Archive | back to contents

fall 2003 | The Culture Issue

The Unrealized and the Unrealizable, or Autonomy as Aspiration

Jacqueline Abrams

The thesis of secularization describes the gradual transition from a world of medieval Christiandom in which all axes revolved around the organizing principle of religion, to a new social order in which the spheres of the state, the economy, and culture became independently operating forces. While these distinct spheres maintain a dialogical relationship in the modern world—that is, fluctuations in one reverberate through the others—the notion of differentiation suggests that no one sphere can completely or perfectly determine the course of another. Habermas’s claim that, “while markets can be established and regulated by political means, they obey a logic of their own that escapes state control,”1 must, therefore, be read as part of a larger secularization thesis, one which includes the realm of culture. If we are, then, tempted to read this thesis as a liberalizing move away from a world in which culture was constrained by the totalizing power of the Church, then it is precisely this freedom that is at stake if the autonomy, or the independent logic, of the cultural sphere is threatened.

One may feel inclined to argue that, unlike the relationship between the state and the market, the boundaries of the “cultural” sphere are entirely nebulous. How can one be expected to identify its parameters when we are so indecisive as to what “counts” as culture in the first place? In spite of the term’s elusive nature, we hold the cultural sphere to high standards. We have certain expectations, even if we do not articulate them as questions about cultural autonomy. I would suggest that we are protective of this ill-defined sphere because it provides the means by which we both critique the world around us, and in the process, construct some sense of identity. The potential infringement of the state or the market in the space of cultural production feels like nothing less than a violation.

The pertinent questions, therefore, must be the following: What would autonomy mean in the context of the cultural sphere, given its complicated relationship to the state and the market? At what point do political and economic influences become political and economic constraints? Is autonomy ever really threatened if the politico-economic appropriation of culture always gives rise to a subculture of critique? Analysis of these questions is beyond the scope of this discussion; in such limited space, I could never do them justice. So, while it is not my intention to answer them, I would suggest that these questions point to an underlying phenomenon with which any critique of cultural production must contend. The focus of this paper, then, will be the merging of these ostensibly independent spheres, with specific attention on the relationship between the market and the realm of cultural production. Only by engaging in this type of analysis can we begin to appreciate the significance of NATO-sponsored art shows and presidents of universities that once served as well-known United States senators, the legality of file sharing made possible by technological innovation, the economic monolith of Hollywood, and the commodification of indigenous artwork. In other words, our examination must be directed toward the spaces in which purportedly autonomous spheres rub against one another so that the contours of one become confused with those of the other. In this paper, I want to suggest that autonomy is not an automatic consequence of secularization. Far from completion, it is a project that is sustained only so long as it is practiced, and, as we will see, “practicing” cultural autonomy is not without its challenges. As a note to the reader, for the purposes of this paper the term “culture,” or “sphere of culture” will refer to cultural production, including the arts, the sciences, and scholarship.

Liberating Scholarship 

The path to cultural and intellectual independence was riddled with obstacles, setbacks, and disagreements. While the use of reason was permitted, even encouraged, within the medieval Academy, epistemology and theology were expected to coalesce around the single and incontrovertible truth of God.2 A teleological enterprise, scholarship lacked any sense of real autonomy. It was not until Galileo’s fateful heavenward glance that the first signs of an independent scholarship became manifest. His support of the heretical astronomy of Copernicus and his belief that the telescope, not the Church, could account for a accurate knowledge of the cosmos did more than undermine religious truth claims; it challenged the very means by which such “truth” could be ascertained.3 After Galileo, investigation of the independent and rational world became a different sort of undertaking, one that required the pursuit of truth to be unencumbered by the constraints of any dominant sphere, be it religious, political, or economic.

Autonomy became a way to practice cultural production. It was not simply the result of a secularizing social and political order, but something of value that had to be defined, fought for, and sustained. The very life force of the Enlightenment was this notion of liberation, the emancipation of the self, the people, the faculties of reason. Sapere Aude, “think for yourself,” was Kant’s prescription to the indentured mind of an era that had yet to culminate in the French Revolution. The radical nature of such a concept can be read in Kant’s attempt to negotiate two seemingly opposing imperatives.

[A] clergyman is bound to instruct his pupils and his congregation in accordance with the doctrines of the church he serves, for he was employed by it on that condition. But as a scholar, he is completely free as well as obliged to impart to the public all his carefully considered, well-intentioned thoughts on the mistaken aspects of those doctrines.4

By distinguishing the private use of man’s reason, which is constrained by the demands of his vocation, from the public use of man’s reason, upon which his enlightenment depends, Kant locates an oppressive master not only in the political sphere, but within the craven mind. In this way, Kant is central to the story of cultural autonomy, as he articulates the liberating watchword that makes independent thought valuable for its own sake.

