as it were, indeterminate. So, unlike the modern era where, in Foucault’s view, the truth of the self is most usually given through a discourse of desire centred upon a psychological or a psychoanalytic style of knowledge, the Greek aesthetics of existence repudiates altogether the grounding of one’s life in epistemological form. ‘The relation to truth was a structural, instrumental, and ontological condition for establishing the individual as a moderate subject leading a life of moderation; it was not an epistemological condition enabling the individual to recognize himself in his singularity as a desiring subject and to purify himself of the desire that was thus brought to light.’32 31 B. Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 32 Foucault, Use of Pleasure, p. 89.

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The aesthetics of existence is, in other words, aside from being a concept designed to capture an historical reality also an ethico-critical, reflexive notion that serves to distance ourselves from all those modern injunctions that we should seek the truth of ourselves once and for all in determinate forms of ‘scientific’, therapeutic or positive knowledge and then act or base our sense of identity on the basis of that truth. It is ethical rather than only epistemic. Foucault was rather scathing about the so-called Californian cult of the self, for instance. Here the problem is that ‘most of the people think if they do what they do, if they live as they live, the reason is that they know the truth about desire, life, nature, the body, and so on’.33 The ethics of aesthetics, on the other hand, should be its own yardstick, regardless of the so-called sciences of the self. This, no doubt, sounds very Nietzschean. Create yourself through style; give style to your character. And certainly there is a Nietzschean echo here; above all in the idea that ethical work is not just a fixed end-in-itself – or is whatever the ‘psychologists’ tell us that it should be – but is a process of self-transformation. Foucault says of his own work on this point: ‘For me intellectual work is related to what you could call aestheticism, meaning transforming yourself . . . This transformation of oneself by one’s own knowledge is, I think, rather close to the aesthetic experience. Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting?’34 But whereas Foucault emphasised ethico-critical transformation, Nietzsche emphasised greatness of style. Foucault, one imagines, was not nearly so interested in greatness as Nietzsche. But if greatness is understood as giving singularity to oneself in the form of a style of life, then perhaps Foucault would have concurred with the Nietzschean emphasis. Giving style to one’s character ‘is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye’.35 Creativity and constraint are linked.36 But there also appears to be an ethical aim here in so far as the notion of an aesthetic of existence serves as a

33 Foucault, ‘On the genealogy of ethics’, pp. 261–2. 34 M. Foucault, ‘The minimalist self’, in L. Kritzman, ed., Michel Foucault: politics, philosophy, culture (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 14. 35 Nietzsche, Gay Science, p. 232. 36 See the marvellous account of this in J. Elster, Ulysses Unbound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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weapon capable of being wielded against the forces that trouble equally Foucault and Nietzsche – the forces, that is, of ressentiment. Bitterness, the desire for revenge – wallowing in one’s own given subjectivity: that is ressentiment. In this sense, Foucault and Nietzsche are motivated by existential – educational – as well as ‘theoretical’ or epistemic interests. For each, the idea of an aesthetic of existence refers to a sort of spiritual exercise according to which one would learn never to despise oneself: and this – ultimately – appears even to have a political provenance. ‘Whoever is dissatisfied with himself’, wrote Nietzsche, ‘is continually ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight.’37 Autonomy is better for everyone. There is another aesthetic discourse in Nietzsche – that relating to the artist. The artist is not susceptible to the plague of ressentiment and that is a good thing. For Nietzsche, then, the artist is one of the higher beings. Not so for Foucault, although in his early work there was a certain romanticism of the madness of artists such as Van Gogh, Nerval or Artaud that has links, perhaps, to the Nietzschean problematic. But, all in all, Foucault was not interested in ‘art’ as such so much as in creativity, at least in the domain of ethics. Let us pursue this thought further. Art and creativity It is not to deny that Foucault himself was passionate about art. Some of his early writings touch quite fundamentally upon aesthetic – especially literary – questions.38 Later in life, he reportedly burned the manuscript of a book on Manet. Earlier, he had published a book about the writer Raymond Roussel, and another – very short – about René Magritte.39 But, arguably, neither of these published books is really about art as such. They are rather works about the nature of representation. If the artworld itself is in itself of any import, for Foucault, it is, perhaps more by way of analogy: in so far as it is there that our creative powers are housed in – to sound very unlike Foucault – their most unmediated form. The sphere of art becomes a kind of

37 Nietzsche, Gay Science, p. 233. 38 See the essays collected in the first part of Foucault, Essential Works: aesthetics. 39 See M. Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, trans. C. Ruas (New York: Doubleday, 1984), and M. Foucault, This Is not a Pipe (1973), trans. J. Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

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ethical analogue of the creativity of subjectivity itself. Foucault says, for example: why can we not think of a life as a work of art? ‘Why should the lamp or house be an object of art but not our life?’40 This is not an aestheticist recommendation. It is not, anyway, the aestheticism that holds that anything at all can qualify as a work of art. That, perhaps, would indeed bring Foucault close to postmodernism. But we ought to insist that Foucault is absolutely not a postmodernist on this question. What is specific to art is the discipline of shaping something. It is art more in the sense of an elaborated craft, and related too to the sense of a techne: a work, a form even of asceticism. Not just anything is art. In Foucault’s work, the phenomenon of art is generalised beyond the so-called ‘aesthetic sphere’ certainly, but that does not mean that art becomes applicable to just about everything. Not at all. No doubt, Foucault’s own version of the problematic of aesthetics and creativity has recognisable affiliations with Heidegger’s account of the Nietzschean ‘will to power as art’. But we should not be misled about this. Here, certainly, it is more than just the ‘sphere’ of art itself which is at stake. Or at least art, in this sense, has a very general meaning; it denotes the will to creativity itself, the creation of oneself, the fabrication of one’s own autonomy or – better – the concrete shaping of freedom. So art is not restricted to the ‘sphere’ of art, but it is restricted by being ultimately ethical. Art is the generalised principle of self-creation. This is how Heidegger glosses Nietzsche: ‘According to the expanded concept of artist, art is the basic occurrence of all beings; to the extent that they are, beings are self-creating, created . . . Art, thought in the broadest sense as the creative, constitutes the basic character of beings.’41 This minimally Heideggerian concern with the question of creativity was no doubt fundamental to Foucault’s later thought. It is played out in various different fields, and is no doubt the reason why, so to speak, ‘terms of art’ became so prominent in his later work. Just think of the range of terminology. We have, aside from the notion of ‘aesthetics of existence’, more generally the idea of ‘arts of existence’ or techniques of the self: ‘those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to 40 Foucault, ‘On the genealogy of ethics’, p. 261. 41 M. Heidegger, Nietzsche: volume 1: The will to power as art, trans. D. Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1981), p. 72; cf. Foucault, ‘A propos de la généalogie de l’éthique’ (1983), in Dits et Ecrits, IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp. 629–30. See also A. Milchman & A. Roser, Foucault and Heidegger: critical encounters (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

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transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria’.42 Also, at roughly the same period Foucault begins to invoke ‘arts of government’. Here, even more overtly than in the senses already discussed, aesthetic ideals tie in with matters of ethics and politics. We turn to such matters in due course. For now, let us only note that if aesthetic ideals become ethically interesting for Foucault, this does not mean that artists are higher beings or that the model of the artist should itself be our ethical model, as it came to be for Nietzsche. Invoking the idea of an aesthetics of existence does not entail any injunction to live what would be commonly seen as an artistic life; the life, for instance, of the Bohemian, the connoisseur or aesthete, and so on. The most that can be said is that, without valorising the artist in any way remotely approaching Nietzsche’s sense, Foucault does think that the idea of the ‘artistic life’ has been of some interesting, ethical and even, broadly speaking, political import. Again, it is about distantiation. The artist, at most, embodies the example – and only that – of a counter-power to other forms of power. To see how and why, we turn now to the themes of pastoral power and bio-power, then to consider the importance of the theme of asceticism in Foucault’s ethical writings. Pastoralism, bio-power and the artistic life For Foucault, one of the most ‘demonic’ innovations of the modern era in Western societies is that of the invention of bio-power. This – putting things rather too simply – was built on the back of something else, pastoral power. The object of both, really, is life itself: power over life.43 Pastoral power predates our modernity. It is, genealogically speaking, a Christian phenomenon. In a well-known pair of lectures, Foucault sketched the ways in which Christianity modified the Hebraic notion of the pastorate and then welded this conception on to the Greek notion of citizenship.44 The Christian pastorate was a form of knowledge and conduct that mutated into a form of power – our modern ‘political rationality’ of the State – that is both individu42 Foucault, Use of Pleasure, pp. 10–11. 43 M. Foucault, ‘“Omnes et singulatim”: towards a critique of political reason’, in Essential Works: power, and M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: volume 1, trans. R. Hurley (London: Allen Lane, 1978), pp. 135–59. 44 Foucault, ‘“Omnes et singulatim”’, pp. 298–325.

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alising and in a sense totalitarian, a government of all and of each. Its object is at once the life of the population itself and the lives of each of us as individuals. Cue bio-power per se. Bio-power is, as the label suggests, a power over life rather than death: a power that administers life, especially collective life. Here Foucault puts forward some big claims about modernity: that the emergence of bio-power in the early modern period ‘was nothing less than the entry of life into history’.45 For our more restricted purposes here, the point is that the development in modernity of such a form of power, centred precisely on the administration of forces of life in a population, served to undermine or discredit the idea that life itself might be the object of an art. Life instead became a matter of government, or what Foucault was later to call ‘governmentality’. From pastoralism to bio-power, life has become amenable to management. Hence cue, now, aesthetics of existence and their (albeit sparse) latter-day progeny. For Foucault insists that the idea of an aesthetics of existence in the modern world – as it reappeared after antiquity in the European Renaissance – functions as a kind of implicit, if fragmented and periodic, affront to the pastoral power over life that had been developing in the Christian Middle Ages.46 Later, from the end of the eighteenth century, the notion of the ‘life of the artist’ took on a certain importance as against bio-power and the ideologies of ‘interest’ and egoism that were characteristic of bourgeois technologies of the self. Here, then, aesthetic selfhood of a certain sort is itself a kind of resistance. There is a clear sense in Foucault’s comments on this that this is somehow a ‘lost’ ethos of thought and practice, and one possibly worth resurrecting, albeit in our own way: We have hardly any remnant in our society that the principal work of art which one must take care of, the main area to which one must apply aesthetic values is oneself, one’s life, one’s existence. We find this in the Renaissance, but in a slightly academic form, and yet again in nineteenth-century dandyism, but those were only episodes.47

45 Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 141. 46 Foucault, ‘A propos de la généalogie de l’éthique’, pp. 629–30. 47 Foucault, ‘On the genealogy of ethics’, p. 271. Cf., for a rather different perspective on this, P. Bourdieu, ‘L’invention de la vie d’artiste’, Actes des Recherches en Sciences Sociales, 2 (1975), pp. 67–93.

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So a minor theme, then, but a theme none the less. But – dandyism as resistance? Is that not stretching things a little? In fact, the question of dandyism is important in that it makes something of an appearance in one of Foucault’s most celebrated late essays, one which has already been under some discussion in this book – the essay ‘What is enlightenment?’ – in the context of the discussion of the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire. This, anyway, suggests that dandyism as a concept did have some general ethico-critical importance for Foucault. Now, Foucault was not entirely stupid. He was no doubt perfectly aware of the provenance of the issue of modernity and modernism in the writings of Baudelaire as this had been excavated by Walter Benjamin.48 But he took Baudelaire in a different direction from Benjamin. For Benjamin the key to Baudelaire’s link to modernity was the famous flâneur, so beloved of postmodernism. Now, the dandy is not, as Foucault points out, the same thing as a flâneur. The dandy is an ascetic figure. ‘To be modern is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing moments; it is to take oneself as object of a complex and difficult elaboration in what Baudelaire, in the vocabulary of his day, calls dandysme.’49 Asceticism here implies not so much self-denunciation as the shaping and transformation of the self, according to a ‘complex and difficult elaboration’. And that, for Baudelaire, is the essence of modernity; not our liberation but our creativity, our self-invention. ‘Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself.’50 It seems fair to suppose that this is a Foucauldian interest as well as just a gloss of a Baudelarian one and that the challenge – of ‘modern man’ – is indeed one of inventiveness; the creative project of knowing how to invent oneself (whether that is an individual or a collectivity) in one’s own way. As such, Foucault’s position is also, in effect – in, so to speak, backing Baudelaire in this way – an endorsement of modernism. And it is more an ethical than a sociological or historical view of modernity. As Foucault insists, this is modernity not as a particular period in history but as an ethos, or ‘atti-

48 W. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: a lyric poet in the era of high capitalism, trans. H. Zohn (London: Verso, 1983); cited by Foucault, Use of Pleasure, p. 11. 49 M. Foucault, ‘What is enlightenment?’ (1984), in Essential Works: ethics, p. 311. 50 Ibid., p. 312.

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tude’. But, as such, it is an ascetic attitude, and that is not the least of what is specific, and so interesting, about it. Asceticism The social sciences have not exactly given a good press to asceticism in relation to the advent of modernity. In the early years of the twentieth century, Max Weber famously attributed the ‘iron cage’ of modern capitalism and bureaucracy to the ascetic tendencies of early Protestantism.51 Radical Protestantism was a peculiar animal in that unlike other forms of asceticism in history it was, expressing this in Weber’s terms, worldly rather than otherworldly: giving value to activities in the everyday conduct of work as opposed to transcendental ideals. For Weber, there was a tragic irony here. With the eclipse of religious values we have been left with the sediment of Protestant asceticism itself but without the value-system that fuelled it. As Weber puts it, the Protestant chose to live according to his calling, yet we are compelled to do so.52 The result is the miserable, boring iron cage and so on. It is not that Foucault in any way refutes Weber’s thesis. Of course not. He barely even addresses it.53 What he does instead is to associate asceticism with worldly activities but in a different – one might say, more sanguine, nominalist – way from Weber’s emphasis. In fact, it is probably the case that Foucault regarded asceticism as a basic component of human freedom, whether amongst the ancient Greeks or in the figure of the modernist dandy. As for the Greeks, the asceticism of those in the ancient world who practised an aesthetics of existence was, of course, worldly – albeit not tied to the world of work, but tied, instead, to an ethical elaboration that was simultaneously political, a matter indeed of ‘government’.54 The aesthetics of existence was a form of self-elaboration deemed appropriate for those who, in command of their own selves, might govern others. And what was practised was not only self-denial, self-command, but a certain kind of freedom, a shaping of the will: a positive asceticism, then, one which was a condition for the ancient elaboration of freedom. For Foucault, the notion of ethics 51 M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–5), trans. T. Parsons (London: Routledge, 1992). 52 Ibid., p. 181. 53 See, however, Foucault, History of Sexuality, pp. 141–2. 54 Foucault, Use of Pleasure.

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was itself very closely tied to this ideal of an ascetic elaboration of freedom. ‘Yes, for what is ethics if not the practice of freedom, the conscious practice of freedom?’55 Creative ethics Where might we look for these kinds of principle today? The dandy, as already noted, is one personage who inherits this mantle of an ascetic practice of freedom – and under modern conditions, and no doubt there are others. But what might be actually mean by modernism in this context? To begin with, modernism, as we have seen, is a matter of ethics, of ethos – what Foucault glosses, in relation to Baudelaire, as the ‘attitude’ of modernity. It is not a resistance to the present but an attempt to grasp its ‘heroic’ aspect. Then again, the attitude of modernism entails a certain element of transfiguration: the bringing of an ethic of freedom to bear against the apparent necessities of the world. ‘For the attitude of modernity, the high value of the present is indissociable from a desperate eagerness to imagine it, to imagine it otherwise than it is, and to transform it not be destroying it but by grasping it in what it is.’56 If the dandy is important here it is not because Foucault is somehow exhorting us to dress up in camp, elaborate clothes but because it is in the figure of the dandy that this notion of transfiguration is captured at the level of modern subjectivity, as exemplary of the modern task of producing oneself.57 Dandyism is subjectivation under the conditions of modernity. Now, what could be more singularistic than the dandy? But there is no reason why subjectivation should not take a collective form. The invocation of an ethic of aesthetics in Foucault has a public edge and is not a form of retreatism into the private sphere. It is not – or not necessarily – a question of withdrawing into the self and of retreating from the world but rather a question of the stylisation of the variegated elements of one’s life. These elements can presumably be quite open-ended, and would certainly include what broadly speaking could be called one’s political life – that is, in so far as any aesthetic of existence which took as its concern how one governed oneself would 55 M. Foucault, ‘The ethics of the concern for the self as a practice of freedom’, trans. P. Aranov & D. McGrawth, in Essential Works: ethics, p. 284. 56 Foucault, ‘What is enlightenment?’, p. 311. 57 Ibid., p. 312.

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necessarily have to make contact with the question of one’s relation to how one was oneself governed by others or, likewise, how one oneself governed others. For instance, an aesthetic of existence does not imply necessarily what one might describe as a self-indulgent form of existence. Whereas for, say, Seneca the problem might have been to take care of oneself, for a Greek citizen of the fourth or fifth century the idea of a techne for life was about taking care of the city, of one’s companions.58 In short, there is no reason why questions of aesthetic morale should not map on to questions of social and public life, political ethics, the conduct of intellectual life and so on. Collectivities can themselves be singularities. Workers, women, minorities of various kinds, intellectuals even – all can be agents of collective stylisation against the ‘programming’ tendencies of contemporary forms of power.59 Perhaps because of his own background the modern gay movement, at least in some of its forms, best represents one further, more contemporary, example of a power of collective subjectivation ranged, for Foucault, against the powers over life. Not least of what fascinated Foucault about such movements was surely the varied ways in which they stylised a mode of existence for themselves outside of existing – moral or epistemological – norms. Foucault writes that: amongst the Greeks . . . the regulation of sexual comportment did not take the form of a code. Neither a civil law, nor a religious law, nor a ‘natural’ law was used to prescribe what one must or must not do. And if sexual ethics were indeed rigorous, complex and multiple this was in the form, perhaps, of a techne or art – an art of living understood as a care of the self and of its existence.60

Likewise with the present. Foucault resists strongly any idea that there is such a thing as homosexuality in the sense of a biological destiny. Rather homosexuals are faced with the task of producing themselves, no doubt along the lines of an ascetics of freedom, outside both given moral codes and the forms of ‘scientific’ or psychological ‘knowledge’ that are addressed to them. There is, in this sense, actually no such thing as a homosexual. Nor is this even a question of ‘identity’, a theme very prevalent within cultural studies. Rather, homosexuality is something that is produced; it is an object of subjec58 Foucault, ‘On the genealogy of ethics’, p. 260. 59 Cf. for a different but interesting perspective on this issue A. Touraine, Critique of Modernity, trans. D. Macey (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 235–9. 60 M. Foucault, ‘Des caresses des hommes considerées comme un art’, in Dits et Écrits, IV, p. 317.

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tivation – a form of escape rather than an epistemic or moral identification. And as such it is also a form of critique, in the ethical sense; that is, as a critical attitude towards oneself, towards what one is or is interpellated to be. Asceticism is just that, really – not a practice of self-denial but a form of ethico-critique, a means of monitoring oneself, a strategy of self-command. Political ethos The notion of asceticism, then, obviously has a wide range of relevance in Foucault’s work, especially – and most obviously – in relation to ethical practices in antiquity.61 But it is also a theme that can be taken further, even into more conventional understandings of political culture. In his more journalistic and other later writings, Foucault invokes the idea of a progressive politics that would be less a question of a set of doctrines than of a certain ethos, that is, a certain ongoing ethico-critical attitude to the present.62 This would be political ‘enlightenment’, but what does that mean? It seems that this is not provided by the fixed figures of emancipatory humanism or the doctrinal certainties of inevitable progress but through a kind of ever-renewed will to innovation and transformation. In that sense, enlightenment is a matter of understanding the present in the form of a ‘mobile thought’ rather than a static, ‘theoretical’ one.63 The will to political creativity is the theme here; a will to expand possibilities of movement, that is, to invent a permanently mobile political thought; or, as in the concepton of Gilles Deleuze, ‘if oppression is so awful, it is because of how it limits movement, rather than because it violates eternal values’.64 Enlightenment is itself transformation. There is an etymological link between the German term Aufklärung and the idea of a kind of ‘exit’ or ‘way out’.65 Enlightenment, Foucault argues, is not about 61 See especially Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject. 62 See Gordon, ‘Question, ethos, event’. 63 M. Foucault, ‘For an ethic of discomfort’ (1979), trans. R. Hurley, in Essential Works: power, and M. Foucault, ‘Kant on enlightenment and revolution’, trans. C. Gordon, Economy and Society, 15:1 (1986), pp. 88–96, p. 91. Cf. T. Osborne, ‘Critical spirituality’, in S. Ashenden & D. Owen, Foucault Versus Habermas (London: Routledge, 1999) from which some of the ensuing remarks are rather distantly adapted. 64 Deleuze, Negotiations, p. 166. 65 See Foucault, ‘What is enlightenment?’, and Gordon, ‘Question, ethos, event’.

