Late Capitalist Culture and Culture Critique

(Part 1 of a 4 Part Series)

Current debates over the supposed movement towards greater “multiculturalism” and the maintenance of “totalitarian” standards of “political correctness” on contemporary American college and university campuses represent a potentially crucial site of struggle over what ends and interests can and will late capitalist institutions, and especially educational institutions, be directed to serve. The most critical question this debate raises is are these institutions to be devoted to serving the needs of late capitalist corporations or are they to be devoted to serving the needs of those who are exploited and oppressed in the interest of capitalist profit and accumulation.

Many within the contemporary academic left have found themselves uncritically supportive — and even uncritically enthusiastic — about the “radical” promise and potential of “multiculturalism.” The slanderous attack upon multiculturalism by the Right, both within and outside of the academy, as the principal bastion of “left-totalitarian” “political correctness” has only confirmed the conviction of many on the left that multiculturalism not only should be defended against such vicious attacks, but also that it represents a most radically progressive development which is entirely antithetical to and in no way complicitous with the philosophical and political positions of the conservative “p.c.-bashers.” We disagree. We think that the emergent ideology of “multiculturalism” must be critiqued and rejected by the radical left.

First, however, we want to acknowledge the progressive value of multiculturalism. We believe that, insofar as it represents a struggle against patriarchal and racist modes of knowledge and practice which support the interests of the ruling class, multiculturalism is an important aspect of contemporary struggle to democratize american society.

Second, we want to acknowledge that we are not disparaging of multiculturalism for its ambiguities and contradictions. We believe such ambiguity and contradiction is virtually inevitable in a category which has been formulated in order to connect a wide range of diverse agendas in achieving what is possible within a highly unfavorable political environment. As a practical, political/institutional project, multiculturalism has already contributed towards some important democratic achievements.

At the same time, however, we believe that it is necessary to inquire (and to do so critically) into what are the theoretical presuppositions of multiculturalism if we are to understand its contradictions — and, from there, its possibilities of future development. We believe that it is troubling that a project with such radical pretensions has become, at least in principle, so readily acceptable to the academic center. We believe, moreover, that this is no accident: multiculturalism is, in essence, nothing more than an updated and retooled version of classic liberal pluralism.

Multiculturalism, at its strongest, understands culture as a series of discourses and practices which maintain and reproduce social relations and social existence. It argues that by privileging the values represented by one set of practices (say, that of Europeans) over others (say, that of Africans), Eurocentric and patriarchal and heterosexist modes of knowledge contribute to the material inequalities which favor straight white Western males. It attempts to counter these inequalities by arguing for the equality of all cultures, and integration of an understanding of all cultures into our pedagogical institutions. It argues, furthermore, that this integration must not merely be an “insertion” of previously excluded knowledges into a system which remains otherwise unchanged; rather, existing (Eurocentric, patriarchal, and heterosexist) culture must be contested and transformed so that it becomes non-exclusivist and non-oppressive.

It is impossible to deny the effectivity of this argument on the terrain of institutional reform: multiculturalism has succeeded in unsettling (except within the more conservative and reactionary areas of the “higher” educational system) the unproblematic hegemony of previously unquestioned myths of “progress,” “freedom,” and “democracy” as definitive of Western and american societies. However, in this very strength also lies the weaknesses and contradictions of multiculturalism. That is, it is by nature of the way in which it concentrates in this very arena of struggle that multiculturalism has tended to develop in a highly abstract and very idealistic direction.

In other words, multiculturalism abstracts “culture” from socio-economic reality, and especially from class relations. This is no mere oversight of the multiculturalist project, but rather an end which is inscribed in its essential logic. The attribution of cultures to diverse and disparate kinds of peoples and to very different kinds and sizes of geographic area rather than to social formations organized as totalities, necessarily leads multiculturalism to focus on the most local and distinctive aspects of sign and value systems as what is most essential in defining a “culture.” Multiculturalism therefore reproduces liberal pluralism, in which a series of separate and equal (in value, if not in power) “cultures” coexist, with only local transformations.

In contrast, we argue for the necessity of theorizing the globality of late capitalist culture. Late capitalist culture is a real totality, and not merely the sum of a vast quantity (and quality) of diverse and distinct cultures of different nations, regions, localities, classes, institutions and even “discourse communities.” We believe it is important to reunderstand “culture” not in terms of its essential difference from other distinct — and at best extrinsically linked — cultures (each homogeneous in itself), but rather in terms of its internal contradictions — and the intrinsic connections among this general culture and various subcultures. Moreover, we also believe it is necessary to reunderstand culture not simply as any concentration or clustering of attitudes and beliefs, customs and traditions, and/or habits and practices within any particular expanse of space or duration of time, but rather as a totality of objects and capacities that are produced, accumulated, and transmitted in the course of real historical work and struggle aimed at producing, reproducing, and enhancing an historically particular mode of social existence. We argue, furthermore, that culture is organized in accord with the productive needs and therefore with the socioeconomic — and class — structure that is dominant in society: culture is organized, fundamentally, to reproduce these needs and this structure.