By the period of high modernity, the project of autonomy had undergone a transformation. It was not human enlightenment, but the cultivation of independent scholarship and disciplines that would hew the path to higher understanding. The effort to create an epistemologically-independent field of sociology was led by Durkheim and Weber. For Durkheim the exclusive domain of knowledge and investigation deserving of the label “sociology” must be distinguished from the separate disciplines of biology and psychology. Weber, working off the same assumptions about disciplinary autonomy, argues that science requires a completely insulated domain. The specialized role of the scientist, he who toils in the objective muck of the world, must be unencumbered by the debasing effects of politics and opinion. Science, like sociology, must not have wandering eyes, for it is the merging of distinct spheres of knowledge, in one instance, and the influence of political ideology, in the other, that undermine the integrity of their projects.

Overt Constraints and Subtle Influences

These efforts to establish some semblance of cultural autonomy can be framed as part of a positive move to create a space for the free, rational subject and his independent disciplines, which meant that certain limitations had to be placed on those spheres that would otherwise traverse ill-defined boundaries. Within a totalitarian order, this merging of spheres makes total domination possible by ensuring that the realm of cultural production serves the ends of the state. Genuine artistic impulse must find its expression through propagandistic creations that promote party politics. The same holds true for the sciences. For example, Lysenkoism, the Communist response to Darwin’s “bourgeois” theory of genetics, wove science and ideology into a bizarre and devastating hybrid that demanded nothing less than complete and total submission to political dogma.

In a democracy, the insinuation of the state or the market into the realm of cultural production is less overt, and it would be misleading to claim that a democracy exerts the same sorts of constraints on the cultural sphere as we have seen in its totalitarian counterpart within the last century. This does not mean, however, that a democratic order ensures cultural autonomy, and it is precisely the purpose of this paper to suggest that an inquiry into the subtle influences of the state and the market on the cultural sphere is a relevant project.

One way to approach this inquiry is by turning to Edward Said’s critique of “Orientalism.” The centrality of Said’s work here is not so much that writings about the “Orient” concealed an Imperialist perspective—that is, they could not be divorced from the social and political reality of the British Empire in which they were composed—but that the “Orientalists” believed their writing to be objective, impartial, and “suprapolitical.” He explains,

despite attempts to draw subtle distinctions between Orientalism as an innocent scholarly endeavor and Orientalism as an accomplice to empire, (it) can never unilaterally be detached from the general imperial context that begins its modern global phase with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798.5

If we are to read in Said’s work the larger claim that no scholarship is immune to the complex and shaping forces of the sociopolitical and economic spheres, then the prospect for any real cultural autonomy seems illusory. If, as Said argues, “even the most imaginative writers of an age, men like Flaubert, Nerval, or Scott, were constrained in what they could either experience of or say about the Orient,” then to some extent we are dealing with an influence that is so pervasive as to render any resistance unimaginable.6 Somewhere between the excessive reality of totalitarian constraints, on the one hand, and the omnipresent threat of sociopolitical and economic influence, on the other, exists a realizable sense of autonomy to which the cultural sphere may aspire. To address the question in any meaningful fashion, one must consider the concrete ways in which the realm of cultural production is impacted by the dominant spheres of the state and the market, however subtle they may be.

The Artist and the Masses

In Democracy in America, de Tocqueville argues that the social composition of a democracy, as opposed to that of an aristocracy, would give rise to a very different form of cultural life. In an aristocracy the artist must appeal to a limited number of wealthy buyers, so the artifacts that he produces are expected to meet the highest standards. In this way, he contributes to a tradition that strives for artistic virtuosity. In a democracy, on the other hand, the modern phenomenon of what de Tocqueville calls “the masses” introduce unique economic circumstances. Because one’s status is not bestowed at birth, he is always capable of defining his social position via his accouterments. As Hannah Arendt explains of the cultural philistine,

In this fight for social position, culture began to play an enormous role as one of the weapons, if not the best-suited one, to advance oneself socially, and reality was located, up into the higher, non-real regions, where beauty and the spirit supposedly were at home.7

Culture is reduced to an instrumental value, a mere means in the pursuit of social status. On de Tocqueville’s reading, the artist, responding to these increased demands, seeks to produce his craft as quickly and cheaply as possible. Once cultural production presents itself as a lucrative endeavor, that is, once a cultural industry emerges, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate an independent cultural tradition from the mere business that it perpetually threatens to become.