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imposing some kind of fixed anthropological destiny upon humankind but about preserving and creating new kinds of ethical and political movement, possibilities for escape on to other paths. It would be mistaken to think of this as being akin to a postmodern celebration of permanent difference and change. It is rather an emphasis upon both political events and games of government in terms of their singularity rather than their inevitability – both in order to understand them properly and as a constant reminder that government itself is an art that is never given once and for all but is subject to the forces of creative invention, accident, change and transformation. An enlightened politics, on this count, would, then, be less a matter of fidelity to doctrine than of an ethico-critical reimagination of ourselves: ‘The heroism of political identity has had its day. What one is has now become a question one poses, moment by moment, to the problems one encounters. Experiments with . . . rather than engagement in.’66 Integral to this political ethos is a concern with critique: defining this – as we shall note further later in this chapter – in broadly ethical terms, as a kind of virtue.67 In Foucault’s political thinking, the question of government is itself a critical one: it includes the question, how not to be governed? Critique is processual, not given; it is an art: ‘the movement through which the subject gives itself the right to question truth concerning its power effects and to question power about its discourses of truth . . . the art of voluntary inservitude, of reflective indocility’.68 How not to be governed? This is a far more difficult and ambiguous question than it might seem. Foucault’s response runs, really, in two directions, and in ways that has made his own (political) position seem ambiguous and possibly contradictory to some. But the ambiguity lies in the question itself, not in Foucault’s own ‘position’ (whatever that is) with regard to it. It is to Foucault’s credit not exactly to have asked the question himself but to have exposed it as an integral question inherent to the very practice of government. His response takes us, on the one hand, towards a kind of radicalism and, on the other, towards reflection on – but not necessarily adherence to – liberalism and its variants.

66 Foucault, ‘For an ethic of discomfort’, quoted in Gordon, ‘Question, ethos, event’, p. 73. 67 M. Foucault, ‘What is critique?’ (1978), trans. K.P. Geiman, in J. Schmidt, ed., What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-century questions and twentieth-century answers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 68 Ibid., p. 386.

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Resistance The question of how not to be governed is most starkly posed by those ‘outside’ the operations of government itself, by those who resist, by those known usually as radicals, however misleading that term is; since, in truth, self-appointed radicals are typically the very last people to be radicals – and we are not, generally, really sure who the radicals actually are. Take, anyway, and most obviously, the radicalism of revolts and revolutions. They are different things; Foucault, it seems, was more intrigued by revolts. Of course the revolution has traditionally been the desired focus of progressives of various kinds. But what is so great about revolutions? In a discussion of a section devoted to the French Revolution in Kant’s Contest of the Faculties, Foucault argues that what interests Kant is not the act of revolution but that which the revolution signifies for those who are not necessarily active participants within it, namely enthusiasm for progress.69 In short, the revolution itself, as a particular event, is not as significant as its subjective effects, the enthusiasm generated for it; for such enthusiasm signifies a general ethical disposition of humanity towards progress in the form of a desire for a political constitution decided, in Kant’s terms, by the free choice of all and a political constitution which avoids war.70 So ‘the question is not that of determining what part of a Revolution should be retained and set up as a model’ but rather, how are we to shape the enthusiasm for revolution: the enthusiasm, that is, for progress? It is a question, so to speak, of the ethics of progress rather than the morality of the revolution as such. Revolts are different. They are ethico-critical events. They are, so to speak, outbreaks of singularistic, collective autonomy. For Foucault, the revolt is a moment of singularity rather than the culmination of a project or the application of an ideology. The revolt is emblematic, precisely because, in contrast, the idea of revolution is so often held up as the culmination of a series of theoretically comprehensible events and causes. In some senses, the revolt, for Foucault, is ‘outside’ of history; it is a deviation, an event of pure singularity – yet, as such, perhaps it is the very condition of history – in the sense of change, innovation – itself.71 Revolts are always extreme situa-

69 Foucault, ‘Kant on enlightenment and revolution’, pp. 91–3. 70 Ibid., pp. 93–4. 71 See M. Foucault, ‘Useless to revolt?’ (1979), in Essential Works: power.

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tions: when one chooses to risk one’s very life for the sake of a refusal of power. But such refusal, even if the highest price is paid, is never exactly pointless. It is never wholly ‘useless’ to revolt since revolts just do happen, and because the work of revolt discloses a work of ethical self-transformation on the part of those who say ‘no’ to power; it is, as Foucault expressed it, the entry of subjectivity – of subjectivation – whether of the great or of the masses, into history. The revolt, Foucault argues, should be related not to the objective contradictions of a society but only to itself, that is, just to its very existence, the manifestation of a unique, collective will.72 The contention is precisely that one does not necessarily have a ‘reasonable’ reason to revolt; rather, revolt is just a fact consequent upon the exercise of power. The apparent ‘irrationality’ of the revolt might be said to be, for Foucault, conducive to freedom – it has something akin to an aesthetic status; a display of an ascetically modelled, if in this case fervent, freedom. It indicates that freedom is not an end-state of politics; rather that the will to freedom is an existential given consequent upon the universality – which is not to say the totalitarian ubiquity – of power. It can even be argued that there is something very loosely approximating to a theory of ‘right’ in Foucault’s later thinking on this point. Not a theory exactly; more like an ethos of critique. Right as critique. This conception of right, to be sure, is not a humanist one. It is based not on our status as human beings as much as on our status as historical, governed beings. In this sense it is neo-humanist rather than humanist.73 ‘There exists an international citizenship with rights and duties and which can engage with any abuse of power, whatever its author, whatever the victims. After all, we are all governed, and by the light of this, in solidarity.’74 The arts of critique, then, entail not just a denunciatory relation to power and government but a creative, strategic – and, it is tempting to add, politically realist – response to the fact that there is government at all. But what about the arts of government themselves? Can the exercise of government be understood in such terms of critique as well? The answer to this question can usefully go by way of a brief 72 M. Foucault, ‘L’esprit d’un monde sans esprit’ (1979), in Dits et Écrits, IV, p. 74. 73 T. Osborne, ‘What is neo-enlightenment? Human rights culture and juridical reason’, Journal of Human Rights, 2:4 (2003), pp. 523–30. 74 M. Foucault, ‘Face aux gouvernements, les droits de l’homme’, in Dits et Écrits, IV, pp. 807–8.

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discussion of the question of liberalism and neo-liberalism in Foucault’s thought. And after this further detour through politics, we will need to come back to consider the concept of culture. Liberalism as critique Foucault lectured on the subjects of liberalism and neo-liberalism, and there is now a large secondary literature on these topics – certainly far too much to reference in any detail here.75 What is worth noting, for our purposes, is that the fact that Foucault was interested in liberalism and neo-liberalism made him neither a liberal (except possibly in quite a general, that is not a narrowly political or ideological sense) nor (and still less) a neo-liberal; and nor, as it has been argued by some, is it that Foucault – or even more depressingly, some of his ‘followers’ – made the mistake of seeing liberalism everywhere, especially whereas in fact there is, of course, illiberalism and oppression just about everywhere too. Of course. It is a case, instead, of specifying Foucault’s ‘problem’ here; specifying what it was that interested him in liberalism and neo-liberalism. Our brief problematological reflections will lead us to address this in relation to the status of critique in the one, and to political creativity – inventiveness – in the other. These large themes are treated very cursorily here, only so as merely to register the extent to which there is a creative, ethico-critical and even ‘artistic’ aspect to the very idea of what, in Foucault’s thought, it is to govern. It is not so much that government is an aesthetic practice but that it is a matter of techniques, of arts of government. Or rather, perhaps what Foucault’s studies serve to show so well is that this aspect of government used to be integral to it but has been rather obscured by the big cosmopolitical discourses of socialism and ideological politics that succeeded liberalism. The difficulty arises with the advent of the modern State. On several occasions, Foucault invokes the political technology of polizei in early modern Europe; when government becomes, in effect, the 75 Still the best overview is C. Gordon, ‘Governmental rationality – an introduction’, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon & P. Miller, eds, The Foucault Effect (Brighton: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1991). See M. Foucault, Naissance de la Bio-politique (Paris: Gallimard & Seuil, 2004), and M. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, trans. G. Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). And cf. N. Rose, Powers of Freedom: re-framing political thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and M. Dean, Governmentality (London: Sage, 1999).

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object of a quasi-scientific ‘knowledge’.76 The aim of polizei was to make government a science of detail across the entire population. With the requisite knowledge the Prince or ruler, or whoever, could dispose of the functions of State in the optimum way. This entailed an expertise of that elusive entity, the ‘population’. Polizei was, to put things crudely, more a matter of science than art; it sought to bypass the art of rule by making political judgement so far as possible reliant on exact knowledge and methods of government. No one is saying that the notion of polizei was literally exacted in, say, eighteenthcentury Europe, though perhaps its principles did reach something of an ironic, or rather tragic, apotheosis in later models of State socialism. But in any case, as an analytical – but not a historical – contrast, the advent of nineteenth-century models of liberalism can be said to have given more space for the notion of political art by proposing that there are limits to the forms of knowledge of the State embraced by polizei.77 The ‘liberal’ politician operates in a space hollowed out between knowledge of the workings of population and knowledge of the fact that too much governance, so to speak, defeats itself; that the art of politics entails a deft and self-limiting hand. What is interesting about liberalism, then, is its status as a historical example; that – however else we might assess it – it is, even as an art of government, itself a form of critique; one so far as Foucault was concerned, not entirely disanalogous to the Kantian critique of pure reason in philosophy. Liberalism is the critique of totalizing (not necessarily totalitarian) government; of state power, founded on the recognition that one can govern ‘too much’. Integral to this is the idea that in order to function as government the autonomy of processes of population – above all, those tied to the economy – has to be respected; government has to inscribe autonomy into its own workings. So with liberalism, to govern – in so far as it is an art – is, in a sense, to critique government. As such there is, to put it simplistically, something reflexive and thus ethico-critical about liberalism. A space is opened up between the activity of government and its application as knowledge, a space that might be filled, perhaps, by 76 Foucault, ‘“Omnes et singulatim”’, pp. 317–23, and M. Foucault, ‘The political technology of individuals’ (1982) in Essential Works: power, pp. 409–17.See also, F.-L. Kneymeyer, ‘Polizei’, Economy and Society (1980) 9:2, pp. 172–96. 77 See most accessibly on this, Foucault’s own course summary: ‘The birth of biopolitics’, in Essential Works: ethics.

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publicity and the regulated agonisms of politics. Indeed ‘politics’ in its modern – it is almost tempting to say modernist – sense becomes possible. We might say that neo-liberalism deploys autonomy in a different way: it abolishes liberalism’s naturalistic understanding of the population and the economy and seeks out, instead, a constructivism of government. And it does something different with the powers of autonomy and with the idea of politics. For, to express this rather abstractly, a closely regulated autonomy becomes akin to a value that is maximised throughout the system – including, ethically, within conceptions of the agencies of government – rather than attributed to different fields; and politics becomes spread, as it were, likewise throughout the system as a whole and not so restricted to a political sphere as such. Whatever its shortcomings, neo-liberalism arguably entails a new sense of ethical inventiveness in politics: the sense that politics entails a constructivism of possibilities rather than the application of formulae of rule – a sense of inventiveness that likewise might be mirrored, one wonders, in political responses to neo-liberalism and its affiliates. None of this means, to reiterate an earlier point, that Foucault was a liberal or a neo-liberal or that he saw these forms of government sociologically as determinate forms of rule that could be used to characterise particular episodes in recent history. But, then, his ‘problem’ is not straightforwardly epistemic or sociological but is, more than anything, as we have been saying, ethico-critical: it is to draw up the beginnings of a historical inventory of ways in which ethics and politics have been linked, juxtaposed, disavowed, formulated, reformulated, transformed. Culture It should be emphasised that nowhere, of course, does Foucault describe this sort of ethical, critical or political ethos in terms of our own label of cultural theory or even, really, in terms of ‘culture’ at all. If Foucault’s political problematology can be aligned with cultural theory, as understood here, then this is less to do with its object – culture? – as with the ethico-critical style within which it itself is enacted. Invocation of cultural theory in this connection is not, then, to make any tiresome claims about disciplinary boundaries, but only, on the one hand, to register the extent to which Foucault’s sort of project entails something not necessarily opposed to but certainly

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different from the positive or epistemic project of a historical sociology of forms of political domination. This project is concerned, in Foucault’s case, with the conditions of autonomy in the context of historically varied apparatuses for the governing of subjectivity. On the other hand, invocation of the idea of culture can serve to show the extent to which Foucault’s work, here as elsewhere, is driven ultimately by ethical but not normative or moral concerns that finally impact upon what are ultimately political issues to do with the desirability of political creativity, political inventiveness, the constant renewal of our existing arts of government. Of course the sense of ‘ethics’ here is a minimal, ‘thin’ one. Certainly it is not normative in any strong sense. That is usually the way for Foucault. If there is any ‘thicker’ candidate for ethical relevance in his work on this score, we can probably do no better than to return to the theme of critique as a particular kind of virtue. Critical virtue Sometimes, in fact, Foucault’s work is opposed by commentators to critique. And that is right if by critique we mean denunciatory critique or the realist-Marxist notion of uncovering and exposing ideologies. Foucault does not do that sort of thing. But he does do critique in the wider, perhaps basically Kantian, sense; critique as ongoing exploration of the limits of what we can know, which is to say critique as reflexive and ultimately ethical work. But how does Foucault actually define critique? He does so ethically, as a kind of intellectual work upon the self. Critique is an invention not a mental capacity: it dates from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with the ‘governmentalisation’ of the European West. Critique is not just an intellectual operation. It is an ‘attitude’ rather than simply the warding off of errors.78 Critique, in this sense, does not always know what it thinks; it does not speak from a necessarily given ‘position’. Critique as a kind of ethical virtue, then, refers not least to our attentiveness over the ways in which we are governed and through which we govern ourselves. Critique is not about liberation; rather it is a question of a ‘limit-attitude’.79 It is really a form of intellectual asceticism: not an epistemic position but more like an ethical work that one performs upon oneself and the limits of one’s intellectual capacities. Hence the project 78 Foucault, ‘What is critique?’, p. 383. 79 Foucault, ‘What is enlightenment?’, p. 315.

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of a critical ontology of ourselves: to ‘experiment with the possibility of ‘going beyond’ the limits imposed upon us. Hence, too, the close connection to nominalism: not as a given epistemological position but as an aspect of this ethico-critical attitude. At the beginning of this chapter it was claimed that Foucault’s nominalism was neither epistemic nor even dialectical or dynamic but more a specifically ethical kind nominalism.80 It is not a standpoint – epistemic, moral, or methodological even – but a form of ethico-critical work, aimed at the practical task not of making the ‘world well lost’ or exploring the interaction between the world and our concepts of the world, but at freeing ourselves so far as is possible from the forces that govern us. Recalling Adorno, and using entirely inappropriate terminology, we could even say that Foucault’s nominalism is an exercise in de-reification, or – better – de-subjectification. Critique, Foucault says, ‘is the movement through which the subject gives itself the right to question truth concerning its power effects and to question power about its discourses of truth. Critique will be the art of voluntary inservitude, of reflective indocility. The essential function of critique would be that of de-subjectification in the game of what one could call, in a word, the politics of truth.’81 De-subjectification? It is as if the ethics of subjectivation that we alluded to early on in this chapter as being integral to Foucault’s cultural theory has to proceed by reference to its critical obverse: the distancing of ourselves from our existing forms of subjectivity. Subjectivation itself implies an ethico-critical work of de-subjectification. Subjectivation is a critical and not just a positive project. Not least of the points that are worth making here is that we are in fact subjects, and Foucault’s nominalism becomes a kind of intellectual technology designed to de-subjectify us so far as this is possible given our existing subjectivity, and not – as with some versions of postmodernism, for instance – to bring about an eclipse of the subject altogether. We need ascetic practices of de-subjectification only because there are such things as subjects. In this at least, Foucault was quite traditional and Ian Hacking was right to link his work to the long tradition of concerns of writers like Sartre, whose main interest was in ethical questions of the autonomy of the subject.82 80 Cf. Hacking, ‘Making up people’. 81 Foucault, ‘What is critique?’, p. 386. 82 I. Hacking, ‘Between Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman’, Economy and Society, 33:3 (2004), pp. 277–302, p. 288.

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Unlike Sartre, however, Foucault has no normative view of what the self or the subject should be. Hence Foucault’s nominalism about the self. But this nominalism is less an epistemic operation than an ongoing, ethically open process. It is a practice. One name for part of this practice is genealogy, but genealogy is not really a ‘method’. It is more like an ethical ‘prejudice’, seeking out singularities where otherwise there might have been uniformity. Foucault himself links genealogy quite specifically to the arts of critique: ‘something that tries to restore the conditions of appearance of a singularity from multiple determining elements, of which it would appear, not as the product, but as the effect’.83 What Foucault is invoking here is no doubt an implicit distinction between a form of historicism that would relate multiple events to singular causes (determinism) and a nominalist genealogy that relates something singular (the prison, the clinic, whatever . . .) to a multiplicity of conditions. There is no way of ‘proving’ that this sort of nominalist genealogy is more accurate or true to things than, say, determinist historicism. Rather it is a sort of critical prejudice: but an ethical one – it is a bias for the singular and the multiple. But nor does it make sense to argue that genealogy is about trying to replace causal and other forms of historicism, to make everything in its own image. We might recall here something else that Foucault emphasises about critique. This is its strategic status, its provisionality; it ‘only exists in relation with something other than itself’; it is an instrument, and as Foucault puts it ‘a means for a future truth that it will not know and that it will not be’.84 Genealogy can exist only in relation to its opposite forms of causal historicism; it is a strategic outlook which makes no sense without them. Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish, for example, does not put forward a new conception of punishment but uses a certain kind of historical nominalism to question the self-evident status of the prison, a self-evidence that more traditional forms of history relate to particular ‘causes’, such as capitalism.85 The genealogy of the modern punitive system is an antidote to this sort of deterministic historicism. It does not use the teleologies of history to explain the present, but is a history of the present: one that uses history against itself, one that 83 Foucault, ‘What is critique?’, p. 396. 84 Ibid., p. 383. 85 Foucault, Discipline and Punish.

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pitches the dominant forms of historicism against itself; that puts the dominant meliorist histories of penality into a sort of negative variation. There is not really anything so grandiose as a ‘methodology’ involved here. It would be better to contrast methodology with something else, something more aesthetic – namely, Foucault’s style. Foucault was reportedly a great teacher, a great lecturer. Perhaps he was an educator rather an anything else; and perhaps that is why the lecture was the perfect format for the expression of Foucault’s style: because the lecture is a performance, a demonstration – and because research in Foucault’s sense seems to have been inseparable from certain educational effects. Foucault’s educational style – his educationality, so to speak – consists in the fact that he is, so to speak, more of a shower than a sayer. He scarcely ever theorises anything in the strong, systemic sense, not even power. Rather he shows relations, alliances, filiations. Much of the force of Foucault’s work rests upon this sense of demonstration and visuality. It is not just that Foucault is adept at descriptive tableaux, although this is certainly true. It is more a matter of critical style: the visuality of his work is related to his hostility to given frameworks and theoreticist elaborations. And generally speaking, Foucault preferred to show how he practised his work, not to set it out formally and methodologically in advance. Style should be opposed to methodology in this sense. We could even say that those with methodologies rarely have style. Style is related to ethics. Gilles Deleuze was right to connect the notion of intellectual style with that of the style of life. ‘But if there’s a whole ethics in this, there’s an aesthetics too. Style, in a great writer, is always a style of life too, not anything at all personal, but inventing a possibility of life a way of existing.’86 To do intellectual work was itself, for Foucault, a matter of de-subjectification, a getting free of oneself.87 Only in such a sense of self-transformation and escape was autonomy possible even to envisage. Everywhere Foucault’s work comes down to this principle: we can not know what autonomy is, but have to collect reminders of the creative will to autonomy in differing historical contexts, and the collection of such reminders is itself part of an ethico-critical work of freedom. But this is no less an endorsement of the idea of autonomy – individual, collec86 Deleuze, Negotations, p. 100. 87 Foucault, Use of Pleasure, p. 8.

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tive – for all that. Far from being the figure who froze human agency into a bleak historicism, Foucault’s work is ultimately always ethical, and – again, ultimately – about little else other than autonomy and creativity.

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Bourdieu, ethics and reflexivity Anthropology – Relationism and habitus – Freedom and culture – Distinction – Reflexivity – High art – Sociologisms – Creativity and autonomy – The autonomisation of art – Creativity again – Half-against Bourdieu – Denunciation – Ethics – Science – Reflexivity again – Intellectual sociology – Auto-analysis – Intellectualism and ambivalence – Antinomies of universalism – Difficult autonomy – Educationality and cultural theory

Pierre Bourdieu was a contrarian and sociologist, perhaps in that order. As with Adorno and Foucault, he can be claimed, also, for a further intellectual lineage – that of ethical reflection as opposed to just negatively critical, denunciatory sociology. This does not just mean that Bourdieu was right-minded and ‘ethical’ in the sense of being moral (whatever one might mean by this). It means that his work is addressed as much to issues of the self, and especially to our reflexivity and autonomy, as to just epistemic issues of positive ‘knowledge’ and denunciatory critique. In fact, the – again, ultimately ethical – issues of creativity and autonomy are absolutely central to Bourdieu’s project, not just when considering – most obviously – art and culture but when analysing the difficult autonomy of the intellectual life that was so important to him. These ethico-critical concerns are what makes Bourdieu, for our purposes, a representative of modern cultural theory and not only – something rather different – a sociologist of culture. Although hardly incendiary, to argue for this ethico-critical view here is to take a slightly unusual tack even though Bourdieu himself made the question of reflexivity, at least, very central to his later work.1 Bourdieu is most often regarded as a general social theorist, a 1 E.g. P. Bourdieu, The Science of Science and Reflexivity, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge: Polity, 2004); P. Bourdieu & L. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive

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cultural sociologist or even just a very wide-ranging ‘methodologist’. This latter view would make him a figure somewhat like Anthony Giddens or Roy Bhaskar in the English-speaking social sciences: writers who seek to tell us how to go about thinking about such topics as the link between individuals and society, agency and structure and so on. But he is more interesting than that.2 Anthropology It is true that if you read Bourdieu you will see that he is very often concerned with giving us sermons as to what he is doing.3 But when Bourdieu gives us sermons on proper methodology, these methodological protocols do not really govern the ongoing procedures of analysis, as methodologies are generally supposed to do, so much as structure them from the outset. That humans are both determined and capable of action is integral to Bourdieu’s ‘anthropological’ understanding – that is, his view of what human nature is. It is not a methodological ‘result’ but an anthropological point of departure, a view of human ‘nature’. So that is where we shall begin. Anthropology, in this wide usage of the term, and ethics are closely linked. What you think humans are will tell you something about what humans can (or perhaps even ought to) be. Bourdieu wants to know how various fields of conduct structure the possible positions and strategies of the agents that occupy and traverse them; he wants to know both how we act and how are determined. It is interesting to look at Bourdieu’s intellectual itinerary in this respect.4 He moved from philosophy through to anthropology through to sociology; but also from quite recognisably methodological concerns in his earlier

Sociology (Cambridge: Polity, 1992). See also, on ‘the paradoxical foundation of ethics’, P. Bourdieu, Practical Reason (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), pp. 141–5. 2 The best guide to Bourdieu is generally Bourdieu himself. On Bourdieu and culture in English see the useful works of B. Fowler, Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory (London: Sage, 1997); D. Robbins, Bourdieu and Culture (London: Sage, 2000); and J. Browitt & B. Nelson, Practising Theory: Pierre Bourdieu and the field of cultural production (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004). 3 See most notably P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972), trans. R. Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) and for later, revised reflections, P. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge: Polity, 1990). 4 See above all P. Bourdieu, Esquisse pour une Auto-analyse (Paris: Raisons d’Agir, 2004), discussed further below.

