Jude Foley, the main character Hardy's Romanian Unknown Jude, comes to Beersheba, the part of Oxford we know as Jericho, where the community of stonecutters and artisans who maintained the university buildings lived. It quickly becomes clear to Jude that he and his fellow craftsmen are, so to speak, the material base without which there would be no intellectual superstructure of the university: without their work, as he says, "the diligent reader could not read nor the high thinker live". In a word, he understands that the origin of culture is physical labor. This is also confirmed by etymology. One of the original meanings of the word culture is the care of what grows naturally, so agriculture or farming, and a related word coulter signifies the blade of a plough. The kinship between culture and agriculture became clear to me a number of years ago when I was driving past a field of luxuriant crops with the dean of arts at an American state university. "A few professorships could come out of this," noted the dean.
The culture generally does not like to see that connection. As an oedipal child, she does not regret to acknowledge her origin and fantasizes that she came from her own thighs, that she gave birth and shaped herself. Idealist philosophers believe that thought rests on itself. You cannot find anything more basic below it, because that too would have to be affected by opinion. Mind/Spirit it goes to the bottom.
There is an irony in this, since few things bind art to its material context as much as its claim to be free from that context. The reason is that the work of art as autonomous and self-determining - an idea born somewhere in the second half of the 18th century - is a model of a version of the human subject that quickly spread in everyday life. Under the ever-deepening influence of liberalism, greedy individualism and - to indulge the most terrible cliché - the rise of the middle class, men and women see themselves as their own creation. (If we open any history book, it will tell us three things about the period we are interested in: it was essentially an age of transition; it was a period of rapid change; the middle class was on the rise. This is exactly why God put the middle class the earth: that it rises like the sun but that, unlike it, it never descends.)
We cannot have culture in the sense of galleries, museums and publishing houses if society has not evolved to the point where it is able to produce economic surplus. Only then can people get down to the business of keeping the tribe alive and create a caste of priests, poets, DJs, hermeneutics, bassoonists, apprentices in London Review of Books, a gaffer on a film set and the like. Culture can actually be defined as a surplus over a need. We have to eat, but we don't have to eat in an expensive restaurant. In a cold climate, we need clothes, but they don't have to be creations Stella McCartney. The problem with this definition is that the capacity for excess is built into the human animal. In both good and bad ways, we are constantly surpassing ourselves. King Lear is largely occupied with this puzzle.
Since material production, which gives birth to culture, is torn by conflict, parts of that culture are sometimes used to legitimize a social order that seeks to contain or resolve conflict; this is known as ideology. Not every culture at any given time is ideological, but every part of it, no matter how abstract or high-minded, can perform that function in certain circumstances. At the same time, however, culture can generate fierce resistance to the ruling power. Surprisingly, it is more likely that such resistance will appear when art becomes just another commodity on the market, and the artist just another petty producer of goods. Before that, in traditional or premodern societies, culture mainly serves as an instrument of political and religious sovereignty, which means, among other things, that there are stable jobs for cultural workers such as court poets, genealogists, licensed madmen, painters and architects patronized by the high nobility, composers on the payroll of princes, etc. In such situations, the artist more or less knew who he was writing or painting for, while on the market his audience becomes anonymous.
The world no longer has the obligation to keep the cultural worker alive. The irony, however, is that entering the market gives art a certain degree of freedom. When it becomes primarily a commodity, culture becomes autonomous. Stripped of its traditional features, it can return to itself as its own purpose as modernist art often does; in addition, for the first time it is free to take on a significant role as a critic. The misery of commodification is at the same time a wonderful moment of emancipation. Like us Marks reminds, history progresses thanks to its bad side. As he is pushed to the margins, the artist begins to claim a visionary, prophetic, bohemian or subversive status - partly because those on the fringes can sometimes really see further than those in the middle, but also to compensate for the loss of centrality. This is how the movement called romanticism was born.