The complicated relationship of the artist to his audience is not a new phenomenon, nor was this tension coeval with the rise of democracy. The artist, as an artist, is always already engaged in a relationship with his potential public. If Arendt is correct in claiming that an artifact is “cultural to the extent that it can endure,”8 then the artist always relies on an audience to bestow immortality upon her craft. In other words, without the public to receive the artifact, to recognize its beauty and ensure its security through successive generations, the object does not become cultural. Talcott Parsons suggests that the artist addresses a pressing social need and that the public, recognizing the need as its own, responds with appreciation. Parsons goes so far as to say that if the artist does not try to convey a message through her work, but treats it as an entirely private affair, she “is a schizophrenic, not an artist.”9 The crucial point is that in a democracy, unlike an aristocracy, the concept of “the masses” as a unified entity, one very important half of the artistic relationship, creates an economic tension that is perhaps most apparent in the case of mass media.

The Modern Mediated World

To some extent, any discussion of the masses as the reification of a collective and unified group of people is reductive and oversimplified to the extent that indissoluble differences, constitutive of a heterogeneous society, must meld together. Nonetheless, the concept of “the masses” helps to explain the modern phenomenon that Arendt identified as the substitution of entertainment for art. While entertainment itself does not degrade the cultural sphere, the processes of consumption to which it gives rise, does. Arendt explains, “the wares offered by the entertainment industry are indeed consumed by society just like any other consumer good.”10 This metaphor of consumption is appropriate as it evokes the image of a ravenous society which, though continuously fed, is never sated. In their famine, the masses are willing to feast on anything, and it is with this in mind that we read David Harvey’s claim:

Through films, television, books, and the like, history and past experience are turned into a seemingly vast archive, “instantly retrievable and capable of being consumed over and over again at the push of a button.”11

The consequence of this plundering of the past is a degradation of the tradition upon which cultural autonomy has been forged, and one vehicle for this erosion is mass media.

Even more than the bizarre cultural hybrids that Harvey describes, the very consumptive nature of an entertainment-oriented society undermines cultural autonomy. Perhaps most salient is the case of television, where the lucrative and brute fact of the masses determines the direction of cultural movement. As Jeffrey Goldfarb explains, because television provides an easy and efficacious means of advertising, a program that is least likely to be turned off ensures a greater number of viewers.12 Because within this medium, business interests dictate what television programs will and will not be aired, emphasis is not on artistic integrity, but on those programs that will cause the least offense (i.e. those that will not be turned off). The aspiration for high cultural standards, then, must constantly be weighed against the incentive to pander to the masses. As David Harvey suggests, the artist himself becomes a mere mechanism in the “production of needs and wants, the mobilization of desire and fantasy, of the politics of distraction as part and parcel of the push to sustain sufficient buoyancy of demand in consumer markets to keep capitalist production profitable.”13 We can now revisit de Tocqueville’s argument that an aristocracy breeds a different type of cultural sphere than that of a democracy. If, in an aristocracy, the value of an artifact is determined by a set of standards that are internal to the cultural realm, in the modern mediated world, it is the masses that determine the standards of cultural production. In this case, it is the inverse relationship between audience and cultural producer that complicates the question of autonomy by making economic considerations a guiding force in the realm of cultural production.

The [In]Conclusion

As this discussion closes around the notion of merging spheres, we should be careful to avoid too bleak a prognosis for cultural autonomy. It is not the case that the cultural-economic dynamic must be one of appropriation or exploitation. It is precisely the cultural sphere that is able to turn a critical eye on both the other spheres, as well as itself, and it is in light of this self-reflexivity that culture contains the very code for its own critique. It is most successful, as Kant suggested, when it is able to carve out a public space for free expression.

This discussion does not attempt to explain how the cultural sphere is to insulate itself from the state or the economy, nor does it predict what the radical separation of spheres might look like. Instead, it is concerned with the obstacles that limit the cultural sphere’s ability to articulate the most pressing problems of the day in such a way that is satisfying to both cultural producer and audience alike. Following Said, it seems that one way to practice autonomy is through meta-questions and cultural examination of those sites of intersection, the imbricate edges where spheres overlap. Only when we relinquish the notion of autonomy-as-goal, and instead treat it as an enduring aspiration, do we come closest to practicing it.

Notes:

1 Jurgen Habermas, “The European Nation-State: On the Past and Future of Sovereignty and Citizenship,” Public Culture 10:2 (Winter 1998), 397.

2 Jose Casanova, Public Religion in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 14.

3 Ibid., 23.

4 Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” From Modernism to Postmodernism, ed. Lawrence Cahoone (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 47.

5 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 333.

6 Ibid., 43.

7 Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1954), 202.

8 Ibid., 208.

9 Talcott Parsons, “The Role of the Artist,” The Social System (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1951), 409.

10 Arendt, 205.

11 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), 85.

12 Jeffrey Goldfarb, “The Structure of Cultural Freedom in Mass Society,” On Cultural Freedom: an exploration of public life in Poland and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

13 Harvey, 61.