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work to quite overtly ethical, even almost indeed spiritual, reflections in later works such as Pascalian Meditations or his quasiautobiographical Esquisse pour une auto-analyse.5 Such issues will be considered in due course, especially when we turn, towards the end of this chapter, to discuss Bourdieu’s work on intellectuals – work that is very useful for getting a taste of Bourdieu’s reflections on the question of autonomy in general. For now, let us only note that there is indeed something ethically normative about apparently methodological issues such as the so-called structureagency problem as it is addressed in Bourdieu’s work. Reflexivity is relevant here too. This critical game is about nothing if not selfawareness. It is as if the aim is to uncover the extents to which agency is structured so as to free agency from structure: in short, to make it more like agency rather than mere behaviour. But that is an ethicocritical rather than merely a methodological or epistemic ideal. Relationism and habitus Now, if there really is any methodological core to Bourdieu it is that he is, as he sometimes insists, a relationist rather than a substantialist. This theme can be rehearsed quite quickly, just as background to what Bourdieu has to say about ethics and culture. Let us begin with a fairly hackneyed but hopefully useful comparison with Marx. Whereas Marx reduces matters to some or other economic ‘core’ which would be, in the modern era, reducible to ‘Capital’ with a capital C, Bourdieu himself would rather invoke the idea of different fields dominated by different kinds of capital. In Bourdieu’s work, capital is ubiquitous but it is not a reductive concept. It is not, anyway, just an economic concept. Within each field – literature, art, the economy, culture, science, academia, etc. – there are different logics of capital at work. For instance in the literary field it pays to promote your cultural capital (your culture in effect) at the expense of your economic capital; whereas in the field of the economy things are the other way round.6 This is why Bourdieu describes the cultural field as ‘the economic world reversed’; it is, so to speak, the denial of the space of economic relations. As for ‘capital’, this does not really have an ‘essence’ in 5 Ibid., and P. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge: Polity, 2001). 6 P. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, trans. R. Johnson (Cambridge: Polity, 1993), pp. 29–73.

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Bourdieu’s work. There is no fundamental form of capital here, only different kinds, according to the relevant field. Capital is not a ‘thing’ so much as a relation. That is Bourdieu’s motto here – ‘the real is the relational’. Bourdieu is a realist but not a substantivist.7 That is, he is a realist about relations not substances. He does not think that social ‘facts’ such as classes, institutions and so on have an objective reality or essence in a substantivist sense but only an identity in relation to other entities. So for instance someone is not ‘petite bourgeois’ in essence but only in relation to other class positions, the declining petite-bourgeoisie, the new petite-bourgeoisie and so on. That is what the notion of the field is all about. It is a relational concept. Perhaps that is Bourdieu’s most succinct contribution to the social sciences: a relationist theory of society according to which agents move around in particular social spaces, with particular positionings, tendencies and trajectories. That is all that anyone really needs to know about Bourdieu methodologically speaking. Of course, most commentaries invoke such concepts as the habitus. The habitus, the durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations, produces practices which tend to reproduce the regularities immanent in the objective conditions of the production of their generative principle, while adjusting to the demands inscribed as objective potentialities in the situation, as defined by the cognitive and motivating structures making up the habitus.8

Or a little more simply put: ‘history turned into nature’.9 Crudely expressed, the habitus can be described as the connection between the subjective world of dispositions and the objective world of inherited practices and structures. The concept alludes to the varied ways in which we are governed through our dispositions – dispositions which are not simply ‘conscious’ and willed but embodied and taken for granted within our practices. It is structure internalised, a sort of deus ex machina devised to explain the linkage between structure and agency but also the reproduction of each in the other – a concept, in short, designed to account for the fact that individuals are both produced by and produce the structures of social life. 7 Ibid., p. 29. 8 Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p. 78. 9 Ibid. See, for a more in-depth discussion than ours, D. Swartz, Culture and Power: the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997), chapter 5.

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But this concept scarcely makes much sense unless understood in an ethico-critical as well as in a merely methodological way. Bourdieu’s point is to assert an element of freedom in social interaction without succumbing to either romantic (existential) or individualistic (rational choice) philosophies of the subject. In any case, Bourdieu’s assertion of an element of freedom at the heart of human practices is also assuredly an assertion of the value of freedom and autonomy and as such it is as much an ultimately ethical move as a methodological one. Freedom and culture Not that Bourdieu has a theory of freedom as such; although on occasion he did describe his work precisely as a ‘sociology of freedom’.10 But surely his work is rather, and amongst other things, something of a catalogue of the ways in which we delude ourselves that we are free: it is about raising our critical self-awareness of the limits of freedom. And that is why the field of culture is so important to him, because it is where – perhaps more than anywhere else – we attempt to practise our freedom. Culture, in complex societies, is certainly where we think we are free, and where we think we are expressing our freedom.11 But culture is also and fundamentally, for Bourdieu, a form of domination and legitimation. That is probably, for most, the most familiar theme in all of his work. Everywhere in Bourdieu’s pages, people appear to be deluded into believing that it is in culture that they are most free. So for example the aesthete or connoisseur regards his or her cultural expertise as a kind of gift of God, whereas in fact such expertise, so far as Bourdieu is concerned, is but part of a very worldly strategy of distinction.12 Aesthetes just want to differentiate themselves socially from the rest of us. The working classes, on the other hand, have reverential attitudes towards high culture. They are excluded from it and, in knowing that they are excluded from it, they deliberately exclude themselves from it. But culture is not only domination. Bourdieu is also in fact sympa10 See Bourdieu, Practical Reason, p. ix. 11 Bourdieu’s important work on cultural relations in non-Western societies cannot be considered here for reasons of space: see Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice. 12 P. Bourdieu, Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste (1979), trans. R. Nice (London: RKP, 1986).

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thetic to the idea that culture really is freedom.13 The aim is not to denounce culture but, ultimately, to be reflexive about it: to critique culture, as it were, so as to free it up. Towards the end of The Rules of Art Bourdieu refers favourably to those who would see culture as ‘an instrument of freedom presupposing freedom, as a modus operandi allowing the permanent supersession of the opus operatum, of the desolate, cultured “thing”’.14 This even sounds like lebensphilosophie at times, even Simmel of all people. Culture here is not just the institutions of culture but it is what is living, what breaks free. Here freedom is processual rather than substantive. Culture is both form and process: as form it solidifies into blocs; as process, it frees itself. As modus operandi, culture is freedom; as opus operatum, it is domination. Culture, then, is both freedom and domination in Bourdieu’s work. We shall see in due course whether this certainly somewhat ambivalent view actually leads Bourdieu into a contradictory stance towards culture. Perhaps – referring back to our terminology in Chapter 1 – we should call it an antinomical one (which is slightly different), and also note that this ambivalence or whatever it is also feeds into what is really a dual view of culture. On the one hand, Bourdieu concerns himself with cultural production, especially in the field of the arts and literature. Here, culture is something esoteric, even elitist, but certainly creative. In The Rules of Art it is the world of Flaubert, Baudelaire, Manet. On the other hand, Bourdieu is concerned with cultural consumption, an emphasis which makes culture something much less rarefied a phenomenon – and much more to do with practices of domination – than when it is restricted to the arts as such. The former theme will be considered later. It is not unimportant. For now we turn briefly to the latter theme, and to the locus classicus of this generalised emphasis on culture, Distinction. Distinction Jon Elster has described Bourdieu’s view of human nature as being founded on snobbery.15 For Bourdieu, Elster thinks, we are all snobs, whether actually so or as inverted snobs. The culturally well-off are 13 See for instance, Bourdieu’s conversations with Hans Haacke, Free Exchange (Cambridge: Polity, 1995). 14 Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, p. 340. 15 J. Elster, ‘Snobs’, London Review of Books, 3:20 (November 1981), pp. 10–12.

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snobs towards the philistine bourgeois; the working classes exercise inverted snobbery towards the culturally well-off. And so on. There is something in this view. In Bourdieu’s work, taste is shown to be, in any case, basically a weapon of class differentiation. In liking golf, red wine, sports cars or orienteering we are not just signalling something about our own lifestyle preferences but rejecting others – we are distinguishing ourselves, engaging in strategies of distinction. Distinction itself is based on a massive empirical survey on taste in everyday life and culture conducted in the late 1960s. Bourdieu would have disliked the terminology, but Distinction is in some ways possible to describe as a sort of sociological semiotics of modern French culture. The term ‘culture’ here has a wide remit. It refers both to people’s sense of taste, whether in styles of the body, in hats or in musical concerts, and to consumption – the ways in which objects and cultural artefacts are used to ‘signal’ certain kinds of taste. Together these signal certain kinds of distinction. So Bourdieu’s view of culture could be described as being one based on culture not as a ‘level’ or ‘sphere’ of society but as a practice of signalling one’s distinctions from others, and hence ultimately itself as a practice of symbolic power. ‘Taste classifies and it classifies the classifier.’16 Art and cultural consumption are not innocent; rather they legitimate social differences.17 The concept of distinction has both active and passive aspects. It is both a capacity to distinguish and also an attribute – of being distinctive. Both aspects, so far as Bourdieu is concerned, are socially generated rather than being innate to individuals. Both are also, so to speak, ethological and ethical. One’s capacity for distinction is built up through the habitus. It becomes a sort of second nature. But distinction is also a kind of commentary upon the world. It is to impose values upon the world of a certain kind. Even if one just looks at the diagrams and photographs, Distinction appears to be about topics such as how the working classes like to eat starchy food and what middle-class people eat for breakfast. But really it is about the ethics of aesthetics. Or rather it is an anti-aesthetics. Bourdieu’s target, here as elsewhere, is the pure aesthetic gaze: the idea that artistic genius, artistic taste, artistic truth come down from the sky with no taint from the social world. Bourdieu will have none of this. We need a ‘vulgar’ turn in aesthetics, a ‘social critique 16 Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 6. 17 Ibid., p. 7.

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of the judgement of taste’.18 We need to see that taste in art, just as with taste in everything, is related to social status, social struggle – precisely, distinction. Because Bourdieu’s target is aesthetic purism, it is hardly surprising that he starts off with an analysis of ordinary people’s taste in works of art. Most musicologists and philosophers of the arts would say that Bach’s The Well-tempered Clavier was a superior work of art to Strauss’s The Blue Danube or Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. In Bourdieu’s account, distinguishing between these works appears to be, more than anything, a matter of class-determined taste. Adorno would, of course, have been horrified. For him, Gershwin would just be the culture industry, The Blue Danube in effect mere radio music. For Bourdieu, on the other hand, what is at stake is not aesthetic value at all but educational – and ultimately cultural – capital.19 Highereducation teachers and art producers like the The Well-tempered Clavier but do not like The Blue Danube. Most people – except apparently domestic servants, hardly a large category one imagines – are more or less happy with Rhapsody in Blue, but junior commercial executives and secretaries positively love it. It is a petite-bourgeois thing, it seems. But it is not just that taste is relative to class position, that there is bourgeois taste, working-class taste and so on. It is that taste is relative, in Bourdieu’s thinking, specifically to a dominant cultural order. Workers are not keen on The Well-tempered Clavier not just because they dislike it in itself but because it smacks to them of high culture. They are not keen on the Pompidou Centre for similar reasons. Workers prefer more ‘earthy’ cultural artefacts: Bourdieu comments that this is a question not just of domination but of refusal.20 High culture is intimidating. It is alien. Which is precisely why high culture is agreeable to elites – or at least to cultural elites, since the moneyed elite appear to favour champagne and fox hunting and find esoteric high culture as intimidating, in their own way, as do workers. In any case, the ‘findings’ are hardly too startling. There is a close relationship between forms of taste and educational capital. The more education you have the greater sense of discrimination in matters of taste, the more the sense of a ‘feel for the game’ in matters of culture. There is a close relationship between forms of taste and social origins. 18 Ibid., pp. 485–500. 19 Ibid., p. 17. 20 Ibid., p. 179.

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The family background will provide the cultural assurance that one is assured in matters of culture. So educational capital is important but ‘cultural capital’ is more important and is not simply reducible to educational capital. People who understand the arts are not ‘more cultured’; rather they have a greater access to the codes for understanding the arts. The worst position to be in, in fact, is to have just a little culture, as with the petite-bourgeois: just enough to be aware of your ignorance and thus in doubt about your capabilities. In contrast the completely dispossessed know nothing of their dispossession. With the widening of educational opportunity in fact people have to resort to slightly more esoteric means of asserting their powers of distinction. The more pressurised the market for cultural goods, the more likely it is for counter-cultures to develop: for instance the love of cinema amongst the highly educated but less advantaged in terms of cultural capital, as a protest against the dominant, ‘scholastic’ culture high in cultural capital. The new middle classes with high educational capital need to be occupied, in the media industries which take on an ‘aesthetic’ garb and in therapeutic industries.21 Even postmodernism could perhaps be explained this way: scholastic culture becomes an object of irony and life turns towards a ‘fun ethic’.22 All this is, of course, to condense matters drastically. The English version of Distinction is 604 pages long. But Bourdieu’s argument, if it is quite that, does boil down to the idea that you like something not because you like it (although you may think you do) but because of what it says about your place in the social field. Culture is a weapon in social strategy. Now, this is all very well but what in fact are Bourdieu’s critical intentions here? Bourdieu is not keen on relativism, and yet Distinction sometimes feels like relativism. No one, it would seem, can stand anywhere outside of the game. There is no Archimedian point from which to critique any one or other aspect of cultural distinction. All are equally valid or invalid, depending on your point of view. It can be quite depressing reading. You thought you liked The Well-tempered Clavier for artistic reasons but now you realise what you thought was an aesthetic form of judgement was in fact a cynical vehicle for your own social distinction – because your vulgar neighbours would not be able to appreciate it, you have to like it. You 21 Ibid., pp. 44–50. 22 Ibid., pp. 365–71.

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only want to impress the others. It is just a question of strategy. Perhaps, in truth, you secretly prefer The Blue Danube. Except that of course Bourdieu does not think that strategy is really a conscious enterprise at all. You do not really secretly prefer The Blue Danube. In fact you genuinely like The Well-tempered Clavier. But it is still a matter of a social strategy for all that, only you will not be aware of it. It is a question of habitus, and so on. Not that this necessarily takes us out of relativism. But it does perhaps mitigate some of the sense of cynicism that one can otherwise be forgiven for deriving from Bourdieu’s text. We are not aware what we are doing. And that is the point. Distinction is supposed to be consciousnessraising; to make us aware of it. Hardly a cynical outcome, even if the means deployed – and Bourdieu’s rather forcedly Proustological tone – can at times seem cynical or, anyway, apparently sardonic or denunciatory. Reflexivity In any case, it would be best to say that for our purposes the most apt principle of reading in relation to Bourdieu’s work is always to attempt to substitute an ethico-critical function for this sort of denunciatory and critical function in his texts, wherever that is possible. Were it simply and only a matter of denunciatory critique, one might suppose that Bourdieu would have to recommend that we overturn, for instance, the world of high art. His would be a strategy of deliberate and consistent – as opposed to a strategic – philistinism. But that is not the principle of reading that is best applied to Bourdieu, and for the most part it is not a principle of reading that he even applies to himself. His work, valuable in so far as it is about recognising ourselves as agents, is best seen, perhaps, as being not so much about changing what we are doing as recognising what we are doing when we are doing it. Or in Bourdieu’s own terms, then, it is more a question of reflexivity. Through sociological and other kinds of analysis one comes to understand the conditions of one’s own action, one’s own freedom. This is actually why for some critics Bourdieu’s work can seem to be somewhat determinist. Action it seems is restricted to the circumstances given by particular fields. Certainly, that would be Elster’s view; that Bourdieu is a functionalist, in effect seeing conspiracies everywhere. But Bourdieu’s position is better read as a deliberate perspectivism: an attempt to understand the world of freedom and

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agency from the point of view of sociological kinds of determination that act precisely as an ethical corrective to our otherwise naive conceptions of them. It is about correcting our tendency to think that our freedom has no limits or conditions. That, in the end, is fundamental to what Bourdieu’s reflexivity is. We return to it in the latter part of this chapter. High art Now, the ethico-critical function that we have mentioned is also present very strongly in Bourdieu’s work on the higher arts, that is, his work on artistic production as opposed to aesthetic consumption. Bourdieu’s aim in his writings on art is to frame a non-reductionist sociology of aesthetic production. Perhaps he does not entirely succeed in this, not least because he often descends into something close to a sociologism of his own. But it is true that showing the determined aspect of our freedom does not inevitably mean recourse to reductionism. In any case, Bourdieu tries not to be reductionist. For him, art and culture can be explained by reference to sociological ‘science’ only in so far as they are not reduced to social forms in the sense of being merely a straightforward reflection of those forms. Thus a sociology of art is to be distinguished from any form of sociological reductionism. And suffice to note that, for Bourdieu, so-called high art is as important to him as it is to Adorno. But whereas for Adorno high art represented – if merely by the very obstinacy of its own continued existence in a wholly rationalised world – a space of possible resistance to wider types of cultural manipulation, for Bourdieu high art is the scene of systematic mystification. This, however, is not to say that Bourdieu sees no redemptive uses for high art. He himself was avowedly attached to the high arts, referring for instance to a long-standing love for the work of Mallarmé (albeit a compulsory attachment for French intellectuals). In any case, the space of autonomous art, for him, was exemplary of the possibility of freedom itself.23

23 Something which the contemporary sociology of art sometimes finds annoying. See J. F. Lane, ‘When does art become art? Assessing Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of artistic fields’, in D. Inglis & J. Hughson, eds, The Sociology of Art: ways of seeing (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

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How does Bourdieu go about reconfiguring the sociology of art? The sociology of art is not a discipline that has covered itself in academic glory. Ever since the demolition-job executed by Ernst Gombrich on the work of Arnold Hauser the project of relating artistic forms to types of social organisation has smacked of vulgar materialism.24 Hauser had attempted to relate more or less the entire history of art to two types of social organisation: aristocratic and authoritarian societies which produced symbolic or abstract forms of art, and individualistic societies which typically produce more naturalistic forms. As Austin Harrington has usefully indicated, the problem with sociology of art of the Hauser variety is that it attempts to explain artistic style by recourse to a ‘covering-law’ model of explanation, according to which individual artefacts or events can be explained under some general law of causation.25 The point is that there can be no general law in the form of an invariant mechanism to explain all forms of aesthetic creativity. (Or rather, all such forms of explanation must be circular.) In fact any such law would have to be fairly banal. Hence the sociology of art – even in its sophisticated variety, such as in the work of Robert Witkin – has tended to be epochalist in orientation; relating forms of aesthetic style to vast periods in history, as in Witkin’s tryptich of ‘invocative codes’ (archaic art), ‘evocative codes’ (from the Renaissance onwards), and ‘provocative codes’ (modernism and after).26 Bourdieu, anyway, also seeks a more nuanced sociological perspective than the old-style sociology of art. He attains this not least by abandoning the dichotomy of society and culture whereby social organisation, as with Hauser, straightforwardly determines the possibilities of cultural form. In this sense at least, Bourdieu – pace his own diehard advocates amongst sociologists – has ceased, really, to be a sociologist in the conventional sense, in that he has no ‘general theory’ of society. Rather there are different fields – artistic, religious, economic, political – which structure what is possible for agents to do in each. So, for instance, one cannot say that the possibility of the novel is simply determined by the state of society – 24 See E. Gombrich, Meditations on a Hobby-Horse (London: Phaidon Press, 1963), and A. Hauser, The Social History of Art (1951), 4 volumes (London: Routledge, 1995). 25 A. Harrington, Art and Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), pp. 66–8. 26 R. Witkin, Art and Social Structure (Cambridge: Polity, 1995).

