After Theory Read online

  In the generously humanistic spirit of the ancient poet, this system regards nothing human as alien to it. In its hunt for profit, it will travel any distance, endure any hardship, shack up with the most obnoxious of companions, suffer the most abominable humiliations, tolerate the most tasteless wallpaper and cheerfully betray its next of kin. It is capitalism which is disinterested, not dons. When it comes to consumers who wear turbans and those who do not, those who sport flamboyant crimson waistcoats and those who wear nothing but a loincloth, it is sublimely even-handed. It has the scorn for hierarchies of a truculent adolescent, and the zeal to pick and mix of an American diner. It thrives on bursting bounds and slaying sacred cows. Its desire is unslakeable and its space infinite. Its law is the flouting of all limits, which makes law indistinguishable from criminality. In its sublime ambition and extravagant transgressions, it makes its most shaggily anarchic critics look staid and suburban.

  There are other, familiar problems with the idea of inclusive-ness, which need not detain us too long. Who gets to decide who gets included? Who – the Groucho Marx query – would want to be included in this set-up anyway? If marginality is as fertile, subversive a place as postmodern thinkers tend to suggest, why would they want to abolish it? Anyway, what if there is no clear division between margins and majority? For a socialist, the true scandal of the present world is that almost everyone in it is banished to the margins. As far as the transnational corporations go, great masses of men and women are really neither here nor there. Whole nations are thrust to the periphery. Entire classes of people are deemed to be dysfunctional. Communities are uprooted and forced into migration.

  In this world, what is central can alter overnight: nothing and nobody is permanently indispensable, least of all corporation executives. Who or what is key to the system is debatable. The destitute are obviously marginal, as so much debris and detritus thrown up by the global economy; but what of the low-paid? The low-paid are not central, but neither are they marginal. It is they whose labour keeps the system up and running. And on a global scale, the low-paid means an enormous mass of people. This, curiously, is a set-up which shuts out most of its members. And in that it is like any class-society which has ever existed. Or, for that matter, like patriarchal society, which disadvantages roughly half of its members.

  As long as we think of margins as minorities, this extraordinary fact is conveniently obscured. Most cultural thinking these days comes from the United States, a country which houses some sizeable ethnic minorities as well as most of the world’s great corporations. But because Americans are not much used to thinking in international terms, given that their governments are more interested in ruling the world than reflecting upon it, ‘marginal’ comes to mean Mexican or African-American, rather than, in addition, the people of Bangladesh or the former coalminers and shipbuilders of the West. Coalminers don’t seem all that Other, except in the eyes of a few of D. H. Lawrence’s characters.

  Indeed, there are times when it does not seem to matter all that much who the Other is. It is just any group who will show you up in your dismal normativity. A murky subcurrent of masochism runs beneath this exoticizing, laced with a dash of good old-fashioned American puritan guilt. If you were white and Western, it was better to be more or less anyone but yourself. The felicitous unearthing of a Manx great-grandmother or serendipitous stumbling across a Cornish second cousin might go some way towards assuaging your guilt. With an arrogance thinly masked as humility, the cult of the Other assumes that there are no major conflicts or contradictions within the social majority themselves. Or, for that matter, within the minorities. There is just Them and Us, margins and majorities. Some of the people who hold this view are also deeply suspicious of binary oppositions.

  There can be no falling back on ideas of collectivity which belong to a world unravelling before our eyes. Human history is now for the most part both post-collectivist and post-individualist; and if this feels like a vacuum, it may also present an opportunity. We need to imagine new forms of belonging, which in our kind of world are bound to be multiple rather than monolithic. Some of those forms will have something of the intimacy of tribal or community relations, while others will be more abstract, mediated and indirect. There is no single ideal size of society to belong to, no Cinderella’s slipper of a space. The ideal size of community used to be known as the nation-state, but even some nationalists no longer see this as the only desirable terrain.

  If men and women need freedom and mobility, they also need a sense of tradition and belonging. There is nothing retrograde about roots. The postmodern cult of the migrant, which sometimes succeeds in making migrants sound even more enviable than rock stars, is a good deal too supercilious in this respect. It is a hangover from the modernist cult of the exile, the Satanic artist who scorns the suburban masses and plucks an elitist virtue out of his enforced dispossession. The problem at the moment is that the rich have mobility while the poor have locality. Or rather, the poor have locality until the rich get their hands on it. The rich are global and the poor are local – though just as poverty is a global fact, so the rich are coming to appreciate the benefits of locality. It is not hard to imagine affluent communities of the future protected by watchtowers, searchlights and machine-guns, while the poor scavenge for food in the waste lands beyond. In the meantime, rather more encouragingly, the anti-capitalist movement is seeking to sketch out new relations between globality and locality, diversity and solidarity.