Our understanding of culture would replace the largely descriptive and appreciative approach of multiculturalism with a much more critical one. That is, our approach interprets and evaluates all cultural objects and processes as contradictory, and this includes as well the “cultural productions” of oppressed groups of people. This means that we must be critical — and even ruthlessly so — of the “self-expression” of representatives of working class, African-American, Latino-American, Asian-American, Native American, feminist, gay and lesbian liberationist, and Third World “cultures.” We believe this is true even — and in fact especially — when this “self-expression” purports to be the simple and direct “testimony” of these people to how they have suffered and how they have resisted and struggled: even the most seemingly directly immediate — and thereby seemingly entirely unmediated — expressions of “rage” and “sorrow” and “pain” and “anguish” on the part of the oppressed must be approached with the same critical rigor. In fact, this point is central to our critique of multiculturalism: due to the complex interdependencies which intimately interconnect the practices of the oppressed to structures which support the oppressor, the practices of the oppressed, even when they seem most entirely and fiercely resistant to that oppression, necessarily reproduce at least in part those structures. Therefore, an uncritical valorization of the practices of the oppressed, even those which resist or appear to offer an alternative to the existing order, inevitably idealizes those practices and therefore, even more damagingly, the social order which makes these practices possible. It is crucial that a truly radical mode of cultural critique be consistently, and as Marx put it, ruthlessly critical of everything that exists.

We believe that the function of culture critique, then, should be precisely to aid the struggles of the oppressed by showing the limitations in their practices of resistance. We, furthermore, believe that it one area in which it is particularly important to do this is to focus upon the limitations in the ways in which the oppressed have recognized, worked with, and pushed forward the contradictions of — and especially the contradictory possibilities within — the dominant late capitalist culture. This dominant late capitalist culture — and this culture includes both the technologies produced under capitalism and the modes of capitalist organization of collective practices, both in social production and beyond — is simply rejected by those struggling for emancipation only at the cost — at least the risk — of fetishizing the conditions of their own oppression, the state of existence which follows, in other words, from their relative deprivation and powerlessness. The dominant culture must be transformed by taking up and pushing forward its most progresive potentialities and by extending and realizing what has been limited and underdeveloped within this culture because of its distortion in the service of oppressive — capitalist -- interests. Radicals should not reject the wealth of capitalist surplus production in favor of a moralistic harkening for an ascetic — and highly romantic and nostalgic — retreat into the pre-capitalist past (real or imagined), but instead must work towards the ends, one, of an egalitarian reappropriation and redistribution of this capitalist wealth, and two, of egalitarian rearticulation and redirection of planned production and distribution of the social surplus of the future.

While multiculturalism represents cultures as fixed and essential, a radical culture critique must theorize — must explain — both the ways in which late capitalist culture develops according to a contradictory dynamic and the ways in which it can be transformed beyond itself from working with the elements that exist within this very domiant culture itself. It is for this reason that a radical mode of cultural critique must maintain the category of universality as a means of abstracting from empirical and local practices whatever might represent the consequences and possibilities of these practices for progressive development of general human capacities — capacities which can be extended and developed, and this extension and development repeated, beyond the limited space of a single conjuncture. By “universality,” we wish to stress that we do not mean transhistorical, but rather whatever exists within actual cultural processes that can be reproduced and expanded in other contexts than those in which they immediately — and empirically — exist. So, for example, a feminist critique of patriarchal sexual practices is in this sense more universal than the “everyday forms of resistance” which are constructed by women struggling against their oppression in relative isolation. We believe that the universality of cultural objects must everywhere be critically supported versus what we call their “independent,” local, and class-bound character. This requires a mode of cultural critique which assesses the effectivity of resistance and opposition on the part of the exploited and oppressed not merely in terms of how much trouble they have caused their exploiters and oppressors, nor merely in terms of how much relative “free” space or even relative “independent” power they have gained through struggle, nor merely in terms of how well they have succeeded (or threaten to succeed) in undermining and destroying destroying dominant culture, but instead also, and crucially, in terms of what contribution they show themselves actually or potentially able to make to the organization, development, and management of a new society.

Next Three Installments in the Series:

Part 2: “Late Capitalism, Crisis, and Opposition”;

Part 3: “Democracy, Public Rights, and the Collective Space”;

Part 4: “Marxism and Socialist Politics in the 1990s.”