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capitalist, commercial or whatever – at any one time. Rather, what makes the novel possible – or, certain kinds of novels possible – is a certain state of the literary field: the totality of the social relations between those engaged in cultural production of a literary kind. If there is no such general entity as society, then none the less all fields are generically social. Any particular field is a product not of nature but of history. The structure of any field can only be accounted for on the basis of its development, and especially the conditions of its genesis. Now, precisely what seems to fascinate Bourdieu most about literary and artistic fields is that they are deceptive. They barely look ‘social’ at all. Indeed, is art not supposed to be generically disinterested from mere social considerations? That would be the viewpoint of the – in his view, naive, Kantian – ‘pure aesthetic’. Bourdieu will have none of that. For Bourdieu, the artistic and literary fields are spaces of systematic denial. One might even say that Bourdieu is interested in art for the same reason that Durkheim was interested in suicide: to demonstrate the efficacy of sociological explanation precisely at its seemingly most implausible point. Moreover, the fields of literary and artistic production have general sociological relevance; because such a focus serves as a laboratory for analysis of processes of cultural consecration in general. And this has something of import, in turn, for how we are to conceive of modern forms of power. For modern power: in Bourdieu’s eyes, is largely cultural power: not the brute economic domination invoked by either Weberians or Marxists of various kinds but a form of power which functions precisely by asserting its disinterestedness and distance from the world of economic necessity. ‘One is in fact in an economic world inverted: the artist cannot triumph on the symbolic terrain except by losing on the economic terrain (at least in the short run), and vice versa (at least in the long run)’.27 Art is domination and legitimation by other means. But in spite of these lofty ambitions we also need to note that, within them, Bourdieu’s sense of the problem is actually quite limited. This is a good thing. Bourdieu’s problematic is not, in fact, that of art in general. Indeed one suspects that Bourdieu would have had little time for such a transhistorical notion – ‘art’ – in any case. Rather, his concern tends to be, in effect, specifically with modernism, with modern art; and in particular with the autonomisation of art that is so characteristic of modernism, that is, both the autonomisation of art 27 Bourdieu, Rules of Art, p. 83.

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itself as an activity from other forms of life and the autonomisation of artistic producers from either patrons or consumers. No doubt this focus could be referred back to the intellectual tradition from which Bourdieu’s work stems: the tradition of epistemological history in Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem.28 These historians of science were concerned with those moments of coupage – or epistemological ‘breakage’ – when a scientific discipline loosed its moorings, so to speak, from the world of everyday life and became autonomous, operating with norms internal to itself. Such a coupage is located by Bourdieu in the literary field with the work of Baudelaire and Flaubert and in the field of the visual arts with the work of Manet.29 Creativity and autonomy This in fact brings us immediately to Bourdieu’s basic theme, or at least his theme in relation to the question of artistic and cultural production. It is a theme which is a natural extension of this concern with strategies of modernism: a theme centred on creativity in particular and autonomy more generally. There is a parallel with Adorno here, even if in so many other respects the two are poles apart. Both are concerned with what might be termed pseudo-heterodoxy, pseudocreativity: claims by those who are not really outside the great scheme of things to be outside the great scheme of things. Bourdieu wants to debunk, especially, our naive ideas about the values of creativity. For him, creativity is not the assertion of creativity; it involves, rather, agency in a social field. Baudelaire, for instance, was creative in this sense; that he was a uniquely gifted creator as such would be another matter. But the world of art is not simply another case-study for Bourdieu. It is a privileged one for his whole point of view. This, again, has to do with the question of autonomy. It is because the aesthetic field is akin to the sacred domain. Art galleries, for Bourdieu, are like cathedrals. But art is interesting as a form of domination precisely because of its apparent distance from all forms of domination. It is the most 28 As is clear from one of Bourdieu’s earliest and best books: P. Bourdieu, J.-C. Chamboredon, J.-C. Passeron, The Craft of Sociology: epistemological preliminaries (1968), trans. R. Nice (New York: De Gruyter, 1991); cf. P. Bourdieu, ‘Georges Canguilhem: an obituary notice’, Economy and Society (special issue, ed. T. Osborne & N. Rose) 27:2–3, (1998), pp. 190–2. 29 Bourdieu, Rules of Art.

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autonomous of the fields. Hence it is not surprising that it is in The Rules of Art that Bourdieu contributes, but for his final lectures, his clearest contribution to the theory of the fields as such.30 But it is also because, for Bourdieu, art really is a space of freedom, of free exchange, and is a model of the free spirit of intellectualism more generally.31 As a modern cultural theorist, Bourdieu recognises that to reflect upon the status of art is to reflect upon the conditions of autonomy. The autonomisation of art Now, even if there is no trans-historical thing such as ‘art’ for all cultures and societies, Bourdieu does seem to think that the relatively recent history of art does show a clear progression towards more and more autonomy from the social world. This is mirrored in a concern more and more for form rather than content, until we get to the complete ‘art for art’s sake’ or self-referential mentalities of much modernist art, the pure gaze: the autonomisation of art from its social conditions (but itself a social achievement) and the relative autonomisation of artists from patrons and ultimately – as with later avant-gardes – even from audiences themselves. Take Bourdieu’s analysis of Flaubert and, before him, Baudelaire and the initial establishment of the modern French aesthetic field. Bourdieu shows how Flaubert and Baudelaire can be situated in the ‘heroic phase’ of the ‘conquest of autonomy’ in the Paris of the 1840s: the period of uncompromising rupture with the established orders of writers consecrated through institutions such as the Académie Française.32 The point is that coupage requires adversaries: one cannot understand aesthetic autonomisation without taking into account the universe of contemporaries against which the rebels seek to construct themselves. The rebellion, moreover, is fully as much a social one as an aesthetic one. In any case, one could say that Baudelaire and the Académie presuppose one another. What is at stake here in this initial autonomisation of the field is in fact a ‘double rupture’, a double rejection – on the one hand of conservative ‘useful’ art and, on the other, of the mercantile world of literary journalism.33 This double rupture had effects that were internal 30 31 32 33

Ibid., pp. 214–82. Bourdieu and Haacke, Free Exchange. Rules of Art, pp. 60–8. Ibid., p. 77.

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as well as external. In other words, it is not just a matter of a sociology of ‘positions’ (where particular artists are situated in the field) but of what Bourdieu calls ‘position-takings’ – of the actual products of art, artworks themselves. So, for instance, to understand Flaubert’s so-called realism in a work such as Madame Bovary we have to see that his literary ‘game’ consists of a repudiation at once of the idealists but also of the realists proper: his realism is almost a sort of satire on conventional realism that is all the more effective for not being merely a repudiation or negation of it.34 But this is an aestheticised realism: not a turning towards the world but an appropriation of the world wholly for the autonomous purposes of art taken as an autonomous enterprise in itself. Hence, as Bourdieu notes, the apparent ethical and political neutrality of writers such as Baudelaire. All engagement with social roles is condemned as bourgeois. But of course, as will be obvious, there is a paradox here, the illumination of which is really at the crux of Bourdieu’s argument. The repudiation of any kind of social vocation for the artist is itself the product of a social strategy; the rupture of art from society is itself a sociological phenomenon. At which point a further paradox appears. ‘The symbolic revolution through which artists free themselves from bourgeois demand by refusing to recognise any master except their art produces the effect of making the market disappear.’35 Contempt for the consumers of art leads one to produce art in a kind of vacuum. Of course, poverty and failure in this context can themselves come to be seen as forms of symbolic legitimation, as with the bohemian movement (contrast Bourdieu’s perspective with that of Foucault on this point). Equally there is nothing so useful as a private income to shore up one’s contempt for the vulgarities of bourgeois cultural demand.36 Now, Bourdieu clearly has not a little respect and admiration for Baudelaire and Flaubert, even if this is as much a sociological admiration (for the ways in which they ‘worked’ the artistic field and inscribed it into their works) as much as an aesthetic one. However, genesis is one thing, the epigones or followers another. Bourdieu cannot abide epigones because they have, so to speak, bought into the morality without the ethics. They have not done any work to attain their positions. The era of Baudelaire and Flaubert is a heroic phase; 34 Ibid., pp. 79, 93, 96. 35 Ibid., p. 81. 36 Ibid., p. 83.

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later incarnations are more mundane and routinised, even undertaken in bad faith. In any case, what follows the initial installation of the field is not the institutionalisation of the principles of the avant-garde but merely a space divided between what Bourdieu calls restricted production (more or less the avant-garde) and large-scale production (the mass market). Whereas Flaubert and Baudelaire demonstrated great creative panache in working the literary field to their own ends, it is as if latter day-heresiarchs have come to routinise their heresies. Today one might think, in this context, perhaps especially of all those still working in the continuing space made possible by Duchampian art. Shock, horror, sensation. But there is something predictable and formulaic, for Bourdieu, about latter-day artistic forms of transgression. One cannot pretend to be Baudelaires and Flauberts today because the structure of the field is not the same now as it was at its genesis. To do so is only to hold on to an ahistorical fetishism of the field. Baudelaire, Flaubert and the others did all the work of initial autonomisation; the epigones merely work in their space, deriving easy cultural capital from the transgressive labours of others not themselves. They are not as autonomous as they think; indeed they are, in effect, enslaved to the logic of the field. This said, the logic of Bourdieu’s argument seems not, in fact, for the most part to denounce the subjects of the field themselves, so much as to show the conditions that make such forms of action a social necessity: not to denounce conditions as they are but perhaps to enable us to get free from such conditions, or at least to acknowledge them for what they are, a restricted and historically conditioned space rather than a space of absolute, trans-historical freedom. In fact, transgressive behaviour is not always an index of freedom. It is as if transgression has become a kind of institutionalised fixation of the literary and other artistic fields: what Bourdieu in fact labels, in the context of the visual art of Manet and his successors of the 1870s, the institutionalisation of anomie.37 Transgression, then, itself becomes the norm. Just as with the writers Baudelaire or Flaubert, the aesthetic strategies of a painter such as Manet can be understood only within the terms of the aesthetic field of his day: that is, in opposition to the classical art of David and his successors in the official Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Classical art was tied to the dominance of the aristocracy in post-revolutionary France. In other words it was, if only by association, reactionary. As 37 Ibid., p. 132.

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Bourdieu shows, the painters of the Ecole were not exactly artists in the modernist sense but ‘masters’; they have a ‘career’ not an ‘artistic life’ (an important notion for Bourdieu, and a modern invention); they train by imitating a master; they make ‘well-made’ works, full of detail and with a finely finished surface. They emphasise content not form: above all, myth and allegory (knowledge of which limits access only to the culturally well-informed). This is painting, Bourdieu observes, which is meant to be ‘read’ rather than ‘seen’. Moreover, this sort of art is inherently hierarchical in orientation: centred on competitions and status. It is obviously social. But Manet’s revolution is no less social. It is just a question of a different logic of the painterly gaze. Here paintings are of accessible topics taken from real life and what matters is at least as much the form as well as the content. These canvases have rough, unfinished surfaces in contrast to those of the masters; and they are exercises in colour: not in the manipulation of content but in the expression of form as form. It is important to stress that for Bourdieu this is not simply a matter of an ‘internalist’ revolution, brought about by the limits of the previous form of art itself. Manet’s is not just an aesthetic revolution but a sociological one, brought on by increasing numerical pressures in the artistic field – basically, more and more artists missing out on the big prizes. The consequence of this is that Manet’s model is a much more heterarchical one: no competitions, just lots of generalised competition and competitiveness, and a plurality of competing cults. Hence the pursuit of art becomes permanent revolution and permanent controversy: anomie – not in fact an entirely normless art, but one in which norms have to be continually produced anew, only to be transgressed again. Creativity again Does Bourdieu’s kind of analysis undermine the creativity of Flaubert or Manet? Is his analysis sociologically reductive? He thinks not. On the contrary: such analysis seems to abolish the singularity of the ‘creator’ in favour of the relations which made the work intelligible, only better to rediscover it at the end of the task of reconstructing the space in which the author finds himself encompassed and included as a point

– a reconstruction which should include appreciation, in fact, for ‘the extraordinary effort which, at least in the particular case of Flaubert,

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was necessary to make it exist’.38 Flaubert’s ‘genius’ was not so much in the field of art as in, so to speak, mastering the art of the field. Thus Bourdieu takes a different tack from Sartre in his study of Flaubert.39 Instead of using the work to analyse the author, work and author are both, in effect, the products of social strategies in particular fields. This does not, on Bourdieu’s own account, entail a denial of the author’s creativity only a repositioning of it: far from annihilating the creator by the reconstruction of the universe of social determinations that exert pressure on him, and reducing the work to the pure product of a milieu instead of seeing in it the sign that its author has known how to emancipate himself from it . . . sociological analysis allows us to describe and to understand the specific labour that the writer has to accomplish, both against these determinations and thanks to them, in order to produce himself as creator, that is, as the subject of his own creation.40

Not least of the points worth making here is that Bourdieu’s work amounts to a critique not so much of creativity as such but only of the romantic, or charismatic, image of creativity: the image of ‘the uncreated creator’, of the genius – an image to be found as much in modernism as within romanticism itself. ‘God is dead, but the uncreated creator has taken his place.’41 In fact, we can suggest that Bourdieu’s is an ethico-critical endorsement of creativity of a certain sort. There is a certain asceticism inherent in this view of creativity. For Bourdieu, creativity is based on the manipulation of the constraints of the fields. It is a social skill. What we have here, then, is not really a critique of the idea of creativity but a constructivist approach to it. Creativity returns deromanticised. The essence of this image of creativity is, however, resolutely interpersonal. In some ways, Bourdieu’s is more a social or field psychology of art than a sociology of it. The fate of artists is determined not by anything essential to themselves but by ‘the universe of contemporaries with whom and against whom they construct themselves’.42

38 Ibid., pp. xix, 70. 39 Cf. J.-P. Sartre, The Family Idiot (1971), 2 volumes, trans. C. Cosman (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991). 40 Bourdieu, Rules of Art, p. 104. 41 Ibid., p. 189. 42 Ibid., p. 70.

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So Bourdieu’s aim in all this seems to be not simply to denounce art as some form of ideological mystification but to establish an understanding of the social conditions for the production of autonomous, modern art. Or at least perhaps we could say there are two theses about art in Bourdieu. There is what could be called the reflexive Bourdieu and there is the denunciatory Bourdieu. The reflexive direction consists of uncovering the conditions of the field as an achievement in autonomisation, and even accepting the notion of art as an ideal of free exchange. This direction points towards ethics rather than denunciatory critique. It is not so much about the denunciation of the field as about acknowledging its conditions and even, ultimately, of asserting its value as a field that produces autonomous works. We consider this further in the section after the following one. For now, let us consider this question of denunciatory critique itself and be, initially at least, fairly critical of Bourdieu. Doing so will involve a brief comparison of Bourdieu’s way of doing things with some other related ways. But then, after that, some attempt will be made to redeem Bourdieu from some of the doubt that has been expressed. Denunciation The fact is that sometimes – indeed, let us admit, fairly often – Bourdieu does appear to write as if high art is more or less straightforwardly ideological and mystificatory. As Bourdieu puts it: art is about turning culture into nature, that is, demonstrating a gift. This is ‘the charismatic ideology’ of art. Note that this means that art for Bourdieu is a form of power; in a democratic society, art is a means of asserting what are essentially aristocratic values. And the art museum is a ‘civic temple’ designed to exclude the participation of the masses.43 The more ‘democratic’ art becomes, the more the gifted (the talented, the aristocrats of culture) are distinguished from the mere barbarians, the uncultured philistines. So art reinforces existing class divisions. This does sound fairly critical in the denunciatory sense. And it is reductionist in its own way, if not quite in the manner of Hauser and his successors. In Bourdieu, there is no room for innovation in form; only social innovation. Or rather, the former is a 43 P. Bourdieu (with A. Darbel & D. Schapper), The Love of Art (1969), trans. C. Beattie & N. Merriman (Cambridge: Polity, 1991).

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reflection or translation of the latter. Creativity, although certainly redeemed as a value, is none the less reduced to a social phenomenon. To be truly presumptious and to sound like one of his loathed oblates, we could say that Bourdieu needs rescuing from himself here. His sociology is at times as tautological as that of Durkheim. It is not just that there are social conditions governing art, but that art is reduced to a social game and little else. The social is both the determinant and, so to speak, the resultant of the analysis. The problem with all this is not that Bourdieu deploys a sociological analysis at all, but how he sometimes does so. For it is possible to deploy sociological forms of analysis in a non-teleological way, and without reducing creativity – and indeed ‘genius’, whatever that is – simply to a social effect. Take, for instance, Norbert Elias’s study of Mozart.44 This is resolutely a sociological study. Mozart is depicted as the victim, in effect, of his own provisional freedom as an aspirationally ‘freelance’ artist, yet actually suspended between the identity of the free, bourgeois artist and the court musician. His ‘failure’ was sociological in that he lost the battle between court and bourgeois models of artistic existence, remaining unable finally to free himself from the control of aristocratic patronage.45 And this sociological understanding of Mozart as occupying a sort of liminal space between traditional and modern forms of musical organisation serves, Elias thinks, to tell us something about the enduring nature of Mozart’s appeal. Whereas Beethoven was more or less wholly of the new order of music, breaking free from the established traditions of music in the German courts, Mozart in fact never broke free from this tradition. Whilst Beethoven was a genius in the era of genius, Mozart had the misfortune to be a genius before the time of genius. Yet ‘it is precisely because he developed the sequential ordering of the motifs that rose up in him within the traditional canon that his music is so accessible and has such lasting appeal’.46 Thus Mozart evaded the problem of modernist art outlined by Bourdieu – that the truly autonomous artist has no audience – but at great personal cost to himself, being suspended between two models of musical life. Was Mozart a genius? As Elias shows, the notion of genius was in 44 See N. Elias, Mozart: portrait of a genius, trans. E. Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity, 1994). 45 Ibid., p. 11. 46 Ibid., p. 32.

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effect appropriate to a bourgeois social formation in which musicians and other artists sell their merchandise in a market space. Whereas for Bourdieu the concept of genius would doubtless be too wedded to a charismatic and hence mystificatory understanding of artistic production to be of much use, reserving instead his admiration for the social manipulations of agents such as Baudelaire or Flaubert, Elias is quite happy to use the notion of genius. One does not, in this analysis, find oneself forced into a sort of aesthetic relativism whereby the only differentiation between forms of art comes down to their positioning in social space. Mozart was indeed a genius, even if the very notion became possible and available only at a specific moment in history, when artistic production becomes in effect autonomised and in effect commodified. In fact we could say that the notion of genius is in fact both indicative of the commodification of creativity and a form of resistance to it, since the genius – at least in the romantic guise – is so typically pitted beyond the mercenary world of economic relations. Elias’s own brand of sociologism does not lead him to relativise the achievements of Mozart. These achievements were indeed dependent upon a social revolution, but this does not mean that the achievements, the results, were themselves simply of a social order. Elias is worth quoting at some length here. Mozart, he claims, was able to do something that the great majority of people are unable to do, which is beyond their powers of imagination: Mozart could give free rein to his fantasies. They poured out in a flood of sound-patterns which, when heard by other people, stimulated their feelings in the most diverse ways. The decisive factor in this was that while his imagination expressed itself in combinations of forms that stayed within the framework of the social canon of music which he had assimilated, these forms went far beyond the combinations previously known and the feelings they conveyed. It is this ability to produce innovations in the field of sound which convey a potential or actual message to others, produce a resonance in them, that we attempt to pin down with concepts such as ‘creativity’ as applied to music and mutatis mutandis to art in general.47

There are times when Bourdieu’s analyses, on the other hand, seem to lose the idea of art as anything other than ultimately a social game. One cannot imagine Bourdieu being too upset by this. For him, art is 47 Ibid., pp. 57–8.

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a social game. So be it. But even some of Bourdieu’s own preferred authorities from the field of art history can be used to show that things can be viewed otherwise: sociologically yet without a sociologistic reduction of art. Other than Elias, there is for instance the work of Michael Baxandall. Bourdieu himself made use of the work of Baxandall on Renaissance painting in an early foray into the sociology of art.48 But Baxandall’s approach can be compared to that of Bourdieu in other ways.49 Baxandall’s work is certainly sociological, but with a deft touch, never losing sight of the differences between forms of artistic production and other forms of agency. In other words, Baxandall never reduces art to its social effects. What, Baxandall asks, is the difference between an historical object like the Forth Bridge and a work of art such as Picasso’s Portrait of Kahnweiler? This has to do with the differing problems in each. The Forth Bridge was a solution – to be sure, an aesthetically satisfying one – to a given problem, to make a crossing of the Forth. The bridge’s designer, Benjamin Baker, worked with resources such as metal in a particular intellectual medium – engineering – to a certain end, bridge-building. Why is Picasso’s Kahnweiler portrait of 1910 so different? In a sense, it is not different at all. Picasso too works with resources and media; with forms and colours, with paint and his whole knowledge of painting, and also with negative examples to react against.50 But in two ways at least, Picasso’s work of art breaks with this model.51 First of all there is what Baxandall calls the ‘disappearance of process’. In Picasso’s picture it is more or less impossible to distinguish between the phases of conception and execution of the object. This is more than just a matter of an awkward fuzziness. The point is of course that paintings are kinds of object which evolve during their execution such that the problems they were originally designed to ‘solve’ mutate during the process of execution itself. In other words, problem and solution are both intertwined yet have a certain autonomy from any resolutely fixable conception of what they are. Second, the original problem is by no means clear in any case. 48 See M. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972); cf. Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, pp. 215–37, and Bourdieu, Rules of Art, pp. 317–18. 49 See for example M. Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: on the historical explanation of pictures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 36–40. 50 Ibid., p. 38. 51 Ibid., p. 39.

