Elsewhere in this issue of Rising East, James Heartfield shoots down the economic balloon of Creative London. Where others have floated the prospect of wholesale expansion, Heartfield brings us down to earth by pointing to ‘creative sector’ job inflation. Yet if ‘Creative London’ and ‘Knowledge Economy’ are not the economic transformation that they are cracked up to be, does this mean that they are simply hot air? Or is there anything else, something in between transformation and the sin of spin, which they truly represent?
My claim is that there is something in between; moreover, that ‘Creative London, ‘Knowledge Economy’ and ‘Creative Britain’ all represent the coming of a new kind of in-between which, while neither as substantial nor empty as either boosters or critics have claimed, is significant nonetheless and especially so in the specific historical context and the particular geo-political circumstances pertaining today.
Today’s circumstances are a continuation of capitalism and imperialism, and thus continue to reproduce the contradiction which is essential to capitalist social relations for as long as they exist as such, namely, the contradiction between social production and private appropriation, i.e. what the majority produces is owned by a minority, and this is the precondition for production.
Our individual lives are together underscored by this contradiction, but it is not played out directly as in a Hobbesian war of all against all (though plenty of lives are nasty, brutish and short because of it); rather the contradiction is mediated, which is to say, both acted out and acted upon, expressed and at the same time offset, in a variety of ways: culture, politics, religion – you name it. In a society where capital: wage labour remains the social relation just as contradiction remains essential to it, i.e. where the reproduction of society is conditional upon the accumulation of capital by means of the capital: wage labour relation, any aggregation of our interpersonal relations (culture, politics, religion) is bound to address this relation and its inherent contradiction, as it will also be bound up with it.
Not only are there different forms of address (culture is different from politics though they are also related), but at different times any one of these various forms can become the most apposite or effective mode of addressing the capitalist social relation in its essential contradiction. To put this another way, specific historical conjunctures demand and/or allow the rise and demise of particular modes of mediating capitalist contradiction. This is also to say that what lies in-between economic production (which under capitalism is also the limiting factor in social reproduction) and the spin put upon it, is the mode of addressing or mediating capitalist contradiction; also, what mediation is comprised of, and the relative weighting of its continually varying aspects, may change over time.
Then perhaps the advent of spin like ‘Creative London’, and, more widely, the greater prominence of culture-oriented impression management, has been the epiphenomenal form of an historical process of change which is not the transformation it was made out to be, but is nonetheless substantive, though not in the economic or other terms in which it is typically presented.
In the following paper, I seek to show that this is indeed the case: that the exhaustion of modern politics has posed the mediation question as matter of urgency – how is capitalist contradiction to be acted out and acted upon now that hardly anyone takes part in the political theatre? Furthermore, I attempt to indicate how the peculiar conditions of these times, including high levels of cooperation between advanced and advancing nations and the quiescence of the working class internationally – conditions themselves brought about in part by the exhaustion of the modern political cycle, posit new ways of addressing the mediation question. Circumstances thus modified facilitate the proliferation of forms of financial capital which are unusually distant from production and its essential contradiction, and, accordingly, the development of new forms of mediation which are far removed from the contested realm and the exclusive organisation of modern, political mediation.
In the re-configuration of mediation which new circumstances both demand and allow, culture has emerged as the most apposite means of acting out and acting upon capitalist contradiction. Not that I am suggesting culture itself is new, even as a form of mediation, but it has become much more of a focal point. Conversely, the foci in our socialised existence have recently become more cultural than political. Corporate relations with consumers (previously known as workers), the state’s relation to its ‘customers’ (previously known as citizens) and even international relations, which previously existed in the form of explicit inter-imperialist rivalries, have all come to be not only seen but also acted out in terms of shared meanings and inclusive practices, and their representation – in a word, ‘culture’.
This is in marked contrast to the directly contested self-interests which characterised the political realm and the period defined by it. There is ‘clear water’, therefore, between cultural mediation as it has recently emerged with its promise of inclusivity, and the divided, divisive central form of organising the political in the UK: the unions and Labour Party known collectively as the ‘organised labour movement’.