  2

  The Rise and Fall of Theory

  Cultural ideas change with the world they reflect upon. If they insist, as they do, on the need to see things in their historical context, then this must also apply to themselves. Even the most rarefied theories have a root in historical reality. Take, for example, hermeneutics, the science or art of interpretation. It is generally agreed that the founding father of hermeneutics was the German philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher. What is not so widely known is that Schleiermacher’s interest in the art of interpretation was provoked when he was invited to translate a book entitled An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, which records the author’s encounter with Australian Aboriginal peoples. Schleiermacher was concerned about how we could understand the beliefs of this people even though they seemed desperately alien to us.1 It was from a colonial encounter that the art of interpretation was born.

  Cultural theory must be able to give some account of its own historical rise, flourishing and faltering. Strictly speaking, such theory goes back as far as Plato. In the forms most familiar to us, however, it is really a product of an extraordinary decade and a half, from about 1965 to 1980. It is in this astonishingly abundant period that most of the thinkers listed at the opening of the previous chapter produced their path-breaking works.

  What is the significance of these dates? It is that cultural theory broke out in the only period since the Second World War in which the political far left rose briefly to prominence, before sinking almost out of sight. The new cultural ideas had their roots deep in the age of civil rights and student insurgency, national liberation fronts, anti-war and anti-nuclear campaigns, the emergence of the women’s movement and the heyday of cultural liberation. It was an era in which the consumer society was launched with a flourish; in which the media, popular culture, sub-cultures and the cult of youth first emerged as social forces to be reckoned with; and in which social hierarchies and traditional mores were coming under satiric assault. The whole sensibility of society had undergone one of its periodic transformations. We had shifted from the earnest, self-disciplined and submissive to the cool, hedonistic and insubordinate. If there was widespread disaffection, there was also visionary hope. There was a general excited sense that the present was the place to be. And if it was, it was partly because it seemed so obviously the herald of a new future, the portal to a land of boundless possibility.

  Above all, the new cultural ideas sprang up in a capitalism for which culture itself was becoming more and more
important. This was an unusual development. Culture and capitalism are hardly as familiar a duo as Corneille and Racine or Laurel and Hardy. Indeed, culture had traditionally signified almost the opposite of capitalism. The concept of culture grew up as a critique of middle-class society, not as an ally of it. Culture was about values rather than prices, the moral rather than the material, the high-minded rather than the philistine. It was about the cultivation of human powers as ends in themselves rather than for some ignobly utilitarian motive. Such powers formed a harmonious totality: they were not just a bundle of specialized tools, and ‘culture’ signified this splendid synthesis. It was the rickety shelter where the values and energies which industrial capitalism had no use for could take refuge. It was the place where the erotic and symbolic, the ethical and mythological, the sensuous and affective, could set up home in a social order which had less and less time for any of them. From its patrician height, it scorned the shopkeepers and stockbrokers swarming in the commercial badlands below.

  By the 1960s and 70s, however, culture was also coming to mean film, image, fashion, lifestyle, marketing, advertising, the communications media. Signs and spectacles were spreading throughout social life. There were anxieties in Europe about cultural Americanization. We seemed to have achieved affluence without fulfilment, which brought cultural or ‘quality of life’ issues sharply to the fore. Culture in the sense of value, symbol, language, art, tradition and identity was the very air which new social movements like feminism and Black Power breathed. It was now on the side of dissent, not of harmonious resolution. It was also the life-blood of newly articulate working-class artists and critics, who were noisily besieging the bastions of high culture and higher education for the first time. The idea of cultural revolution migrated from the so-called Third World to the well-heeled West, in a heady mélange of Fanon, Marcuseé, Reich, Beauvoir, Gramsci and Godard.

  Meanwhile, a conflict broke out on the streets over the uses of knowledge. It was a quarrel between those who wanted to turn knowledge into military and technological hardware, or into techniques of administrative control, and those who saw in it a chance for political emancipation. The universities which had been the very home of traditional culture, the citadels of disinterested inquiry, became for a fleeting moment, most unusually, the cockpits of culture as political struggle. Middle-class society had been reckless enough to set up institutions in which young, clever, morally conscientious people had nothing to do for three or four years but read books and kick ideas around; and the result of this ludicrous indulgence on society’s part was wholesale student revolt. Nor was it confined to the campus, like today’s campaigns for political correctness. In France and Italy, student agitation helped to detonate the largest mass working-class protests of the post-war era.

  This, to be sure, is only likely to come about in peculiar political circumstances. In our own time, political conflict on the campuses has been largely about words rather than red bases. Indeed, the former is partly a result of the disappearance of the latter. Even so, allowing sensitive, politically idealistic young people to gather together for several years on end remains an imprudent policy. There is always a risk that education may put you at odds with the tasteless, clueless philistines who run the world and whose lexicon stretches only to words like oil, golf, power and cheeseburger. It may make you less than sanguine about entrusting the governance of the globe to men who have never been excited by an idea, moved by a landscape or enthralled by the transcendent elegance of a mathematical solution. You may develop grave doubts about those who have the nerve to speak of defending civilization and would not recognize an obelisk or an oboe concerto if it were to slap them in the face. These are the men and women who prate of freedom and would recognize it only in the form of a hand-out.