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We need to know what Picasso was trying to do, which means reconstructing what Baxandall calls his Brief. This is at once aesthetic – questioning issues of pictorial depth, issues of form and colour, of the representation of experience and so on – and also social: to do with issues of the market for painting, the whole history of painting as a ‘vocation’ and its raison d’être. In Baxandall’s image of him, Picasso is engaged in a field that is at once painterly and social, as well as highly porous to other forms of experience, but it is not just a social field. The point is not to vaunt Baxandall and denounce Bourdieu. It is only to indicate that there are other ways to use sociological forms of analysis that do not simply bring about a sociologistic reduction of art. One could quite easily defend Bourdieu by alluding to the Bachelardian view of science, which would claim, perhaps, that a sociological reduction is exactly what a sociological explanation, as opposed to any other, would be obliged to do. No matter. Our aims here are not exactly critical but only diagnostic – to differentiate the denunciatory Bourdieu from the more interesting ethical one. To do this we need to return to the reflexive direction in his thought. Ethics What is Bourdieu up to? Everything happens as if he cannot really seem to decide whether to be Marx or Wittgenstein. Arguably, he is better when being the latter: better – and, not least, actually more radical – when he is, so to speak, leaving everything as it is than when he is engaging in critical denunciation. But, in a sense, this is to miss the point. For later we will claim that in fact it may not necessarily be a question of choosing between these positions at all. We can argue that Bourdieu’s work embodies a negotiation of both, conveying the sense in which we are all, as part of the very vocation of intellect, condemned, or at least committed, if not to denunciation as such then certainly to the distantiation of explanatory work, in effect, to objectivisation – and also, and partly as an antidote, to reflexive work. The reflexive model presupposes that we need studies of the various social fields not in order to denounce everything as being merely social but so as to get a sense of the conditions in which we operate. Reflexivity is actually a form of genealogy, or what Bourdieu terms generative analysis: what matters are the origins of the field. But origins are important not in the Nietzschean genealogical sense: so that they can be dissolved as contingent, multiple, perhaps even

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illusory. The fields are historical but they are also real; they do not dissolve under the gaze of the historian. Rather, they are given form in terms of the strategic opportunities and constraints they involve. Knowledge of the historicity of the fields gives us self-understanding but it does not leave us anchorless and adrift in a world of random conventionalism.52 For Bourdieu, analysis of the fields is important for – again – ethico-critical rather than simply genealogical reasons: in so far as a knowledge of origins enables us to master the rules of the game for ourselves, ‘placing ourselves at the origins of a world whose functioning has become so familiar to us that the regularities and the rules it obeys escape our grasp’.53 Without a history of the fields we would not have an awareness of the limits of our autonomy, and hence – and this is the ethical moment – an awareness of ourselves. This is why the very notion of the field can be seen as more of an ethico-critical concept than a positive – ‘scientific’ – one. Or at least in being ‘scientific’, for Bourdieu, the concept of the field performs functions that can be regarded as ethical. Bourdieu describes the concept of the field as an ‘instrument of rupture’ with the immediate world of common sense: a means of ‘taking a point of view on the ensemble of viewpoints which come into being through it’.54 The notion of the field is, then, itself an ethical instrument: it allows us to gain a certain distance over ourselves. It is true that Bourdieu regards this precisely as the condition of science, the achievement of an ‘objective’ point of view on the seeming subjectivism of conditions. But the aim of such objectivism is actually to enhance our capacities for reflexivity: in that sense, sociology as an analysis of the fields is a kind of work upon the self. The aim is not ultimately to criticise from on high but to include one’s own position in the labour of objectification in a ‘liberating effort to objectify all objectifications’: ‘This, in my opinion, is the principal function of theoretical culture: to provide the means for knowing what one is doing and of freeing oneself from the naiveté associated with the lack of consciousness of one’s bounds.’55 So what is this – ultimately ethical – notion of reflexivity? As will be obvious from the preceding remarks, to understand this notion it will be helpful to consider the nature of science on Bourdieu’s account 52 53 54 55

Bourdieu, Pascalian Mediations, p. 109; Bourdieu, Rules of Art, p. 312. Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., p. 207. Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, p. 184.

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– and particularly as this issue is addressed in a late work, Science of Science and Reflexivity. Science A scientific discourse, for Bourdieu, is one which fulfils two conditions: let us call these closure and realism. Science relies upon an ethic of disinterestedness from worldly powers – its famous ‘objectivity’. As such, science is constrained by its commitment to the real, its realist nomos. You simply cannot be a scientist unless you believe that there is a real world out there. But science also has closure. As Bourdieu puts it, the Archimedean point of his theory of science lies in the contention that what distinguishes science from other kinds of cognitive-intellectual activity is ultimately a social fact – that producers have as their clients only the closest of other producers.56 Only scientists understand other scientists. But only scientists in the same small sub-field can really understand each other. That is what, for Bourdieu, is specific about science. This, incidentally, leads Bourdieu to make a somewhat barbed comment about economics as a sort of pseudo-science. Economics adopts ‘science effects’ from authentic science not by being particularly sound on the realist front – that is, by being true – but by being an exceptionally authoritarian discipline: in other words by imitating the closure of science through essentially disciplinary means. Economics is not necessarily true but it is disciplined.57 This is an intriguing way to understand economics. But where would this leave Bourdieu’s own discipline, sociology? One would think that sociology would have no claim to be a science. Sociology completely fails at closure since, although it might attempt to produce jargons of its own, not to be fooled, the general public persists in believing that it knows something about its own social world regardless of what sociologists tell them is going on. And it fails on the realism front simply because – by definition – the object of sociology, society, is, though real enough, a social construction if only for the banal fact that it is made of people and people’s perceptions of what is going on.58 And yet Bourdieu wants to insist that sociology – or at least his sort of sociology – is indeed a science. Why is this? 56 Bourdieu, The Science of Science and Reflexivity, p. 54. 57 Ibid., p. 75. 58 Ibid., p. 88.

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Reflexivity again The answer lies by way of recourse to this much-vaunted principle of reflexivity itself. Reflexivity is not to be opposed to objectivity, but is an aspect of it. For Bourdieu, it seems that a scientific sociology – as opposed to a scientific physics or a scientific chemistry – is necessarily a reflexive discipline. Now reflexivity does not mean simply the subjectivist principle that one is aware of what one is doing and one’s limitations in doing so. Nor does it mean what some Anglo-Saxon sociologists of science mean by it: the awareness of the contradictory nature of one’s own position as a social scientist trying to say something that is ‘true’ in an irresolutely relativist world.59 That is, for want of a better term, epistemic reflexivity. Bourdieu rightly or wrongly has a particular loathing for that sort. Rather, and in contrast to these, we might call Bourdieu’s principle of reflexivity an objectivising one. The point about objectivising reflexivity is that it provides an analogue to the objectivising tendencies of ‘scientific’ sociological analysis itself. It functions not as an alternative to such analysis but as a corrective to it: in parallel with it, not in contradistinction to it. Reflexivity is needed simply because, as intellectuals, theorists or whatever we simply are condemned to seek out a certain autonomy from our subject matter. But too much adherence to such autonomy can lead to a kind of fetishism of objectivity, such as we believe – in the manner, Bourdieu thinks, of certain kinds of philosophy – that we have access to a universal rationality. Whereas, on the contrary, our temptations towards the universal – though laudatory because aiming at impartiality – need to be balanced by our recognition of our own space of interests in being interested in the objective in the first place. So in the social sciences, objectivising reflexivity comes about when the social scientist seeks to gain a perspective on his or her own objectivising tendencies by recognition of his or her own place in the world, or at least the universe of available positions towards which he or she is oriented. Reflexivity is, obviously, an ethico-critical concept. It divides, at least for our purposes here, into at least two, albeit very closely related, forms in Bourdieu’s work: the sociology of the intellectual field itself, and what Bourdieu calls auto-analysis. Each will be discussed in turn, with concentration mostly on the latter. 59 See for example S. Woolgar, ed., Knowledge and Reflexivity (London: Sage, 1988).

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The structure of modern cultural theory Intellectual sociology

The sociology of intellectuals is a key site of investigation for Bourdieu. It is fully as much a part of his cultural sociology as is his work in Distinction or on the artistic fields. It is not just that intellectuals have certain kinds of power but that the figure of the intellectual – just like that other cultural figure, the artist – is the incarnation of the very essence of culture: the principle of autonomy. And as we know, Bourdieu the ethicist is deeply interested in the question of autonomy. The sociologist, as an intellectual, inhabits – unsurprisingly enough – the intellectual field. Therefore to be reflexive about what one is doing one needs to understand the intellectual field which one occupies. To do so one needs sociology, or rather sociological history, or at least a certain kind of sociological history: the history of the fields in which agents operate – for instance, the artistic or literary field, the economic field, the political field and so on. Reflexivity is useful because it illuminates the social conditions of what we take to be our autonomy, objectivity and disinterestedness when it comes to our behaviour as actors in particular fields. In this sense it has indispensable educational value. This is especially so of the sociology of intellectuals since intellectuals in particular, it seems, tend to think of themselves as having freedom, conscience and autonomy. As Bourdieu puts it: ‘The sociology of intellectuals brings to light the particular form of interest which is the intellectual interest in disinterestedness.’60 In further outlining briefly what Bourdieu is saying here, we can truncate matters somewhat but without hopefully losing their essence. The intellectual field, like any other, is characterised by rules of distinction not dissimilar to those entailed in cultural consumption more generally. Putting things very simply, we can see, argues Bourdieu, that the intellectual field positively codes the ‘purer’ or more apparently disinterested forms of knowledge at the expense of more empirically based disciplines. Philosophy is the quintessential example of an intellectual discipline in so far as it has made – or, anyway, constantly attempts to make – a complete break with the world as such. It is a ‘pure’ discipline. Sociology, on the other hand, is a vulgar, lowly kind of enterprise on this model, suspended somewhere between the arts and the sciences and muddied by its 60 Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity, p. 94.

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involvement with everyday life and ordinary people.61 But the basic difference is really at the level of the ethics of autonomy. Philosophy has made itself autonomous from the social world, sociology has not. Sociology is the pariah science par excellence, and Bourdieu’s later writings are so full of the complaint that everyone loathes sociology that one might suspect that he himself, a sort of martyr in this respect, masochistically enjoyed this supposedly subaltern status. Not that Bourdieu’s is exactly an anti-intellectual position. For he holds that to do sociology at all one does not simply embrace the social world as it is. On the contrary, even here one must make the ‘break’ from the social world in order to ‘objectify’ the world of subjective dispositions. Even in a book of testimony such as The Weight of the World, Bourdieu never talks the language of simple-minded empiricism – of getting one’s hands dirty in the world ‘as it is’.62 Rather there is a ‘double break’ that needs to be performed: the break from the scholastic reason of the philosophers and the break from the spontaneous understanding of the social world. Reflexivity, the understanding of one’s own location in the space of the fields, is needed on both counts. Auto-analysis Sociology, then, is a science of the fields animated by and conducted in the name of a certain kind of reflexivity. One must understand the fields in which certain things can be said and done and certain things can not. But there is also another, second kind of reflexivity which is, in a sense, more personal. Or rather, it is about being objective about oneself or at least about one’s position in the fields in which one finds oneself; and this can contain a personal element, even if one has to be somewhat sceptical of what Bourdieu called the ‘autobiographical illusion’ that one even has such a thing as an autobiography.63 Illusions of this latter sort notwithstanding, during the closing years of his life Bourdieu produced several autobiographical fragments within larger work, culminating in his posthumously published

61 P. Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, trans. P. Collier (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), p. 122. 62 P. Bourdieu, The Weight of the World, trans. P. Parkhurst Ferguson (Cambridge: Polity, 1999). 63 Cf. P. Bourdieu, ‘L’illusion biographique’, Actes des Recherches en Sciences Sociales, 63–3 (1986), pp. 69–72.

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‘confessions’ – in Esquisse pour une auto-analyse.64 This text is a uniquely important source for insight into Bourdieu’s own quest for autonomy. What is the status of these autobiographical reflections? We shall see that they are to function as counter-balances to the objectivising, ‘scientific’ vocation of the sociologist. Actually, they are not really autobiography in a confessional sense. They do not document the ins and outs of Bourdieu’s career or his personal life. They are really biography not autobiography: a sort of biography of his intellectual presence, his ethos as an intellectual. That is why Bourdieu sometimes invoked the idea of ‘impersonal’ confessions. On the one hand these serve to show how Bourdieu found himself taking the positions in the French intellectual field that he took, and on the other hand they function as a kind of ‘impersonal’ apology for the kind of figure Bourdieu saw himself to be, and as such represent not just an incidental ‘background’ to his work but an important, because reflexive, component of it. This sort of reflexive project is about uncovering the conditions of one’s own putative autonomy. In that sense, it is, of course, an obviously ethico-critical exercise. The key theme is the character of Bourdieu’s self-perceived heterodoxy – his self-vaunted outsider status. Bourdieu’s personal intellectual position, his origins being in the provincial peasantry, appeared to demand, so far as he was concerned, that he should actually cultivate a certain outsiderness. But such cultivation was difficult owing to a paucity of resources. His comparison of his own experience with that of Michel Foucault – admired, certainly, for his intellectual scholarship and commitment – encapsulates this well.65 Foucault, Bourdieu notes, was haute-bourgeois and homosexual, allowing him the options of aestheticism and (individual) transgression, options that were not available to Bourdieu himself.66 Bourdieu, as a sort of haute-peasant (his father worked in the postal service but was from peasant stock) and being merely heterosexual, was forced, it seems, to resort to mere sociology. Philosophy is the enemy. Philosophy, pivot of the scholastic point of view, is predicated upon the very rejection of the social world that Bourdieu, from his peasant stock, is both unable and unwilling to 64 Bourdieu, Esquisse pour une Auto-analyse; cf. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, pp. 33–42, and Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity, pp. 94–114. 65 Bourdieu, Esquisse pour une Auto-analyse, pp. 102–7. 66 Ibid., p. 106.

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accomplish. Yet to repudiate philosophy is to repudiate one’s sense of election as one of the intellectual elite. Hence the embrace of sociology becomes, in effect, a heroic act of intellectual martyrdom. In turning his back on philosophy, Bourdieu is turning his back upon the very idea of the pure intellectual. In his autobiographical writings, Bourdieu makes abundantly clear that he himself was particularly gifted as a philosopher, hence the repudiation is all the more a matter of autonomy – a question of choice rather than necessity. That this is ultimately an ethical quest is relayed most obviously by the spiritual language. The turn away from philosophy towards the pariah sciences of the social world was a matter of conversion. The spiritual terminology – martyrdom, conversion – is utterly characteristic; and it is not surprising that Bourdieu embarks upon a journey which is more like a spiritual ordeal than a ‘pure’ intellectual enterprise, during which he makes this conversion to the social sciences and his martyrdom becomes complete. This journey is to Algeria, where – to cut matters short rather drastically – he is taught by humble people the limitations of the scholastic point of view. Now, as J.D. Barbour has argued, the travel narrative is an established autobiographical figure, used to convey a sense of sincerity – that one’s choices are objective rather than simply aesthetic.67 Bourdieu’s Algerian experience was less simply either a period of ‘fieldwork’ or of ‘national service’ than – to continue with the apposite religious vocabulary here – a sort of spiritual baptism, a conversion-experience to the ethic of, so to speak, the denegation of the process of the negation of the social world that he saw in just about everyone else. So, the Esquisse pour une Auto-analyse is in fact a spiritual apology. It would bear comparison less with works such as Rousseau’s Confessions or Althusser’s The Future Lasts a Long Time than with works of a specifically religious discursive tenor such as John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua. An ‘apology’ in this sense is the record of a spiritual journey and is a ‘defence’ (Greek, apologia) whereas a ‘confession’ is an admission of one’s failings, albeit with an eye to one’s eventual conversion and enlightenment, as in the founding example of St Augustine’s Confessions.68 In that sense, Bourdieu’s is not a confession. Bourdieu does not – on his own account at least – appear to have any failings. He has nothing to 67 J.D. Barbour, The Conscience of the Autobiographer (London: Macmillan, 1992), p. 19. 68 Ibid., p. 11.

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confess: his sense of guilt is restricted to the intellectual kind; that he is an intellectual at all. Why is this? Being an intellectual, it seems, is in some ways a bad thing in that it presumes, with its innately objectivising spirit, a kind of impossible autonomy from the social world. But there is a little more to it than that, as we shall see. For although it is an impossible autonomy, then nevertheless, for all that, it is none the less a form of autonomy and ultimately worthwhile for that reason. Intellectualism and ambivalence In another work, Pascalian Meditations, the title of which also betrays spiritual as well as Cartesian-scientific overtones, Bourdieu observed: I have never really felt justified in existing as an intellectual; and I have always tried – as I have tried again here – to exorcise everything in my thinking that might be linked to that status, such as philosophical intellectualism. I do not like the intellectual in myself, and what may sound in my writing like anti-intellectualism is chiefly directed against the intellectualism or intellectuality that remains in me, despite all my efforts, such as the difficulty, so typical of intellectuals, I have in accepting that my freedom has its limits.69

Aside from the image of the ‘pure’ intellectual, Bourdieu is especially ambivalent about the model of what he called the total intellectual, the Sartrean image of the omniscient ‘master-thinker’, derived from the French khâgne system – the one who ‘knows everything’.70 For many this resistance might seem odd in someone so obviously just such an intellectual, one self-fashioned very much on what David Macey has called the j’accuse model: that very French tradition of the intellectual telling the truth to power of which Zola and Sartre were the great examples.71 This is particularly true for Bourdieu’s later life, which was taken up with vociferous intellectual activity directed in classic j’accuse fashion against the neo-liberalisation of French politics and society.72 Moreover, Bourdieu’s own model of intellectual activity is certainly totalising in that he took as his vocation a huge variety of 69 70 71 72

Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, p. 7 Ibid., p. 36, and Bourdieu, Esquisse pour une Auto-analyse, p. 37. D. Macey, ‘Michel Foucault – j’accuse!’ New Formations, 25 (1995), pp. 5–13. See for example P. Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge: Polity, 1988).

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aspects of the social world, without succumbing to what he regarded as the fetishism of specialisation.73 So what is going on? Surely the Esquisse pour une Auto-analyse is an ethico-critical exercise: it functions to resolve on the basis of critical reflection the tensions in Bourdieu’s intellectual make-up but also within the make-up of intellectualism itself, that is, as a particular kind of vocation caught between a commitment to the universal and a scepticism towards it. It is an account of how Bourdieu steered between and presumably beyond these various positions of anti-intellectualism, the pure intellectual and the total intellectual. It is less perhaps a matter of making a record of his intellectual life than it is an exercise of the self, a spiritual exercise perhaps, however ‘impersonal’, in that it is a sort of self-justification, a work on his intellectual conscience: what Barbour calls an act of ‘moral selfassessment’.74 Another way to put this would be to say that the Esquisse pour une auto-analyse functions as a test and so ultimately a confirmation – and not a repudiation – of Bourdieu’s own sensibility of ethico-critical autonomy. Antinomies of universalism So in fact it would be a mistake to think that Bourdieu simply repudiates the model of the intellectual and, in so doing, repudiates the objectivising impulses of ‘scientific’ thought. His ambivalence towards intellectualism has been invoked, not his outright rejection of it, so this implies that there was something, even residually, worthwhile about being an intellectual for him. And indeed that is the case, not least in so far as Bourdieu was, as Pascalian Meditations makes clear, well aware that rejecting the intellectual in himself in absolute terms would amount to ‘bad faith’ since, as he well knew, he just was an intellectual, take it or leave it. For Bourdieu, so for intellectualism more generally. Intellectual autonomy – the objectivising tendencies of all intellectual work, indeed all cultural work per se – for Bourdieu, actually is real but it is antinomical. This antinomical status is there even in Bourdieu’s very definition of the intellectual. If the intellectual is not just objective but disinterested, and specifically outside the political field, this is precisely because, on the basis of that very disinterestedness, the 73 Bourdieu, Esquisse pour une Auto-analyse, pp. 48–50. 74 Barbour, The Conscience of the Autobiographer, p. 8.

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intellectual is able to intervene – with all the more effect – within the political field. That is, because he or she is not of politics. Autonomy, paradoxically, confers certain powers of intervention. Hence, Bourdieu’s definition: ‘The intellectual is constituted as such by intervening in the political field in the name of autonomy and of the specific values of a field of cultural production which has attained a high degree of independence with respect to various powers’.75 Now, at the root of this antinomy is another; that the universal has a history. This is Bourdieu’s way of escape from the simplistic universalism characteristic of the scholastic point of view. There is universalism but it is a cultural – it is tempting to say, ultimately an ethical – achievement, and is not, paradoxically enough, universally ‘given’. It really is universal, but it is also historically constituted. Bourdieu writes: We have to acknowledge that reason did not fall from heaven as a mysterious and forever inexplicable gift, and that it is therefore historical through and through; but we are not forced to conclude, as is often supposed, that it is reducible to history. It is in history, and in history alone, that we must seek the principle of the relative independence of reason from the history of which it is the product; or, more precisely, in the strictly historical, but entirely specific logic through which the exceptional universes in which the singular history of reason is fulfilled were established.76

So understanding – reflexively – the conditions of the universal does not mean repudiating it. On the contrary. Bourdieu’s is a critique of objectivising reason not a denunciation of it. In recognising the will to the universal as an ethical, epistemic and cultural achievement we should be all the more aware of its precarious status as a cultural artefact that needs defence against its detractors: the relativists, the postmodernists, and the self-appointed heresiarchs of various descriptions. Reason and history are not opposed; rather, universal history is the product of a historical labour.77 What we are offered here is a third way, then, as Bourdieu sees it, between universalism, as normally conceived, and relativism. 75 Bourdieu, Rules of Art, p. 129. 76 Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, p. 109 77 Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity, p. 54, and Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, pp. 93–127. Cf. Max Weber’s famous ‘Author’s introduction’ to his religious sociology, now in M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. T. Parsons (London: Routledge, 1992).