In the period of political mediation, ‘divide’ was tantamount to ‘rule’. Just as social production only occurs as an aspect of private appropriation (and vice versa), so the acting out of this contradiction was acted upon first in the delineation of class and national divisions and only then in the (partial) blurring of dividing lines previously emphasised. This was the condition of Rule Britannia: the contradiction inherent in the national capital of Britain mediated in a mode of political contestation and international conflict.
In such conditions, characterised as they were by organised class conflict and its secondary amelioration, Matthew Arnold’s manifesto for cultural inclusion, Culture and Anarchy (1869) – it might have been titled ‘Include and Rule’, was noted but not widely implemented. Indeed, when the working class in Britain soon distinguished itself as a combative political entity, it became inoperable. Nearly a century later, when an American named Bernard Nossiter suggested that Britain should re-define itself in terms of culture and tourism (1978), the re-orientation of capitalist mediation was still prohibited by the continued existence of political conflict. But today, in a different context characterised by scarcity of political conflict, an abundance of inclusion, inclusion inclusion is what amounts to cultural mediation.
This is the usage of culture not to offset Arnold’s ‘anarchy’, i.e. the collectivised, proletarian threat to bourgeois rule, but in the attempt to address anomie – the social effects, anti-social in their consequence, of the privatising force of the capitalist social relation. It by no means adds up to social transformation, nor is ‘inclusion’ anything like as inclusive as it is made out to be; nonetheless the turn to culture constitutes a significant modification in the major mode of mediation. Neither ‘new economy’ nor ‘empty signifier’, this is the real, in-between content of Cool Britannia, Creative Britain and their regional progeny, Creative London.
That the new terms of acting it out have not transformed the underlying reality is in my terms to say that the mediation of capitalist contradiction is not the same as transcending it: disjuncture between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’ is a function of mediation; without it there would be neither mediation nor the need for it. Heartfield, in this issue of Rising East and in a variety of other publications, has done us all a valuable service in distinguishing between the appearance and reality of Creative London/Creative Britain. Seeing the distinction between the two, however, should not prevent us from recognising the necessity (for capital) of mediation and the reality of transition from one preferred form of mediation to another. To my mind, the critique of Creative London calls for the articulation of both these aspects as they are represented in Heartfield’s paper and my own.
The term ‘Cool Britannia’ came into circulation in the mid-1990s. It connoted many of the qualities associated with Creative Britain, with an added element of defensive self-mockery expressed in the thinly veiled reference to ‘Rule Britannia’. But self-mockery does not preclude simultaneous self-aggrandisement, as was the case here. ‘Cool Britannia’ was a trumpeting of Pomp and Circumstance transposed to the cultural arena in yet another attempt to refute the remark made nearly 40 years earlier by U.S. secretary of state Dean Ascheson, that ‘Britain has lost an empire but not yet found a role.’
‘Cool’ Britannia’s reference to ‘Rule’ was double-edged, therefore: on the one hand a disavowal of Empire, as if to say, the only way we can possibly mention the days of Empire is to make a joke of them; but, on the other hand, it courted continuity with the days of Empire, as if to say, at that time our navy was pre-eminent, now our capital is the pre-eminent global city, and our culture rules the global airwaves.
Thus, while recognising its epiphenomenal character, it is equally important to recognise that in its brief usage, ‘Cool Britannia’ was an indication of both continuities and discontinuities with Britain’s imperial past.
At first glance the elements of continuity are perhaps the most striking. Thus Henwood reports that ‘the globalisation characteristic of the late twentieth century resembles the world of 100 years ago.’ (Henwood 1997: 114) In identifying the determining factors of imperialism not with the jingoism of militaristic elites but with the necessary dynamic of capital in its highest (yet) stage, in 1917 Lenin emphasised the concentration of capital, the export of capital and the increased role of finance capital as characteristic expressions of the latter (Lenin 1977). Nearly a century later, such trends are even more pronounced; yet there are other trends which may be still more indicative of the recent context.
Peculiar economic factors seem to have facilitated particular modifications in the forms of social reproduction, while specific aspects of social reproduction may have had equally important effects on the accumulation process, perhaps enabling the continuation of the latter beyond normal or previously applicable limits. Taken together, such factors and their interaction underlie the development of cultural mediation as both a divergence from imperialism in Lenin’s classic characterisation, but also as a continuation of it.