  Some of the political struggles of this period were reasonably successful, while others were not. The student movement of the late 1960s did not prevent higher education from becoming locked ever deeper into structures of military violence and industrial exploitation. But it posed a challenge to the way in which the humanities had been complicit in all this; and one of the fruits of this challenge was cultural theory. The humanities had lost their innocence: they could no longer pretend to be untainted by power. If they wanted to stay in business, it was now vital that they paused to reflect on their own purposes and assumptions. It is this critical self-reflection which we know as theory. Theory of this kind comes about when we are forced into a new self-consciousness about what we are doing. It is a symptom of the fact that we can no longer take those practices for granted. On the contrary, those practices must now begin to take themselves as objects of their own inquiry. There is thus always something rather navel-staring and narcissistic about theory, as anyone who has encountered a few prominent cultural theorists will be aware.

  Elsewhere, the record was fairly chequered. If colonial powers were cast out, neo-colonial ones were being levered into their place. For all the climate of post-war affluence, there were still important mass Communist parties in Europe. But they responded at best churlishly and at worst repressively to the stirring of the new social forces. By the 1970s, with the emergence of so-called Eurocommunism, they had opted more decisively than ever for reformism over revolutionism. The women’s movement chalked up some signal achievements, suffered some serious rebuffs, and altered much of the cultural climate of the West almost beyond recognition.

  Something of the same can be said for the various campaigns for civil rights. In Northern Ireland, the dictatorship of the Unionists was besieged by mass protest, but whether there will be a wholly democratic outcome still remains to be seen. The Western peace movement helped to halt Lyndon Johnson in his bellicose tracks, but failed to abolish weapons of mass destruction. In playing its part in ending the war in south-east Asia, it also did itself out of business as a mass political movement. Elsewhere in the world, however, revolutionary currents continued to upturn colonial powers.

  As far as culture goes, the bland, paternalist cultural establishment of the post-war epoch was rudely shattered by the populist experiments of the 1960s. Elitism was now a thought-crime only slightly less grievous than anti-Semitism. Everywhere one looked, the upper middle classes were assiduously at work roughening up their accents and distressing their jeans. The working-class hero was triumphantly marketed. Yet this politically rebellious populism also paved the way for the rampantly consumerist culture of the 1980s and 90s. What had for a moment shaken middle-class complacency was soon to be co-opted by it. Similarly, managers of shops and pubs did not know whether to be enthralled or appalled by Sixties slogans like ‘What do we want? Everything! When do we want it? Now!’ Capitalism needs a human being who has never yet existed – one who is prudently restrained in the office and wildly anarchic in the shopping mall. What was happening in the 1960s was that the disciplines of production were being challenged by the culture of consumption. And this was bad news for the system only in a limited sense.

  There was no simple rise and fall of radical ideas. We have seen already that revolutionary nationalism chalked up some signal victories at the same time that it unwittingly prepared the ground for a ‘post-class’ discourse of the impoverished world. While students were discovering free love, a brutal US imperialism was at its height in south-east Asia. If there were fresh demands for liberation, they were partly reactions to a capitalism in buoyant, expansive phase. It was the soullessness of an affluent society, not the harshness of a deprived one, which was under fire. European Communist parties made some inroads, but political reform in Czechoslovakia was crushed by Soviet tanks. Latin American guerrilla movements were rolled back. Structuralism, the new intellectual fashion, was radical in some ways and technocratic in others. If it challenged the prevailing social order, it also reflected it. Post-structuralism and postmodernism were to prove similarly ambiguous, subverting the metaphysical underpinnings of middle-class society with something of its own market-type relativism. Both postmodernists and ne
o-liberals are suspicious of public norms, inherent values, given hierarchies, authoritative standards, consensual codes and traditional practices. It is just that neo-liberals admit that they reject all this in the name of the market. Radical postmodernists, by contrast, combine these aversions with a somewhat sheepish chariness of commercialism. The neo-liberals, at least, have the virtue of consistency here, whatever their plentiful vices elsewhere.

  The early 1970s – the very highpoint of radical dissent – also saw the first glimmerings of the postmodern culture which was eventually to take over from it. The halcyon days of cultural theory lasted until about 1980 – several years after the oil crisis which heralded a global recession, the victory of the radical right and the ebbing of revolutionary hopes. Working-class militancy, having flourished in the early 1970s, subsided dramatically, as a systematic onslaught was launched on the labour movement with the aim of breaking it for ever. Trade unions were shackled and unemployment deliberately created. Theory overshot reality, in a kind of intellectual backwash to a tumultuous political era. As often happens, ideas had a last, brilliant efflorescence when the conditions which produced them were already disappearing. Cultural theory was cut loose from its moment of origin, yet tried in its way to keep that moment warm. Like war, it became the continuation of politics by other means. The emancipation which had failed in the streets and factories could be acted out instead in erotic intensities or the floating signifier. Discourse and desire came to stand in for the Godard and Guevara that had failed. At the same time, some of the new ideas were the first straws in the wind of post-political pessimism which was about to blow through the West.