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Something like perhaps, as Paul Ricoeur once put it, a ‘contextualism of the universal’ itself.78 This itself has ethico-critical and political consequences. As Bourdieu argues the matter, the ‘monopolisation of the universal’ – presumably by scholastic and unreflexive disciplines such as philosophy – is a logical and political ‘scandal’; and there is a need instead for a ‘political struggle for the universalisation of the means of access to the universal’.79 So far from leading to anti-intellectual conclusions, Bourdieu’s ‘shame’ about being an intellectual leads him to the view – paradoxical, but coherent none the less – that intellectuals have to mobilise collectively to defend the principle of autonomy of the intellectual field itself in what Bourdieu calls – in a nicely antinomical phrase – a logic of the ‘corporatism of the universal’.80 As he puts it: The anarchic order reigning in an intellectual field which has achieved a high degree of autonomy is always fragile and threatened to the extent that it constitutes a challenge to the laws of the ordinary economic world, and to the rules of common sense. It is dangerous for it to depend on just the heroism of a few. It is not virtue which can found a free intellectual order; it is a free intellectual order which can found intellectual virtue.81

Difficult autonomy So there is the shame of being an intellectual and something like almost the pride in being an intellectual, being in potential solidarity with other intellectuals. Is this to come full circle? Is Bourdieu, as it were, having his anti-intellectual cake and eating it? Yes and no. Or rather, if this seems like a contradiction then that is because it is a contradiction – or, as we have said, an antinomy. Bourdieu presents his findings as per the intellectual field as at once the product of science and of a personal and deeply authentic odyssey. The two are linked. It is not least the personal sincerity of Bourdieu’s account that is designed to make us believe it as science.82 But what Bourdieu has 78 P. Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction, trans. K. Blamey (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), p. 61. 79 Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, p. 84. 80 Bourdieu, Rules of Art, pp. 339–48. 81 Ibid., p. 347. 82 Cf. on sincerity in science and scholarship B. Williams, Truth and Truthfulness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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recounted in his autobiographical reflections is less the solution to the problems of his own intellectual make-up than the predicament of intellectualism itself. In fact no one – not just Bourdieu – is born an intellectual. On that score, everyone who attains that sort of an autonomy is in a condition of alienation. But it is not by that false autonomy. Intellectual objectivisation really is an achievement: one to be both defended and yet monitored for its limitations on the basis of reflexive considerations. What Bourdieu is describing in his auto-analysis is not the heroism of Bourdieu only (for that way would lead us only to interpretations, like his own at times, based upon paranoia and a certain kind of self-indulgence), but also the predicament of the intellectual per se; caught between the antinomies of the contextual and the universal, autonomy and the political, empiricism and theoreticism, involvement and detachment, history and reason. Of course there is no pure intellectualism. Far from it. Intellectualism just is an antinomical vocation. Such is how it is, in differing ways, for anyone involved in the difficult autonomy of the intellectual life. But, further, the figure of the intellectual is in fact only the incarnation of something that is actually more general, something that exists in all of us whether we consider ourselves to be intellectuals or not. It is the incarnation of the will to autonomy itself, the will to make a break from those forms of dependency which condition us. Autonomy – and this is ultimately an ethical finding not a sociological one – is always difficult autonomy. Educationality and cultural theory This brings us, finally, to the question of educationality in Bourdieu. Basically, there are two ways of seeing or using his work in this context. These are somewhat caricatured, but will serve to make the point. The first way is to think of him as a boring methodologist putting sociology and the social sciences on their final, ‘scientific’ footing. This is to make him the sort of ‘constipated searcher after truth’ of the sort that Paul Feyerabend once invoked in relation to received understandings of Galileo.83 Bourdieu did, one suspects, regard himself as a heroic searcher after truth, constipated or not; but in any case alternative principles of reading for his work are possible to suggest. These bring out his ethico-critical as opposed to his posi83 See P. Feyerabend, Against Method (London: Verso, 1978).

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tive, ‘scientific’ side (not that, at least as a pretension, it necessarily denies the latter), with the consequence that we should regard Bourdieu not just as a sociologist of culture but as a modern cultural theorist. Bourdieu’s uses, anyway, are as an educationalist as well as a positive, epistemic social scientist. We can sum this up by saying that, first, on a general level, Bourdieu’s work is exemplary of a certain concern for freedom, autonomy and difference. If his work constantly reiterates the extent to which our freedom and originality is an illusion this is not to damn the ideals of freedom and originality but to renew them, and in terms of a practical intent: Bourdieu’s work is an assemblage of reminders as to the necessary limits of our autonomy; it is work that exhorts us to labour, so to speak, upon the conditions of our freedom in order not to denigrate it but to renew it. Bourdieu is sometimes read as an arrogant, empire-building thinker, but in terms of what we have been calling educationality his work is a kind of ethico-critical lesson precisely against the arrogance of the unthought assumption of autonomy, combined with a commitment to it as an ideal: a question of reflexivity and work. Second, Bourdieu’s own intellectual experience is exemplary here, not because – to reiterate – he was himself heroic necessarily but because he embodied (and embraced) the tensions that are actually constitutive of the difficult autonomy of intellectual existence, which is to say the difficult autonomy of saying just about anything about the world, of explaining it, even of relating to the world at all. So for intellectualism in particular, we also need to read culture in general. Pure intellectualism, pure culture – these are impossible. But that is just the way with autonomy. The fact that complete autonomy from our own particular social perspectives is impossible does not mean that the ethico-critical task of autonomisation is not in itself a worthwhile one. That is what Bourdieu’s work, in spite of all its irritations and shortcomings, serves to show. Bourdieu’s is not necessarily a way to follow, but it is an exemplary way none the less.

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A note on postmodern cultural theory Modernism and postmodernism – Aestheticisation and the death of art – Resistance and aesthetic redundancy – After autonomy – Postmodern morality – After educationality – Culture is everywhere

Much has been made in this book of the idea of modern cultural theory being ultimately ethical in its aims and outlook. Or at least, our principles of reading in relation to Adorno, Bourdieu and Foucault have been, in effect, ethico-critical ones; emphasising that these thinkers are best read not simply in ‘positive’ or epistemic terms but as contributing to a kind of ethically minded reconfiguration of ourselves as critical beings, something that has been shorthanded in terms of the ethics of autonomy. Rather than go into all that again, let us turn in this final chapter very briefly to alternative conceptions of cultural theory that are not possible to interpret so easily in terms of this ethico-critical quest. These can, for the sake of convenience, be termed postmodern. This short chapter, however, does not offer an overview of or general commentary on the by now in any case rather jaded concept of postmodernism and still less of all those many other offshoots, in contemporary post-structuralist discourse or second-wave feminism for example.1 Its aims are much more limited: seeking only to differentiate postmodern cultural theory in the very widest sense (one which might even have included apparently anti-postmodern discourses such as rational choice theory) from the forms of modern cultural theory that have been the focus of this book; and in doing so the focus is quite narrowly on questions of aesthetics, culture and creativity. 1 Much of this tends to take a literary emphasis: see, representatively, A. Easthope & K. McGowan, eds, A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2004).

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The basic and simple point is that, for better or worse, with postmodernism the regulative ideal of an ethics of autonomy has certainly been given up. But it is not just that. Rather, there are different rules of discourse at stake here altogether. For, in our terminology, postmodern discourse – for all its relativism and scepticism about the status of knowledge and truth – actually does seem to be oriented towards epistemic rather than ethical questions. This itself will need some explaining, but there is also something of a modest twist to be had in the ending. Modernism and postmodernism Suffice to say, then, that the aim here is not so much to denounce postmodernism as a form of discourse – a tiresome and probably unnecessary enterprise – but only to resituate it in relation to the ethics of modernism itself. There is nothing too original in this. It has become de rigueur not to oppose modernism and postmodernism too starkly as if they were simply chronological concepts.2 One of the most famous – and certainly the most intellectually interesting – of the original proponents of postmodernism as a concept, Jean-François Lyotard, claimed that, far from coming after modernism, in fact postmodernism predates it. ‘A work can only become modern if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.’3 The continuity to be invoked here is not, however, of this sort. On the contrary, postmodernism and modernism are indeed opposed to each other; and we will be briefly alluding to some of the thinkers who describe this contrast most starkly – not Lyotard, who appears to us to be a different (more difficult) case, but Baudrillard, Maffesoli, Jameson, Bauman. Against this postmodern context it might seem somewhat perverse to claim any persistence at all in the ideal of culture as ethical autonomy. It depends, however, on what is being defended. It is worth conceding, certainly, that in postmodern times, the Arnoldian – ideal – concept of culture is now dead. For Matthew Arnold, culture was something to pit against nature: to raise nature up to something better than itself. This was culture as moral ideal.4 No 2 See P. Osborne, The Politics of Time (London: Verso, 1995). 3 J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. G. Bennington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 79. 4 See M. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963); cf. Z. Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 33–4.

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one, except perhaps the indomitable Roger Scruton, believes that any more. The morally uplifting notion of culture is well and truly finished. And certainly this is so according to postmodernists such as Bauman: ‘Culture is about hierarchy, discernment and evaluation; postmodernity, on the contrary, is about the flattening of hierarchies, absence of discretion and equivalence.’5 Is culture dead then? What has disappeared is the idea of culture as a rarefied ideal, the product of moral or ethical work. But not the least of the effects of the postmodern turn has been a sort of culturalisation of everything, such that for some writers postmodernism is itself actually a ‘mode of production’ in which ‘cultural production finds a specific functional place’.6 This is significant. Postmodernism, for writers such as Jameson, does not simply denote aspects of the cultural ‘superstructure’. Rather, in postmodernism, culture becomes infrastructural: it is everywhere. Culture has spread across the economy and the social body: ‘everything, including commodity production and high and speculative finance, has become cultural; and culture has equally become profoundly commodity or commodity oriented’.7 Culture is both diffused and generalised, no longer inhabiting a particular ‘sphere’ of its own but is ‘consumed throughout daily life itself, in shopping, in professional activities, in the various often televisual forms of leisure, in production for the market and in the consumption of those market products, indeed in the most secret folds and corners of the quotidian’.8 It is possible to argue, and has been argued by some, that such a diffusion of culture represents the generalisation of modernism: the overflowing of modernist principles from the sphere of art into the social body more widely. As a result, it is not just culture that is everywhere but aesthetic principles: only the aesthetic model is no longer tied to a particular sphere – that of art per se – but is generalised to apply to just about everything. But even if postmodernism is a generalisation of modernism, in some respects, the upshot is the displacement of the specificity of aesthetics within modernism, and thus also of its ethico-critical aspects. 5 Ibid., p. 34. 6 F. Jameson, The Cultural Turn: selected writings on the postmodern (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 44–5. 7 Ibid., p. 73; more generally see F. Jameson, Postmodernism: or the cultural logic of late capitalism (London: Verso, 1991). 8 Jameson, The Cultural Turn, p. 111.

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Aestheticisation and the death of art Sociologists – especially those following in the footsteps of that protopostmodernist sociologist Georg Simmel – have invoked the idea of an aestheticisation of culture occurring in postmodern times.9 According to this view, more and more areas of existence are coming under the guiding influence of aesthetic principles rather than those of morality, politics or the economy: ‘The thing that is at issue here is whether, after homo politicus and homo economicus, we are not confronted by homo aestheticus?’10 What Michel Maffesoli appears to be thinking of here are phenomena such as processes of the commodification of everyday life as well as aspects of social solidarity itself. What he calls the ‘ethics of the aesthetic’ entails what our terminology might adapt as the ‘morality of the aesthetic’ – not an embrace of the principles of art (in a narrow, aestheticist sense) but an emphasis on vitalism and creativity in more and more departments of life: ‘a creativity of common meaning, instinctual in some way, which serves as a sort of substratum for diverse social creations’.11 With the apparent diminution of class allegiances and of narrow individualism, people come together for the sake of the ambience of togetherness itself. Maffesoli invokes a ‘collective narcissism’ which emphasises the aesthetic ‘because what it involves is a particular style, a particular mode of life, of ideology, of dress, of sexual manners, in short, everything pertaining to the order of collective passion’.12 If everything becomes aesthetic, where does this leave the sphere of art itself? Both everywhere and nowhere – and certainly minus its Adorno-esque powers of critique. Art no longer houses critical culture. So it is hardly surprising that in spite of this apparent aestheticisation of everything in fact it is the demise of art that has been heralded as contiguous with the advent of postmodernity. Hegel preached the death of art, but the actual assassin has arguably been postmodernism: a state of affairs which has been outlined with some 9 See for example W. Welsch, Undoing Aesthetics, trans. A. Inkpin (London: Sage, 1997), and, in a different register, some of the discussion in U. Bech, A. Giddens & S. Lash, Reflexive Modernisation: politics, tradition and aesthetics in the modern social order (Cambridge: Polity, 1994). 10 M. Maffesoli, ‘The ethic of aesthetics’, trans. R. Shields Theory, Culture and Society, 8 (1991), pp. 7–20, p. 7. 11 Ibid., p. 11. Cf. on postmodernism as morality R. Shusterman, ‘Postmodern aestheticism: a new moral philosophy?’ Theory, Culture and Society, 5:2–3 (1988), pp. 337–55. 12 Maffesoli, ‘The ethics of aesthetics’, p. 16; cf. M. Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes, trans. D. Smith (London: Sage, 1996).

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cogency by Jean Baudrillard. The process began with a certain kind of modernism; with, say, Marcel Duchamp and his ready-mades. Duchamp transposed the everyday object – his famous urinal, for instance – into an art object. From here, the entire world can be reconstructed as a ready-made. ‘In itself, Duchamp’s act is infinitesimal but, starting with him, all the banality of the world passes into aesthetics, one that truly brings aesthetics in the traditional sense to an end . . . And for me, the fact that the entire world becomes aesthetic signifies the end of art and aesthetics in a way.’13 But what is it that is ended here? Baudrillard extends Walter Benjamin’s argument in terms of the death of aura, briefly invoked in Chapter 2. In Benjamin’s (modernist) age of mechanical reproducibility, there was still a residue of the real world, whereas in our postmodern electronic age of digital reproduction the ‘original’ has disappeared altogether. Moreover, reproducibility means that all sorts of different contexts can be juxtaposed: in pastiche, collage, allegory. Postmodern architecture, for example, simply mixes up forms without bothering about their heritage. Everything is flattened and the contrast between high and low becomes an irrelevance. Baudrillard asks if we can still even invoke the idea of a ‘work of art’ at all under such conditions. Not really. ‘It is becoming something else. It is not exactly a commodity but it passes into the condition of a sign which must be able to circulate like any other. Therefore its own time and place, its own uniqueness, is effectively removed.’14 Resistance and aesthetic redundancy So art is just another form of the semiosis of commodification. The choice between Schoenberg and jazz is now redundant; and so likewise the choice, if that is what it was, between aesthetic resistance and cultural capitulation. The exquisite irony of postmodernism is that, with the collapse of aesthetics into culture and culture into society, the only thing left for art to do is register its own utter pointlessness – except, perhaps, as a marketing tool.15 13 J. Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, trans. A. Hodges (New York: Semiotext(e), 2005), p. 52. 14 J. Baudrillard, ‘The work of art in the electronic age’, in M. Gane, ed., Baudrillard Live (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 147. 15 On this, in the British context, see J. Stallabrass, High Art Lite (London: Verso, 2002) and, more generally, from the perspective of the corporate consumption of art, C.Wu, Privatising Culture (London: Verso, 2002).

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What resistance there is has to relate only to this flatly semioticised world. Without reality nothing can really resist. We are famously at the ‘end of production’: all that remains is endless, weightless semiotic circulation.16 In modernity, symbolism was possible. Signs could actually refer to something like the real world. In postmodernity there is just a general semiosis – signs just refer to other signs. Consumer culture is itself simply and only the dissemination of signs. Identities are effects of the consumption of signs; signs of taste, signs of fashion. Commodities themselves are just signs. Even resistance in postmodernity is resistance towards the residues of symbolisation; resistance to the idea that anything could have a determinate meaning. The masses ‘resist’ leftist culture only in so far as they reject the label of the proletariat or the people; resistance, in so far as it exists at all, is semiotic refusal. There is little or no agency in such resistance; no ethico-critical work is involved. It is just that – refusal, indifference. If there is agency at all it is only in the endless ‘fascination’ with culture. In Baudrillard’s world the masses – whoever they are exactly – scarcely believe in culture any more than does anybody else. People are not really duped by culture; rather there is no distinction between culture and the world, as everyday life itself becomes imploded into the forms of the media.17 No longer is there any reality outside to be tested against these mediated forms. Postmodern media fascination is not a question of ideology, then, because hyper-reality is not illusory. ‘The unreal is no longer that of dream or of fantasy, or of a beyond or a within, it is that of a hallucinatory resemblance of the real with itself.’18 The real itself disappears and becomes the hyper-real. It is not, then, that postmodernism is a world of dream images, or something out of a science fiction film. It is much more boring than that. In its own way, hyper-reality is quite realist and everyday: even postmodern art is tempted by a ‘pure objectivity’ beyond subjectivity, almost a form of empiricism.19 But, more importantly, nor is hyper-reality illusory in the sense that anyone is easily taken in by it. It is not that everyone is that 16 See J. Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. I. Hamilton Grant (London: Sage, 1993). 17 J. Baudrillard, ‘The masses: the implosion of the social in the media’, trans. M. McLean, New Literary History, 16:3 (1985), pp. 577–89. 18 J. Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. P. Foss & P. Patton (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 142. 19 Cf. H. Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996).

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stupid. That is not the least of the differences with Adorno. Although it is true that Adorno – for instance in his analysis of the powers of astrology – invoked a kind of ‘secondary occultism’ according to which people were able to see through, in a more or less blasé manner, the mechanisms of their own manipulation by the culture industry, the postmodern world is much more saturated in ironic capitulation and indifference even than that. Here it is as if manipulation were known and desired and desired because known. To succumb is, after all, to become more or less useless. It is true that this, in its own way, may even be a sort of resistance so far as some postmodernists are concerned. Perhaps, says Baudrillard, the function of our consumption of the products of the media is actually to resist the demands of everyday life: to bring about – presumably by the inculcation of stupor and trivia – the ‘joyful expulsion of all the encumbering superstructures of being and will’.20 As for so-called high art, that would certainly not be, for the postmodernists, a site of resistance except in so far – one imagines – it reflexively refuses its own status as art. Either way, the Adorno line on aesthetics and the critical importance of high art would seem redundant under postmodern conditions. But in fact Adorno can be defended a little more vigorously on this point. There is a category mistake in assuming that the idea of art needs the institutional existence of a coherent artworld to have any provenance. For Kant, who of course founded the modern idea of the aesthetic, the discourse of aesthetics was a site of claims to universal agreement; which is not to say that Kant could have been so ignorant of the fact that aesthetics entails, in actuality, precisely dissent and disagreement.21 In other words, it was a discourse, so to speak, of desire rather than necessarily of institutional actuality, split between what it is and what, ethically speaking, it embodies. Adorno certainly thought that the project of high art had become redundant or at least could do so, but did not belittle the importance of the aesthetic principle for all that – indeed, he emphasised its importance all the more, precisely because of the likelihood of its redundancy. The death of art, which, after all, has been with us for a long time, does not mean that the principle of art – as an ultimately ethical ideal entwined with the pursuit of autonomy – is dead: not least in so far as reflection on 20 Baudrillard, ‘The masses’, p. 587. 21 See I. Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790), trans. W.S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), p. 162.

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art (perhaps of the sort embodied by the kinds of modern cultural theory we have been considering here) itself serves to reactivate the memory and possibility of such a principle. As Adorno wrote: ‘Assuming art is abolished, abolishes itself, vanishes or barely hangs on to precarious existence – all this does not mean that the content of past art will necessarily go down the drain, too. Art could well be survived by its past content in a new and different society, rid of its barbarous culture.’22 After autonomy The difference between a cultural commentator such as Baudrillard and a critical thinker such as Adorno is, then, not least, of an ultimately ethical order. Whereas Adorno invokes the presence of high art at least as an ethico-critical beacon, and indicator – however contradictory and fading – of the principle of autonomy, however currently moribund that principle is, Baudrillard’s world is not ethical in this sense at all. Critical autonomy has simply ceased to be an issue. What is at stake is not the ethico-critical understanding of autonomy but the epistemic documentation – if perhaps not always, as many of the critics of postmodern writings tend to suggest, the celebration – of its abandonment. In fact, this is not necessarily to damn postmodernism. As description, no doubt it has a lot going for it. It is only to say that the rules of each critical game are different. Modern cultural theory has an ethical constitutive-interest in its subject matter. Oddly enough, given its scepticism about the concept of society, postmodern discourse is more often quite sociologistic in orientation; seeking to describe the world in more or less positive, descriptive terms. Certainly, the notion that postmodernism entails the death of the social is nonsense; one might as well say that it entails a ubiquity of the social; if albeit, as a result, possibly the demise of that specific domain known as ‘society’. As such, postmodernism – like sociology – is an epistemic and even at times a moral discourse but not an ethico-critical one. The category of truth has hardly been abandoned here. On the contrary, postmodernism is obsessed with truth. Sometimes of course there is a scepticism about the truth, but this attitude is almost as old as the history of modern reason itself. Hegel, C.S. Peirce – these are hardly

22 T. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: RKP, 1970), p. 5.

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postmoderns.23 And if the postmodernist documents the world often with melancholy irony, it is a documentation none the less: statements of things as they supposedly are which, though often evocative of a vague rebelliousness, and sometimes alluding at least gesturally to political matters, have no particular significance from an ethicocritical point of view. To appreciate further the difference between these critical games, take for instance the familiar topic of the postmodern eclipse of the subject of autonomy itself: the death of the individual that is so marked a feature of postmodernist discourse. The modernist ethic, it seems, was ‘organically linked to the conception of a unique self and private identity, a unique personality and individuality, which can be expected to generate its own unique vision of the world and to forge its own unique, unmistakable style’.24 This model, we are informed, has now evaporated: we are now in the era of the eclipse of the autonomous subject. Now, Adorno – to continue with him – certainly believed in the eclipse of the individual as being a feature of modernism itself, and he would doubtless also have concurred with such a verdict under postmodern conditions. Yet he addresses this eclipse in a different way, for ethical reasons; because he still values the principles of autonomy and critical reflection, thinking of them as worthy of redemption. Not so postmodernism, for which such ideals would be naive at best. The subject, the individual, simply has no coherence in such a discourse. Hence the effect of postmodernism is to vacate this notion of a coherent self: to rid ourselves of the notion not just of an individual critical responsibility but of individuation itself. Such an orientation is clearly at some odds from someone such as Adorno (not to mention Bourdieu who was, in any case, all too obviously a die-hard enemy of postmodern discourse), but also from a writer such as Michel Foucault, who after all, not unlike the postmodernists, did seek to extend the notion of the aesthetic beyond the artistic sphere itself and on to the terrain of subjectivity and the self. As is well known, Foucault, however, clearly and obviously retains a strong ethical dimension to his aesthetic thinking. In our chapter on his work, we found ourselves invoking matters of government and power as well as – in fact perhaps far more than – matters specifically 23 See on this point T. Osborne, Aspects of Enlightenment: social theory and the ethics of truth (London: UCL Press, 1998), p. 7. 24 Jameson, The Cultural Turn, p. 6.