First, the economic factors influencing social reproduction: declining investment in plant and machinery (constant capital), a decline which is noticeable throughout leading capitalist nations but has been particularly marked in Britain, will have had the effect of slowing down the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, where the latter is understood as a derivation from the increased ratio of constant to variable capital. Since the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is at the same time the tendency towards economic crisis in the sphere of production, the slowdown in the former (a consequence of the lack of productive investment) is also likely to have prompted a slowing down in the development of counter-acting tendencies.
The set of these counter-acting tendencies and the policies apposite to them were identified by Grossmann ([1929]1992) as the real content of imperialism. If such tendencies have been developing more slowly in recent years, it follows that the reproduction of classical imperialism as a set of counter-acting tendencies has itself been partly countered by factors arising from the extraordinary deceleration of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. That imperialism is thus qualified, though not negated, is indicated by the modified character of Western intervention in the Third World. (Little and Wickham-Jones 2000)
Of inter-imperialist rivalry over spheres of interest, of which the best-known example is the ‘scramble for Africa’ (Pakenham 1998), Lenin, following Hobson (1905) and Schulze-Gaevernitz (1906: 225), observed that such adventures were driven not by the spiritual desire for lebensraum nor a vulgar craving for raw materials, nor even by the requirement to maintain profits by dumping goods on pre-capitalist economies, but by the need to export capital. (1977: 176-262) Exporting capital was the dynamic underlying both the re-formation of existing colonies and the establishment of new ones. Whether new or old, at the turn of the twentieth century each and every colony was the property of a particular, advanced nation in whose domestic capital the tendency towards crisis was already discernible; hence the role of such colonies as the exclusively-owned destination for exported, national capital; and the ensuing rivalries and, ultimately, war, arising from the need to protect capital’s colonial destinations for the sole use of its respective, national exporters.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, by contrast, advanced capitalist countries preferred to export capital from one to another, while, with a couple of important exceptions such as the Asian Tigers in the early 1990s and China from the second half of the 1990s, the export of capital from the West to the rest of the world went into relative decline (IMF 1994) . During this decade, while the loci (Balkans, Middle East, Africa) of Western intervention were consistent with the years before and after the First World War, the dynamic behind Western militarism varied considerably from that identified by Lenin and Hobson. If in the Edwardian era the Royal Navy and the Colonial Civil Service acted as guarantors for the export of capital, in the 1990s UK armed forces and state-sponsored NGOs served in the attempt to import legitimacy and moral authority to Western nations where both of these qualities were in dangerously short supply.
Whereas classical imperialism might be described as the commodification of international relations, in which imperialist powers related to each other according to their competing interests in the export and international deployment of national capital, recent developments are suggestive of the partial culturisation of international relations, in that the motive behind the relatively concerted actions of Western powers has been the desire to realise shared meanings derived from an inclusive, ‘humanitarian’ agenda (Furedi 1994). This means that ‘humanitarianism’ on the world stage will have shared some of the aims and traits of the Creative Britain brand in the domestic context.
Furthermore, whereas the counteraction of crisis tendencies previously prompted self-interested and exclusionary activity on the part of advanced capitalist nation states as guarantors of national capital, the recent deceleration of crisis tendencies has tended to diminish exclusionary pressures and their expression in inter-imperialist rivalries, i.e. rivalries between world powers seeking to maximise their spheres of influence and exclude other such powers from them. In the recent context of decelerating crisis tendencies, the self-interest of advanced capitalist countries is expressed in the demand for the re-mediation of social relations through a combination of ethics and aesthetics in the conduct of international affairs and their media representation.
Imperialism perhaps, but an imperialism driven by problems of mediation rather than those of accumulation, and by the attempt to respond to the mediation question, recently re-posed, through the production on the international stage of cultural signifiers for domestic consumption. This is in marked contrast to the classical imperialism of national and nationalistic policies designed to catalyse counter-acting tendencies towards an incipient crisis of accumulation. In the recent context, the combination of the epochal contradiction between social reproduction and capital accumulation together with the historically contingent consequences of the slowdown in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, has made it possible for problems of mediation to take precedence over limits to accumulation. Thus economic factors which jointly produced a deceleration in the tendency towards crisis, have underpinned the prioritisation of cultural concerns over economic ones, the corollary of which is the temporary qualification of counter-crisis measures traditionally associated with imperialism.