At about the same time, industrial capitalism is born, which with astonishing ease entrusts culture to perform a task at the very moment when it is in danger of being supplanted by petty bourgeois factory owners. A barrier grows between the symbolic realm and the world of utility, a barrier that goes all the way down to the human body. Values and energies for which there is little need in daily physical work are blown into their own sphere, which consists of three large sectors: art, sexuality and religion. One of the endangered values is the creative imagination, which was invented in the late 18th century and which today enjoys great respect among artistic types, although organizing the genocide in Gaza requires a considerable degree of that ability.
The resulting distance between the symbolic and the utilitarian threatens to deprive culture of its social role, but it is at the same time an operational distance that enables criticism. Culture will expose the crippled, degraded state of humanity by its full and free expression of human powers and abilities - this is the theme provided by Schiller i Termination do Morris i Marcuse. Art or culture is able to deliver a fierce rebuke to society not so much by what it says as by what it is - a strange, purposeless, intensely libidinal existence. In an increasingly instrumentalized world, it is one of the few remaining activities that exists for its own sake, and the purpose of political change is to make that condition available to other human beings. Where art was, there will be humanity.
Harmonious realization of one's own powers as a wonderful goal in itself - this is not only aesthetics but also the ethics of romantic humanism, which also includes the ethics of Karl Marx. Aesthetics becomes important when it is no longer just about art. Marx's thought refers to the material conditions that would enable entire societies to live for the sake of living, and one of those conditions is the shortening of the working day. The essence of Marxism is leisure, not work. The only good reason for someone to be a socialist - apart from annoying people he doesn't like - is that he doesn't care about work. For Oscar Wilde, which in this sense is closer to Marx than to Morris, communism is a state in which we will lie all day in various interesting poses, dressed in loose crimson robes, recite Homer to each other and drink absinthe. This is what a working day would look like.
That vision, like any ethics, contains certain problems. Should all our powers be realized? What about the obsessive desire to beat up Tony Blair?
Or should a man realize only those impulses that come from the true core of his self? But by what standards do we judge it? What if my self-realization collides with yours? And why multifaceted expression would be better than devoting yourself to one thing, as they did Alexei Navalny or Emma Radukan? Do human faculties really become malignant only when they are alienated, imbalanced, or repressed? And what if we are somewhat in love with the powers that alienate and oppress us because they are contained in the human subject, that is, they are not completely outside of it?
Hegel and Marx have some kind of answer to the problem of conflicting self-realizations: realize only those abilities that allow others to do the same. Marx calls this mutual self-realization "communism". As the Communist Manifesto says, the free development of each individual is a condition for the free development of all. When the realization of one individual is the basis or condition for the realization of another, we call it love. Marxism is about political love. Of course, I mean love in its true meaning - agape, caritas - and not to its sexual, erotic and romantic versions that are so enchanted by the late capitalist society. We're talking about the kind of love that can be deeply uncomfortable and not necessarily emotional, that is a social practice rather than a sentiment, and that could put you in danger of being killed.
Early industrial capitalism entrusted culture with another task. A new actor appeared on the political scene - the industrial working class - which was not easy to contain. Culture, in the sense of refinement and polish, was needed to buy off the second half of the title Matthew Arnold - anarchy. If liberal values were not sown in the masses, the masses could eventually undermine the liberal culture. Religion has traditionally instilled in ordinary people a sense of duty, consideration, altruism and spiritual improvement. But religious belief was in decline as the industrial middle class demythologized social existence through its secular pursuits and, ironically, ended up squandering what could have been a valuable ideological resource. Culture then had to take over that task from the churches because it was the artists who turned the profane material of everyday life into eternal truths.