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to do with culture or the artworld. The idea of the aesthetic, there in Foucault’s work, is a kind of operator that maps on to other interests but is not a lead-in to a culturalist perspective of any kind. For Foucault, the concern with the aesthetic is not an aspect of culturology but is inseparable from the ethical critique of autonomy; so even if it is a category that can be folded on to other, apparently nonaesthetic, fields of experience it does not lose its singularity for all that. In this sense, Foucault is strongly at odds with most postmodernism. Postmodern morality Of course some postmodernists do appear to take a somewhat different, apparently more overtly ethical, tack. In Zygmunt Bauman’s work for example, in particular his Postmodern Ethics, there is the specific argument that postmodernism entails a return to the ethical.25 But we have to be vigilant as to what Bauman actually means by this. Bauman starts from a basic distinction (which appears to govern all of his work, in spite of changes in terminology) between a modernity that was concerned to control ambivalence, and a postmodernity in which the ambivalent is something that has to be negotiated and worked with.26 Modernity was totalising and controlling; postmodernity has given up on this aspiration. Control is impossible. We have to live with ambivalence. So postmodernity entails a displacement of the legislative role of reason (where reason was supposed to guide all of the ends of society) with an interpretative one (where there is no absolute reason but only a plurality of rationalities).27 The result of this is not the anything-goes mentality of some accounts. Rather, for Bauman, postmodernism entails not a capitulation of moral values but a reactivation of them.28 This is because, whereas modernity purportedly attempted to evacuate the space of morality altogether and replaced it with the rule of reason, with the eclipse of that model a space is opened up once more for moral reflection. Postmodernity has returned us to morality, or rather to moralities, for given the prevalence of ambivalence in postmodernity there is really no scope for any single overarching moral system but 25 26 27 28

Z. Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). Z. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity, 1991). See Z. Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters (Cambridge: Polity, 1989). See Bauman, Postmodern Ethics.

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only for a plurality of moralities, and for endless moral negotiation. But Bauman’s return to ethics, compelling as it is, is hardly about ethics in our sense. Bauman uses the term ‘ethics’ to signify the production of moral rules: ethics, on his conception in effect means what we mean here by morality. Bauman’s is a descriptive argument about the presence of morality in postmodern societies, not a form of discourse with an ultimately ethical constitutive-interest of its own. Moreover, Bauman relies on something very alien to the modernist forms of cultural theory drawn on in this book; a theory of morality. Indeed, he is a moral foundationalist of a sort. Drawing on the work of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, Bauman asserts that moral relations have priority to those of ‘being’: we exist not, so to speak, for ourselves, but for the other.29 The moral is the demand that the other makes of us. All well and good. This is an interesting perspective on which to found a sociology of postmodernism, and Bauman’s work is justly celebrated. But, for better or worse, it is devoid of ethical content in the sense outlined here, referring to the root idea of the cultivation of critical autonomy: with the effect that, on our terms at least, there is plenty of morality in Postmodern Ethics but – again, on our terms – hardly any ethics as such. In fact, the principle of ethical autonomy would be more or less incompatible with the very idea of morality as primal responsibility for the other. That principle, as it has been outlined here, is no doubt too critical and individualistic (or rather singularistic, for it can be collective) and too strategic as opposed to being moral – indeed opposed to the morality system, as it is – to chime well with the Bauman–Levinas conception of morality. And what becomes of the aesthetic principle here? Bauman insists on a separation of aesthetics from that of morality. ‘Always and everywhere’, states Bauman, ‘the search for aesthetic satisfaction defies the pressures of moral responsibility’, even though he also adds that it is nevertheless the case that ‘unless constantly rejuvenated by aesthetic satisfaction responsibility may flounder’.30 Again, for better or worse, there is a difference from the kinds of modern cultural 29 Levinas’s work is not itself the issue here, except to observe that he probably did not quite deserve having the onus of sociological postmodernism offloaded on to his thought. For an accessible overview in English see E. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. R.A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985). 30 Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, p. 182. Levinas also characterises the aesthetic sphere as the domain of the irresponsible, one which has to be rescued by criticism.

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theory considered here, according to which the separation of aesthetics from the morality system does not at all imply a separation from the ethical field. To pursue aesthetic ideals is itself an ethical quest – quite possibly an impossible and futile one, as we saw in the case of Adorno – in that it is the pursuit of the principle of critical autonomy itself: it is reflexive work, critical reflection on autonomy as an ideal. The problem may just be a matter of terminology more than anything else. Rather like Michel Maffesoli, Bauman appears to code the aesthetic in pre-Kantian terms; that is, as sensuous feeling.31 That meaning is of course present in post-Kantian aesthetics but it is not always so dominant. It is to privilege the sensationist notion of the aesthetic as opposed to the ethico-critical version. Terminology is a matter for those using the terms, but certainly we reach the same basic result as before, which is to say that, in postmodernist discourse, the very idea of the aesthetic as a space of ethical work is occluded. Our point is not to argue that this occlusion is necessarily fatal or is necessarily wrong: only that it is there, and that postmodernism, as a result, is basically an epistemic, in fact mostly descriptive, form of discourse with no knowledge-constitutive interest of its own other than to describe things often in generalising, sociologistic terms purportedly as they are, even whilst on occasion mourning the impossibility of doing so. After educationality Another way to put much of this is to say that there is little or no educational element – educationality – in postmodern discourse. Jameson, Baudrillard and Bauman are trying to do ‘cognitive mapping’: that is, they themselves are more often than not describing things rather than criticising or endorsing them. There is an alignment between postmodernism, sociologism and certain kinds of Marxism here. They are all epistemic enterprises which often share – again, for better or worse – a certain anti-liberalism in that they are typically resistant to the more Kantian goal of an ethics of autonomy as an ultimate educational ideal. Adorno, for instance, was just as pessimistic as Baudrillard. But there is an ultimately ethical – even liberal – reason for this, in spite of his Marxism. It is as if he wants to provoke our instincts of autonomisation, to cultivate critical reflection, to provoke us into a sort of maturity. That is the sense of educationality 31 Bauman, Postmodern Ethics, pp. 168–9; cf. Maffesoli, ‘The ethics of aesthetics’.

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in Adorno; and that is what postmodernism gives up. Of course, it could be argued that postmodern writings are themselves often strategic, stagings of positions for particular effects.32 But it is never clear, really, what such stagings are in aid of, other than the more or less empty gesture of shock, or surprise or, otherwise, just the banal staging of a description. In postmodernism the idea of educationality has been given up for that of something like publicity. That is not necessarily a bad thing. In Baudrillard, it is true, publicity often looks rather like showing off and trying to be clever and iconoclastic (‘the Gulf War never took place’ and so on); but in Jameson and others the principle of publicity is exactly that – it is about making public elements of our cultural situation that might not previously have been connected up together. Publicity is not a bad thing necessarily, but it does tend perhaps to dim the visibility of other forms of critical experience, not least those of the ethics of educationality in the kinds of cultural theory that have been examined here. In this sense, postmodernism does not necessarily critique or oppose modernism so much as help to blot out its specificity. Culture is everywhere Part of the obscurity surrounds, of course, the concept of culture itself. Or rather, postmodernism obscures the obscurity – the impossibility – of the concept of culture. Just like its reactionary antecedents, against which it is itself, too, part of a reaction – T.S. Eliot springs to mind – postmodernism appears to know what culture is. Instead of preaching culture from on high, it simply projects it everywhere. Even Raymond Williams thought ‘culture’ was a very difficult word; not so, it seems, the postmoderns. It is true that modern cultural theory, as understood here, has no definitive understanding of culture either, but it embraces the fact as integral to its very operations: hence in the first chapter of this book, the idea of a basic antinomy of culture was invoked precisely in this context. This antinomical aspect of culture is the impossible object that modern cultural theory works upon. In postmodernism, there is nothing tangible to work upon in this sense at all since culture is the ground as well as the object. Everything is culture, yet the concept of culture itself – perhaps because of this – is barely examined. 32 See for example J. Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, trans. P. Beitchman & W. Niesluchowski (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990).

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It is not that postmodernism is unaware of this. Not at all. Bauman himself, exceptionally, has diagnosed this state of affairs with some lucidity. In modernity, he argues, culture played a special, restricted, critical role.33 The intellectuals purveyed what Bauman terms ‘the ideology of culture’: ‘that narrative representing the world as manmade, guided by man-made values and norms and reproduced through the on-going process of learning and teaching’.34 As such, culture was a critical idea. The problem is that other forces impeded and then appropriated this idea of cultural invention: in particular, the market and the State. As a result the intellectuals’ ideology of culture became diminished, at least in terms of their own purchase on it, but not in terms of its general scope. There is plenty of scope for culture but it has ceased to be an ethico-critical concept and has no purchase on anything because it is that everything. So is it worth giving up on the idea of culture? In a sense, modern cultural theory has already done so. It gave it up, yet pursued it at the same time. To counter postmodern culturalism, a different game of cultural criticism is required, something that is outside postmodernism, even opposed to it. ‘Postmodern man’, it appears, has given up the modernist idea of self-invention that animated thinkers such as Foucault with his idea of an aesthetics of existence. As such, Foucault’s work is an antidote to such conditions not part and parcel of them. The best antidote to the spongy culturalism of the postmodern predicament is modernism itself: which is why Adorno, Foucault and even Bourdieu may be more relevant than ever – precisely because of their continuing and stoical irrelevance in our so-called postmodern condition. The argument is not, then, that modern cultural theory should become a renewed norm of discourse. In our narcissistic age we need the critical ethics of autonomy as a regulatory ideal perhaps, and as something of an antidote certainly; but not, anyway, so much, perhaps, as a positive norm but as a counter-power to other prevailing powers – the managerialism of creativity, the dumbing-down of art, the homogenisation of culture-as-everything, the collapse of the image of autonomy as a collective and individual ideal. We need modernist ethics, then, not because modernism is right, and not even out of any nostalgia for the modern, but for postmodern reasons: precisely because of our postmodernism.

33 Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters. 34 Z. Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 2–3.

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Conclusion Ethics and educationality again – Politics – The status of modern cultural theory – Modernism and antiromanticism – Theory and empiricism

This book has claimed that there is – or was – such a thing as modern cultural theory and argued that there is – or was – something ultimately ethical about it. It would no doubt be an understatement to observe that a great many issues and problems remain. Of the many, perhaps four stand out in particular. There is still, naggingly, the question of the exact status of this entity, modern cultural theory. Related to this, there might be continuing queries about what is ‘modern’ and what is ‘theoretical’ about modern cultural theory. There are questions of politics. And then there is more, of course, that still might be said about ethics. We begin, anyway, with the latter issue. Ethics and educationality again It has been repeatedly claimed here that cultural theory, at least in its modern form, is characterised by what, for want of better terminology, can be described as a knowledge-constitutive interest that is ultimately ethical in character. This absolutely was not meant to mean that modern cultural theory provides yet another view of what it is to have or be a self in the contemporary era. On the contrary, in being ethical in the way that it is ethical, modern cultural theory is rather something of an antidote to the turn to matters of the self that have been rather prominent in recent times. Foucault’s work, for instance, is not another sociological diagnostics of the self but a series of means for evading the idea that there is anything fixed and fast about selfhood beyond that which we might invent for ourselves. Modern cultural theory, if it is anything, does not come to speak in the name of some finite view of the self that has either been lost or is to be discovered. On the contrary, it might speak rather against much of the current, and often rather narcissistic, focus on the self that we have

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seen in recent contemporary thought. In that sense, it could even be described as being counter-ethical in orientation. In any case, the concern with ethics does not have anything to do with the morality of self-hood. And of course, as such, only a very minimal notion of ethics has been at stake here. A concern with ethics has been designated as a concern with the values of ethico-critical autonomy as a guiding principle of inquiry: autonomy as that Enlightenment regulatory ideal of being free of dependency, whether as an individual or as a collective. Autonomy, in this sense, is processual not substantive: it can refer to the autonomisation of, say, the arts from other fields of experience but invokes little of the substance of what is at stake here. So no particularly substantive vision of autonomy has been offered; and this is why we have invoked the idea of autonomy in terms of a thin conception of ethics rather than a necessarily thick conception of morality. In so far as it is ultimately an ethically oriented discipline in this sense, modern cultural theory might be seen as a critical enterprise rather than a positive one in that its enquiries are quite typically guided by the tasks of questioning the forces which lead to heteronomy in various forms – whether as in Adorno these are to do with the culture industries, as in Foucault they are to do with the machinations of power and discipline, or as in Bourdieu they are to do with the sacralisation of cultural creativity. Hence, we have implied that modern cultural theory is characterised by a sort of ethical bias or prejudice. Perhaps, then, this is really only a negative conception of ethics. There is no ‘thick’ ethical or moral substance at stake here in that no positive, substantive view of ethical value is implied beyond the basic value of autonomy – collective or individual – itself. A bit more will be said about autonomy in the next section. For now, our contention is that to expect a ‘thick’, positive substance to be attachable to the concept of autonomy would be to misunderstand the character and aims of cultural theory in its status in terms of what we have awkwardly been calling educationality. The function of modern cultural theory is not, to put it bluntly, to tell us what to do but to help us, however restrictedly and modestly, in the exercise of our critical faculties: and, in tandem with that, in the exercise not so much of our creative faculties but of those faculties that work counter to anti-creativity – fetishisation, normalisation, moralism. So anyway, modern cultural theory is not a moral pedagogy but a form of exercise. It is, so to speak, about work not product. Its ethical character lies as much in itself as in its object: in the fact that it is

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itself a kind of ‘technology’ that might be used to work upon ourselves, even if it does not offer a set of fixed moral or epistemic teachings that tell us what we should do or what we are. This, of course, means that modern cultural theory is necessarily limited. It is, strictly speaking, an ancillary enterprise; ancillary to other kinds of enterprise and inquiry – utopian, moral, scientific, critical, epistemic, positive, whatever – that seek to do different things, and in relation to which cultural theory is merely parallel, and not even necessarily so important relatively speaking, rather than basic, foundational or underlabouring. And if it is worth separating modern cultural theory from other enterprises that are possible this is not to assert the rights of cultural theory so much as to free up ground for other ways of thinking. Truth itself is not plural; but there is a plurality of critical games available to us.1 Recalling all the arguments already made on this score, not the least of what is specific to modern cultural theory – although that is already perhaps the wrong terminology, for there is no reason to think that it is absolutely unique in this respect – has to do ultimately with the ethics of critique. If there is an ethos to modern cultural theory it is about autonomising our powers of critical reflection. And if there is any – no doubt extremely ‘thin’ – substance to this enterprise then this lies on the one hand in the intrinsic valorisation of criticism that this involves and on the other hand in a ‘historical’ prejudice to the effect that our contemporary spaces of action, our fields of life, engagement and inquiry are themselves somehow in particular need of the leverage of reflection. Something has already briefly been said about this latter issue in the last chapter. More might have been said, too, about the different challenges that face the idea of critique in our times, and to which any ethics of critique would have to respond: for instance, the prevalence of the idea of critique as denunciation, the existence of fundamentalisms of various sorts, the return of all sorts of moralities to do with creativity, rights and so forth. As for the valorisation of criticism, what is to be emphasised is not this or that critical model but – just that – the value of criticism itself. In other words, modern cultural theory is resolutely an enlightenment, that is to say a modern, discourse. Fundamental to our three modern cultural theorists is not so much either a straightforward adherence to or even a bland scepticism about enlightenment but a particular kind 1

See on this J. Tully, ‘Wittgenstein and political philosophy: understanding practices of critical reflection’, Political Theory, 17:2 (1989), pp. 172–204.

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of (ultimately ethical) commitment to it, a sense that enlightenment is both processual – not possible to formulate in final, finished form – and, for all that, indeed because of that, valuable. Enlightenment and its secular values of criticism, freedom, and resistance to prejudice is not something to be sanguine about. The very principle of enlightenment, understood as a value, is an achievement – something historical, specific, possibly very vulnerable in our contemporary times – that is not simply to be asserted but worked upon, modified, made the object of – ethical, critical – work. Modern cultural theory is one form of just such work, no doubt a modest and obviously a limited one. It is not everything, certainly; but it is more than just pointless ‘theory’ or breathless, right-on cultural studies. Politics This brings us inevitably to the question of politics. Perhaps modern cultural theory does not seem, in emphasising even if only implicitly the question of ethics, to be very political. This is not quite right. It is rather that, for modern cultural theory, ethics appears to be a condition of politics. Perhaps some contrasts are helpful, even if this risks some generalisations. Let us contrast cultural studies with (where they are not the same) postmodern forms of cultural discourse, and then both with modern cultural theory. A great deal of cultural studies – assuredly not all – wishes to code culture immediately on to politics. High aesthetic practices are usually denigrated in this enterprise: culture is something practical, democratic – political. And typically debates in cultural studies will take the form not of arguments over the meaning of the elusive concept of culture but over whether or not X’s work is really more or less political than Y’s, where political appears to mean aligned with some otherwise often un-specified but unquestionably ‘progressive’ political – often, one might better say moral – project. But such a notion of politics – admittedly somewhat caricatured here – is literally reactionary for precisely those reasons so often deplored by practitioners of cultural studies: its essentialism and romanticism about those in need of progressive politics. It makes the jump too quickly between culture and politics; for to be culturally or in any other way deprived or oppressed does not automatically make one a normatively exemplary candidate for a progressive or radical politics – or if it does, there needs to be some explanation, in each case, as to why this might be so, that is, why the jump has been made from culture to politics at

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all. But since there is very little of that in cultural studies, all too often that discipline is marked by a gestural albeit frequently highly moralistic adherence to the circular and often rather terrorizing conventions of hyper-politics which, in the end, is effectively to be apolitical because more based on the fantasy of the institution than a concern for the actual world. A lot of postmodernism, on the other hand, is openly sceptical about politics. The assertion that we are living under postmodern conditions often goes along with the contention that the very idea of the political has been, at best, foreshortened, and at worst, obliterated in contemporary societies. The result of this is, again, that politics appears, if it appears at all, only as gesture, anywhere between the poles of cynicism and refusal; but, certainly, no specificity is granted the field of politics in any way that makes it separable from the verdicts of postmodernism’s sociologism about the societies it likes to describe. Politics is granted no autonomy of its own. Modern cultural theory is different from either the hyper-politics of cultural studies or postmodern culturology in that a degree of separation is accorded the political sphere from that of ethics. This is not really an institutional separation. Foucault, for instance, famously sees the political more or less everywhere and not as a separate institutional sphere. But in normative terms, all three of those considered do make a separation, more often than not only implicit, between a thin ethical normativism and a thicker political one. It is wholly wrong, for example, to accuse Adorno of being apolitical. The fact is that his politics, at least in his intellectual work, is mediated through his ethics: the aim is to raise the threshold of critical reflection and maturity in order precisely to make way for certain kinds of – democratic, non-authoritarian – politics. Foucault too was obviously a highly political animal, as his biographers have shown. And yet there is a gap – not an occlusion – between Foucault’s intellectual work and his politics: a gap that is filled, as it were, by his ethics. Only through an ethical elaboration of ourselves can we pass beyond the twin temptations – easy, immature temptations – of epistemic and moral reductions of existence. Hence, ethico-critical work – including intellectual work – constitutes both a kind of resistance in itself but also a kind of underlabouring for political life understood as the search for collective singularities and freedom. Lastly, Bourdieu too was obviously highly politicised, especially in the latter part of his career. But except in his more overtly polemical and journalistic work, Bourdieu never makes a short-cut from intellectual scholarship to political position-taking. Bourdieu’s work, for

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all that, is, as we have seen, saturated in implications that are ultimately ethical, to do with freeing ourselves from romantic conceptions of creative agency and autonomy; but, again, it is generally a question of a thin ethical normativism not a thick political one, and where the jump to a coherent politics is made – as in, for example, the idea of a corporatism of the universal – this is done through the mediation of ethical considerations (the autonomy of the intellectual, in this instance) and not by direct recourse to political imperatives that are merely ‘deduced’ from the analyses themselves. In short, modern cultural theory is not itself politics: which is only to say that it is better preparation – assuredly amongst a host of very different kinds of reflection – for the arts of politics than either discourses that are more immediately but more gesturally political or discourses that have given up on the political altogether. The status of modern cultural theory As to the question of the – epistemic, disciplinary – status of modern cultural theory, the point was made in the introduction that modern cultural theory is – or was – not anything like a self-conscious ‘discipline’. Nor is it or was it really even a loose tradition of inquiry – after all, Adorno and Foucault, for instance, were hardly interlocutors. Perhaps the best way to think of it is, as mentioned in the introduction, as a genre of discourse. The point about a genre is not that all those who inhabit it recognise that they are part of it, but that there are certain rules or principles that make it up as a genre, that give it its structure. Perhaps the use of the plural is a little disingenuous here for really there has only been one principle alluded to in this context, and that is – as already reiterated at some length – the ultimately ethical principle of autonomy itself, however it is conceived. Two observations are apposite at this point. First, it is certainly and obviously the case that additional figures might be included in this list. Perhaps Mikhail Bakhtin or Raymond Williams were cultural theorists in precisely this sense. Bakhtin, in particular – a theorist whose views about creativity are intrinsically tied to ethics of criticism and democracy – might have repaid study from this angle.2 But our aims here have not been restrictive. A genre of discourse may be 2

See K. Hirschkop, Mikhail Bakhtin: an aesthetic of democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Readers will have to await T. Osborne, Gender and Modern Cultural Theory (forthcoming) for another dimension not considered here.