What of social factors influencing the character and the sustainability of capital accumulation? In Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism, Lenin quoted the British colonialist Cecil Rhodes to the effect that in the early twentieth century the expansion of Empire was necessary in order to avoid civil war. (1917: 225) Whereas the Trotskyist position of revolutionary defeatism, elaborated subsequently, sought to change world war into class war, the British bourgeoisie and their German counterparts moved inexorably towards world war in their attempt to win the class war by other means such as Empire. Furthermore, the effect of class war was to remove certain policies from the menu of counter-crisis measures available to the capitalist class. Such was the level of class conflict and the balance of class forces in the run-up to 1914, that the recurring tendency for intra-national confrontation could only be resolved with the onset of inter-national conflagration on a world scale.
In the recent context, by contrast, the British ruling elite has come under no such pressure from the working class. British workers, whose collective organisations were defeated in the 1970s and again, resoundingly, in the 1980s, have been in no position to resist successive increases in the rate of exploitation, whether these were implemented under the banner of the ‘manager’s right to manage’, or more recently, in the name of Creativity and ‘internal branding’. Furthermore, the flexibility afforded to managers by the recent imbalance of class forces has had ideological effects which in turn have offered even greater latitude in the accumulation of capital.
In the 1990s and even more recently, just as previous levels of class conflict became inconceivable as well as impractical, prompting a steep decline in industrial disputes, so financial speculation soared to new heights. These two trends were complementary as well as opposite. While the dot.com boom of the middle of the decade was articulated with creativity, it was noticeably unhinged from the production process or from those who implement it. In other words, the ideological context in which workers as such count for little, lends itself to the expectation that money makes more and more money, especially when invested ‘creatively’. Thus, while the epoch of classical imperialism was characterised by the growth of finance capital and its increased role in production, the further financialisation characteristic of the recent period indicated a degree of separation of profits from production which could only have come about when producers count for relatively little. Here, once more, we see a divergence from the epoch of classical imperialism, with the evolving imbalance balance between productive and speculative investment underpinned by dramatic discontinuity in the balance of class forces.
Just as historically contingent aspects of the accumulation of capital have impinged upon geo-political dimensions of social reproduction, so historically contingent aspects of social reproduction have impinged upon the cycle of capital accumulation and the possibility of prolonging it. Thus increased export of capital between advanced capitalist countries, the deployment of new value produced in China to support the circulation of derivatives and the commissions creamed off in the West, the new found prominence of fictitious capital accumulated through the international circulation of capital, and the role of the City of London as a particular, national conduit for such a general, international process - the full and recent extent of all these developments has been conditional upon unusual levels of international cooperation, which in turn is made possible by the diminished tendency for counter-crisis competition, i.e. inter-imperialist rivalry.
Similarly, the relative absence of class conflict expressed as confrontation between management and organised labour, an absence derived in part from the decline of political traditions around which labour has been accustomed to organise, has facilitated flexible working both in advanced capitalist countries and in Third World countries to which production has been increasingly ‘outsourced’. In turn, labour flexibility often promotes increases in absolute as opposed to relative surplus value, i.e. increases which do not contribute to the changing organic composition of capital and hence to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Thus recent developments in international class relations - modifications to subjective factors - have again influenced the objective conditions in which the accumulation of capital not only continues but continues beyond limits which might otherwise have come into effect.
In the recent context, therefore, the interaction between capital accumulation and social reproduction has been relatively unproblematic, as compared with previous instances where objective factors such as slump or subjective factors such as working class revolution have emphasised the essentially contradictory character of the self-same process in which capital accumulation and social reproduction are bound together.
The de-intensification of the effects of contradiction does not entail the transcendence of capital as an essentially contradictory social relation requiring mediation. What it does mean, however, is that the demand for new ways of mediating this contradiction is not derived from the accelerated expression of such contradiction in the classical form of capitalist crisis, as theorised by Grossmann (1929) in reference to the 1920s, and Mattick (1980) in respect of the 1970s; rather such crisis as has occurred, has been at the level of mediation itself.