What else was happening at the time of romanticism and the industrial revolution? A revolution took place in France. We wouldn't be wrong if we said that she pushed culture to the fore in the modern age - but culture as a response to revolution, as an antidote to political turbulence. Politics implies decision-making, calculation, practical rationality; in addition, it takes place in the present, while culture, one would say, lives in another dimension - in which customs and pieties mostly evolve spontaneously, unconsciously, almost as slowly as in the ice age - and can be opposed to the very idea of setting up barricades.
In Great Britain this opposition is called Edmund Burke, who came from Ireland, a nation where sovereign power failed to take root in the emotions of the people because it was a colonialist power.
Burke believed that such rooting was absent in France because the Jacobins and their successors did not understand the following: if the law is to frighten, it must be loved at the same time. In Berk's opinion, what is needed is a law that, although it is masculine, dresses up in the seductive feminine garb of culture. Power must beckon and seduce us in order not to push us into Oedipal rebellion. The potentially terrifying sublimity of the masculine must be tempered by the beauty of the feminine; precisely this aestheticization of power, writes Burke in his Philosophical investigation of the origin of our ideas about the sublime and the beautiful, the French revolutionaries tragically failed to achieve. Of course, aestheticization must not remove the masculinity of the law. The ugly bulge of her phallus must occasionally be visible through transparent dresses so that citizens can be warned and intimidated when necessary. But the law cannot function only through terror, and therefore it must be a transvestite.
Burke believed that the domain of culture - that is, customs, habits, feelings, prejudices and the like - was fundamental in a way that politics, to which he devoted his entire life, was not; and he was right. There have been some dubious ways of elevating the cultural over the political, but Burke, who began his literary career as an esthetician, does not scorn politics from the Olympian heights of high culture or dissolve it into cultural affairs. Instead, he understands that culture, in an anthropological sense, is the place where power must be concentrated in order to be effective. If the political does not find a home in the cultural, its sovereignty will not be received. We need not despise or idealize the Jacobins Marie Antoinette to get the point across.
Despite his aversion to Jacobinism, Burke eventually felt some sympathy for the revolutionary United Irish Movement, a very unusual sentiment for a member of the British Parliament. Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, himself a member of that parliament, was even more committed to the idea of a United Irish Party. He was, in fact, her secret companion—had she been known, that fact might have wiped the smile off the faces of his London audience. The United Irishmen were Enlightenment anti-colonialists, not romantic nationalists, but the rise of romantic nationalism in the early 19th century brought culture back into the center of political life.
Nationalism was the most successful revolutionary movement of modern times, overthrowing despots and smashing empires; and culture, both in an aesthetic and anthropological sense, had an essential role in that project. With revolutionary nationalism, culture in terms of language, customs, folklore, history, tradition, religion, ethnicity, and so on, becomes something that people are willing to kill for. Or to die. Not many people are willing to kill for Balzac or Bowie, but even culture in that more specialized sense plays a key role in nationalist politics. There is work again for artists who, from Yeats i Macdiarmid do Sibelius i Senghor, become public figures and political activists. In fact, nationalism has been described as the most poetic form of politics. When the British were shooting some Irish nationalist rebels, a British officer is said to have said, "We have done Ireland a service: we have rid it of some second-rate poets."
The nation itself resembles a work of art: it is autonomous, united, founded in itself and originated from itself. As this language may suggest, both art and nation are among the many surrogates of the Supreme that the modern age has produced. Aesthetic culture imitates religion with its communal rites, artistic priesthood, search for the beyond and feelings of awe. If it fails to replace religion, the reason is, among other things, that it encompasses too few people, while culture in the sense of a certain way of life contains too many conflicts. No symbolic system in history could be a rival to religious faith, which breaks the connection between the routine behavior of billions of people and ultimate, imperishable truths. It is the most enduring, most deeply rooted form of popular culture that history has ever seen, and yet you won't find it as a separate subject in any cultural studies course from Sydney to San Diego.
(End in the next issue; Lecture held on 27.03.2024; London Review of Books, 25.04.2024; Translated by Slavica Miletić; Peščanik.net, 17.06.2024)
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