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quite a loose entity and certainly no claims can be made here to limit it exclusively to the three thinkers that have been our focus. It is a constellation not a lineage. This relates to the second observation. This is to emphasise that it is not at all our contention at all that Adorno, Bourdieu and Foucault are attempting to say exactly the same thing about autonomy. As has hopefully been shown, the ideal of autonomy is the thinnest of things that unites them – it is an ‘ultimate’ rather than a ‘mediate’ concept for them. So none of them in fact is really saying anything too substantive about it: rather, each of them at once assumes it as a value and conducts a questioning of it, especially in the form of an attention to what they regard as false forms of autonomy. But in each the ideal of autonomy itself figures very differently. Adorno associates autonomy with something quite substantive: with art. But autonomy is always compromised, for him, with what it opposes. In Adorno’s world even autonomy is false consciousness in the final analysis. Hence, perhaps the most one can say is that it exists for him as a kind of regulative ideal or even an anthropological predicament – something we do in fact strive for, whatever its impossibility. Foucault takes us in a different direction. He collects examples. In this sense he is the least theoretical of the three. Yet Foucault’s project would make absolutely no sense without the knowledge-constitutive principle that is at its basis – a concern for creativity, enlightenment, a way out. Foucault was conceptually claustrophobic. He always wants to know where the exit door is located. Hence, his is the thinnest notion of autonomy of all. At the most basic level, it is simply to be somewhere else. This scarcely amounts to a definition of autonomy as such. Rather, autonomy is what you make of it: and here is the empiricist principle in Foucault’s work. Autonomy is the product of collective and individual practices of singularity. There is no overarching theory of autonomy here not because Foucault is against such an idea per se but because, for him, autonomy is simply not that kind of thing. Foucault is not trying to ‘sell’ us any particular view of what autonomy is, only to free up some space for us to elaborate practices of autonomy for ourselves. Bourdieu’s line on autonomy is clearly different from this again. His is a form of critical realism when it comes to the question of autonomy. Modernist artists, for instance, really are autonomous in some respects. But this autonomy is also problematic and illusory: not in Adorno’s sense, not because it is compromised by its opposite and the existence of what it rejects – the culture industries in his case. Rather, autonomy is

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problematic and illusory for Bourdieu because it sublimates itself away from the social world. For Bourdieu, autonomy is always the resultant of a social operation: not in Adorno’s sense but as part of strategies of distinction. It deludes itself that it is itself. We are not simply condemned to this situation as in Adorno. Rather we are enjoined to be reflexive about it: to recognise the limits of our autonomy; to recognise that what we think of as autonomy is only part of the burden of the social world. Bourdieu always returns us to the social aspect of autonomy, and in this sense his is the most substantive version even if this leads to certain – perhaps productive, ‘educational’ – difficulties. Modernism and anti-romanticism In any case, the point is not to reduce these three thinkers to the same problematic, only to link them in the loosest, albeit hopefully interesting, of ways. If anything does really unite them, however – and as a consequence of their ethico-critical concern with autonomy – it is their modernism. This can be misleading. None of our three thinkers simply embraced modernism unproblematically. None – even including Adorno – was a really paid-up aesthetic modernist as such. Perhaps it is best to think of their modernism in negative terms, in terms of what they reject. And what they reject above all is romanticism. Adorno will have nothing of the utopian, romanticist idea that everything is well with the world. He goes in the opposite direction as a deliberate counter-balance. So, on the contrary, in Adorno’s world everything is terrible. But this is not an epistemic statement about the world so much as an ethical intervention within it; to act as an antidote to our misguided, delusional will to happiness, which is really a will to dependency. As for Foucault, his target – if it can be put in such a way – is the romanticism of the idea that there can be any such thing as a final human nature. His modernism is, if it is anything, a processual attempt to escape the fixity of such an idea. If anything the message is optimistic. Humanity is not simply subjected to control. Or rather, if this is so then there is also good news here. Humanity if it can be controlled and moulded can also be transformed. As Deleuze put it, there is a line that comes from the outside but also a line that we can impose for ourselves.3

3

G. Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. M. Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

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The malleability of our humanity is a source of hope as well as a cause for vigilance. Bourdieu, likewise, appears to loathe above all the romanticist notion of the creative genius; the figure who entirely escapes the pressures of the social world. Again, his sociologism can be regarded (although, as we have seen, the issue is complex) as ethical rather than just epistemic. Bourdieu’s sociologism functions, in spite of its limitations, as a counterweight to our romantic prejudices about action and freedom; that we can escape our circumstances, that we can get free of our social bondage. But as such this sociologism is not about reducing everything to the social but bringing about a certain realism in our understanding of autonomy: the recognition that it rests upon worldly, social foundations – which, in turn, brings out its fragility and perhaps even its precarious value. Tied to this principle of modernism in each case is also a valorisation of asceticism. Again, this is essentially an anti-romantic theme. What is coded here is not the negative aspect of asceticism, as self-denial; but its aspect as creative work. Adorno cannot stand the idea of free time, of hobbies, of relaxation. This is not because he is some latter-day Puritan. It is surely because he – like Bourdieu and Foucault – wants to emphasise the sense of contingency and achievement that is at the heart of all our creative practices. These do not simply come from the sky. They require practice, work. At the end of the day, these are ethical matters; about, so to speak, what we do to and with ourselves and each other rather than just what we think or happen to produce. The sense of achievement is important; it makes these artistic, creative, social products all the more valuable – not as God-given rights but as values that are all the more valuable because immanent and earned. This has consequences for how we think about the basic value of creativity. In each thinker, creativity is not given but made. It is open to everyone but it requires transformation, work. If nothing else, such a problematic requires a certain attentiveness to the frailty of our creative practices: enjoining us to take nothing for granted, and certainly not to submit to any off-the-shelf doctrine as to what creativity is. If creativity is important it is far too valuable a commodity to be a commodity. So, there are themes of modernism, asceticism and creativity that are of significance, but nowhere do our three thinkers provide us with actual theories of these things and, still less, compatible ideas about them. Hence, we need – finally – to say something further about the status of theory itself.

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Theory and empiricism This book has been sceptical, in places, of theory but it is not that modern cultural theory on our understanding is anti-theoretical. What is at stake here, rather is the issue of what we oppose theory to. Adorno, Foucault, and Bourdieu are certainly not theorists in so far as they are resistant to empirical research. On the contrary, Adorno conducted huge amounts of empirical research, including a fair amount in collaboration with genuine paid-up empiricists such as the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld. Foucault hardly ever seems to theorise anything, instead occupying himself, in the main, with building up historical scenarios and examples. And Bourdieu had a contempt for those who indulged themselves with the pontifications of pure theory without engaging in actual research. So it might be better to say that our triumvirate of thinkers are theorists because of their empiricism rather than in spite of it. Does this make sense? Yes, because of course empiricism is itself a theoretical choice that one makes and is itself as much an ethicocritical strategy as it is an epistemic one. Empiricism is itself a matter of a kind of ascetic work, an achievement, a skill and a value. It is a form of critical reflection, as much a way of distancing ourselves from the world – a form of objectivation – as a means of connecting us up to it. As soon as one drops the opposition between theory and worldliness, it is possible to see our three thinkers as both empiricists and theorists of a kind. Not that they embraced, needless to be said, the same kind of empiricism – a term which, in any case, each would unquestionably have rejected. Adorno was hostile to naive empiricism, always linking up empirical research to dialectical forms of reflection. Foucault, Kantian that he was, invariably emphasised the (discursive) conditions that governed the very possibility of thought. And Bourdieu regarded empirical research as useless without the background of a conceptual understanding of the fields. So it depends on what you mean by empiricism. None of our thinkers was an empiricist as such – that is, in the sense that, say, Locke or J.S. Mill can be described as empiricists. But each discloses in his work what might be called a concern for the empirical, a concern that is itself, in the end, a theoretical choice, which is to say a choice which is the product of a certain habit of critical reflection. Modern cultural theory per se – were it to exist today at all – would be a matter of going out, having a look and getting things done in one’s own way. This is what Adorno, Foucault and Bourdieu did,

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precisely – each in his own way. The work of their successors need not necessarily look like theirs in substance or form if it is to partake in the ethos of modern cultural theory. In fact it could not do so. Rather, it would necessarily go in what might seem quite possibly to be wholly contrary directions. Who knows what it might look like?

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Index abnormality and normality, 74 Académie Française, 117 Adorno, Theodor, 1–8, 11–12, 17–20, 23, 28, 32, 35–66 passim, 71, 99, 100, 103, 113, 116, 140, 143, 146–8, 151–3, 155–64 on astrology, 47–9 on authoritarianism, 49–51 Benjamin and, 52, 60–3 on dependency, 47–9 on dialectics, 37–9 as educator, 63–6 on enlightenment, 38–9, 57–8 jazz and, 5, 35–6, 40–1, 44–8, 52 paradoxical thought and, 37–9 aesthetes, 107 aestheticisation of culture, 143 aesthetics, 142–6, 150–1 ethical understanding of, 77 of existence, 12, 70, 76–90, 153 Alexander, Jeffrey, 18 Althusser, Louis, 133 anomie, 119–20 anthropological analysis, 16–17, 23, 33–4, 104–5 antinomy of culture, 30–1, 37–8, 56, 59, 135–8, 152 anti-semitism, 50–1 Armstrong, Louis, 44 Arnold, Matthew, 28, 141 art, 23–4, 31–3, 39, 42–3 autonomy and, 55–7, 63, 117–20 concept and definition of, 143–4 creativity and, 83–5 ‘death’ of, 146–7 as a form of domination, 115–16, 122 as an ideal of free exchange, 122 as a social game, 123–5 sociology of, 113–14 as a space of freedom, 117 technology and, 60–3 see also high art; modernist art Artaud, Antonin, 83 asceticism, 12, 77–8, 84, 87–91, 98, 121, 162–3 astrology, 47–9, 146 Atget, Eugène, 62 Augustine, St, 133 aura, 61, 144 authoritarianism, 41–2, 47, 49–51

‘autobiographical illusion’, 131 autonomisation, 24, 117–20 autonomy, 2, 77, 83, 101–3, 134, 147, 149, 153 in art, 55–7, 63, 117–20 concepts and definition of, 160 creativity and, 32–3, 116–17 difficulty of, 138–9 ethics of, 13, 23, 29, 141, 150–1 as an ideal, 25, 64–6, 155, 160 intellectual, 135–6 psychological expression and, 67 see also creative autonomy; critical autonomy avant-garde art, 117, 119 Bach, J.S., 110–12 Bachelard, Gaston, 116, 126 Baker, Benjamin, 125 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 159 Barbour, J.D., 133, 135 Baudelaire, Charles, 23, 61, 87, 89, 108, 116–19, 124 Baudrillard, Jean, 141–7, 151–2 Bauman, Zygmunt, 21, 141–2, 149–53 Baxandall, Michael, 125–6 Beckett, Samuel, 36, 54–5 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 32, 123 Benjamin, Walter, 52, 60–3, 87, 144 Bernstein, J.M., 35, 63 Bhaskar, Roy, 104 Bildung tradition, 28 bio-power, 85–6 bohemianism, 118 Boulez, Pierre, 63 Bourdieu, Pierre, 1–8, 11–13, 17–20, 29, 32–3, 103–39 passim, 148, 153, 155–64 on art, 115–17, 122–5 autobiographical reflections of, 131–4, 137–8 on autonomy, 161 on creativity, 121–2 on culture, 109 as educator, 138–9 on ethics, 159 on fields, 126–7 on intellectualism, 134–8 on reflexivity, 122, 126–9 on science, 128

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Californian cult of the self, 82 Canguilhem, Georges, 116 capital, forms of, 105–6; see also cultural capital; educational capital capitalism, 36, 40–1, 46–7, 50–3, 88 Cavell, Stanley, 24–7 Caygill, Howard, 61 Christianity, 77–80, 85 cognitive mapping, 151 coherence of texts and oeuvres, 5 commodification, 41, 143–4 of creativity, 124 connoisseurship, 107 consumer culture, 145 creative autonomy, 9 creative ethics, 89–91 creative singularity, 75–6 creativity, 25–6, 102–3, 120–3 art and, 83–5 autonomy and, 32–3, 116–17 commodification of, 124 modernism and, 26–7 value of, 162 critical autonomy, 3–5, 10–13, 19, 23, 147, 151 critical ethics, 2–3, 22, 29 critical reflection and self-reflection, 11, 51–4, 58–9, 62, 157–8, 163 critical reflexivity, 25, 27, 29 critical virtue, 98–9 critique, 95–8 capacity for, 66 definition of, 98 ethics of, 156 cultural capital, 111, 119 cultural production and cultural consumption, 108, 113 cultural studies, 17–18, 157–8 cultural theory, 7, 12–13, 29, 97 as a genre of discourse, 4, 159–60 see also modern cultural theory culturalisms, 14–18 culture, 97–8 aestheticisation of, 143 antonomial view of, 30–4 concepts and definitions of, 8–9, 15–17, 25–8, 68–70, 109, 152 as convention and as reflexivity, 25–30 and freedom, 107–8 as an instrument of social control, 36

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166 Brecht, Bertolt, 40, 54, 56, 63 Brown, Norman O., 16

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and politics, 157–8 see also high culture culture industry, 36, 41–8, 51–3, 57, 62–5, 100, 146, 160 culturology, 16, 74–5 dandyism, 86–8 David, Jacques-Louis, 119 Davis, Miles, 44 Deleuze, Gilles, 69–70, 75, 91, 101, 161 dependency, 47–52, 57–8, 155 de-subjectification, 99, 101 detachment, 6–7 determinism, 100, 112 dialectics, 37–9 disciplinarity, 3–4 disciplinary power, 72–3 distinction, cultural, concept of, 108–12, 161 Duchamp, Marcel, 119, 144 Durkheim, Emile, 115, 123 educational capital, 110–11 educationality, 3, 11, 13, 18–20, 27, 64, 101, 138–9, 151–2, 155 Eisenstein, Sergei, 62 Elias, Norbert, 7, 123–5 Eliot, T.S., 152 Ellington, Duke, 44 Elster, Jon, 108, 112 empiricism, 5, 163 enlightenment and the Enlightenment, 20–5, 38–9, 57–8, 70, 91–2, 155–7 Epictetus, 80 epigones, 118 essentialism and antiessentialism, 58 ethics, 1, 10–11, 71, 77, 98, 102, 126, 151, 154–8 of autonomy, 13, 23, 29, 41, 150–1 contrasted with morality, 2 of critical autonomy, 23 of critical reflexivity, 25 of critique, 156 cultural theory and, 29 as defined by Bauman, 150 as exercises in thought, 29 politics and, 158 of thought, 21 see also creative ethics; critical ethics ex-normality, 75 expressionist painting, 31 fans, 47

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Index fascism, 36, 41, 49–51 Feyerabend, Paul, 138 field, concept of, 126–7 films, 52, 60–1, 111 Flaubert, Gustave, 33, 108, 116–21, 124 Forth Bridge, 125 Foucault, Michel, 1–8, 12, 18–23, 29, 33, 67–102 passim, 132, 140, 154–64 on aesthetics, 148–9 on autonomy, 76, 102 on critique, 99–100 as educator, 79–80, 100-2 on enlightenment, 12, 20-2, 86–8, 91–2 on ethics, 158 on ‘infamous men’, 75–6 on liberalism, 95–7 on modernity, 71, 86–8 on nominalism, 68, 100 on politics, 158 on power and government, 72–3, 92, 95, 148–9 on subjectivity, 69–70, 73–4, 78, 81 freedom and unfreedom, 39, 58 French Revolution, 93 Freud, Sigmund, 36–7, 50, 65 Fromm, Erich, 50 F-Scale, 50–1 Galileo, 138 Geertz, Clifford, 16 genealogy, 100, 126–7 genius, concept of, 123–4 Gershwin, George, 110 Giddens, Anthony, 104 Gombrich, Ernst, 114 grand narratives, 58 grand theory, 6 Greek philosophy and civilisation, 76–81, 88, 90 Greenberg, Clement, 24 habitus, 106, 109 Hacking, Ian, 99 Harrington, Austin, 114 Hauser, Arnold, 114, 122 Hegel, G.W.F., 35, 37, 143, 147–8 Heidegger, Martin, 72, 84 heteronomy, 3, 9–10, 19, 28, 155 high art, 51–3, 57–60, 112–13, 122, 146–7 high culture, 27, 100, 107, 111 historicism, 101–2

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167 Hitler, Adolf, 49 homosexuality, 90–1, 132 Horkheimer, Max, 42–3, 57 human nature, 104, 108, 161 Huntington, Samuel, 16 Husserl, Edmund, 35 Huxley, Aldous, 42 hyper-reality, 145 individuation, 148 intellectualism, 134–9 Jameson, Fredric, 50, 52, 141–2, 151–2 Jarrett, Keith, 44 jazz, 5, 35–6, 40–1, 44–8, 52, 144 Kant, Immanuel (and Kantianism), 21, 25, 38, 64–5, 75, 93, 96, 98, 115, 146, 151, 163 Lazarsfeld, Paul, 163 Levinas, Emmanuel, 150 liberalism, 95–7 ‘liquidation of the individual’ (Adorno), 53–4 Locke, John, 163 Lyotard, Jean-François, 141 Macey, David, 134 Maffesoli, Michael, 141, 143, 151 Magritte, René, 83 Mahler, Gustav, 42, 59 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 113 Manet, Edouard, 83, 108, 116, 119–20 Marcuse, Herbert, 16 Marx, Karl, 35–6, 105 Marx Brothers, 42 Marxism, 18, 35–6, 65, 115, 151 maturity, 66 maximisation of arguments, 4–5 military discipline, 72 Mill, John Stuart, 163 miserabilism, 36, 65, 71 modern cultural theory, 1–32, 103, 117, 139–40, 147, 150–9, 163 distinctiveness of, 34 ethos of, 156, 164 as a form of exercise, 155–6 modernism, 89, 121, 148, 153 anti-romanticism and, 161–2 creativity and, 26–7 norms of, 23–5 postmodernism and, 141–2 status of, 159–60

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168 tradition and, 25 modernist art, 10–13, 24–5, 31–2, 56–9, 115, 117, 160 modernity, 86–8, 149, 153 moral codes, 77–9, 150 morality definition of, 2 postmodern, 149–51 Mozart, W.A., 124–5 neo-liberalism, 95, 97 Nerval, Gérard de, 83 Newman, John Henry, 133 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 3, 19–20, 40, 72–7, 80–5, 126 nominalism, 12, 68, 81, 88, 99–100 objectivation, 163 objectivism, 63 pastoral power, 85 Peirce, C.S., 147–8 personality, ethical model of, 64 perspectivism, 63–5, 112–13 philosophy, 130–3 photography, 60, 62 Picasso, Pablo, 125–6 politics and political ethos, 91–2, 157–9 polizei, 95–6 Pompidou Centre, 100 pop music, 45 positivism, 13 postmodernism, 13, 26, 57–60, 67, 84, 87, 99, 111, 140–53, 158 modernism and, 141–2 morality and, 149–51 power, 71–5 cultural, 115 problematics and problem-atisation, 8 Protestantism, 88 publicity, 152

revolutions and revolts, 93–4 Ricoeur, Paul, 137 romanticism, 27–8, 121, 161–2 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 133 Roussel, Raymond, 83 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 80, 99–100, 121, 134 Schoenberg, Arnold, 36, 52–4, 59, 63, 144 scholastic culture, 111 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 3, 20 scientifc discourse, 128 Scruton, Roger, 141–2 Seneca, 80, 90 Simmel, Georg, 14–16, 29–32, 108, 143 snobbery and inverted snob-bery, 108–9 social sciences, 129 social theory, 22 socialism, 95 sociobiology, 16 sociologisms, 113–16, 124, 162 sociology, 17, 97–8, 115, 123–33, 143, 147 of art, 113–14 intellectual, 130–1 Spengler, Oswald, 16, 36 Strauss, Johann, 110, 112 structure-agency problem, 105–6 subjectivation, 68–70, 78–80, 89–91, 94, 99 subjectivity, 69–70, 73–4, 78–81 subjectivity-effects, 46, 49, 51 taste and class differentiation, 109–12 techne, 90 theory, definition of, 6–7 transgressive behaviour, 119 truth, concept of, 19, 73–4, 78, 81–2 ‘truthfulness’ (Bernard Williams), 81 universalism, 136–7

radicals, 93 rational choice theory, 140 reading, principles of, 4–7, 71, 79 realism, 118 reason, 22–3, 70 reductionism, 113 reflexivity, 105, 112–13, 126–31, 146 as an objectivising principle, 129 relationism, 105–6 relativism, 111–12, 136 Renaissance, the, 86 ressentiment, 83

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Van Gogh, Vincent, 32, 83 Weber, Max, 15, 22, 66, 88 Webern, Anton, 54 Welles, Orson, 43 Williams, Bernard, 81 Williams, Raymond, 17–18, 152, 159 Witkin, Robert, 114 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 126 Zola, Emile, 134