In this respect, the turn to cultural mediation and the difficulties inherent in such a turn, are comparable to the turn to the financial economy and the crashes by which it is occasionally yet inevitably afflicted (as I write, it remains to be seen whether doubts about bad debts in U.S. real estate will prompt this level of ‘correction’). Neither the financial economy nor the cultural turn is the consequence of the realisation of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall where the rise in the mass of profits fails to compensate for it. Rather they are both expressions of the qualification of this tendency in the peculiar context of international cooperation and labour quiescence.
The financial economy and its periodic difficulties are the corollary of the increasingly distant relationship between the valorisation process in the sphere of production (inextricably linked to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall), and the growing proportion of the mass of profits realised in the sphere of circulation, where the effects of tendency of the rate of profit to fall are felt indirectly. That so much of the mass of profits is realised through means which are only indirectly connected to the fundamental process of production, is itself a destabilising factor; by the same token, however, the widening gap between the financial economy and the sphere of production, where lies the essential contradiction of capital and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, means that trends towards economic crisis, which are as fundamental to capital as the accumulation of capital itself, have not been brought to a head as once they were in the Great Depression that followed the Wall Street crash of October 1929, or (on a smaller scale) in the recession which followed the oil crisis of 1974.
As the financial economy is far removed from the production of new values, so too is culture, in its artistic capacity, distanced from the everyday realm of production and the contradiction essential to it. As a form of mediation, this is at once its strength and its weakness. In its distance from necessary conflicts arising from the essential contradiction in production, it stays true to itself even when it downplays contradiction in its re-presentation of social reality. Thus culture, in its artistic aspect, addresses the contradiction inherent in social relations by re-configuring social reality as if such contradiction were largely absent from it. In this sense, of all the mediating forms, culture goes furthest towards resolving social contradiction. But in so doing, it moves far away, perhaps too far, from essential social contradiction as it is necessarily experienced in intersubjective conflict. In other words, in being so far removed from the essential contradiction in production relations, culture, in its artistic capacity, is less able to address the necessary expression of social contradiction in day-to-day conflict, and on this account has previously proved insufficient as the general form of the mediation of social contradiction. Rather, culture has tended to be most effective in its mediating role among those particular sections of society which were furthest removed from the essential contradiction in production relations. In today’s unusual circumstances, however, given both objective conditions and subjective factors tending to suppress politicised conflicts arising from essentially contradictory production relations, cultural mediation of social contradiction can be extended throughout society, even though its inherent capacity for mediation is limited.
In the classical era of capitalist crises as described above, the general principle of mediating forms was separation: separation of the spheres of influence belonging to one national capital from those belonging to another; separation of politics from economics; separation of metropolitan from ‘alien’ populations; and separation of theory from practice. Hence the contemporaneous Marxist critique of capitalism took the form of the theory and practice of the totality, or, the unification of dialectics and proletarian internationalism in the Lukacsian concept of praxis.
I have already referred to the competitive struggle to divide up the globe by separating the land mass of continents such as Africa into territories loyal to one imperialist power or another, and therefore open to the export of capital only from that particular advanced capitalist country. While this round of competition began in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, it accelerated at the turn of the twentieth century and culminated in the two world wars (1914-18 and 1939-45) which were the definitive events of the epoch. The separation of imperialist economies was by no means confined to the first half of the twentieth century, however. It took until the late 1980s for international trade to reach levels previously attained in the period prior to 1914. (Henwood 1997: 113)
In Britain, the separation of politics from economics took the form of the subdivision of the labour movement into two parts, the unions and the Labour Party. The latter was founded by the unions in so far as its constitution as a national political party in 1921 was largely an offshoot of the Labour Representation Committee, a group of union-sponsored MPs formed 20 years earlier to represent the interests of unions and their members in parliament. However, in its constitution the Labour Party also ratified a separation of powers whereby the party became the only explicitly political outlet for labour, while union activity was largely confined to the workplace, and, in effect, to the advance/defence of negotiated working conditions and wages enjoyed by those workers in specified workplaces who were also members of particular unions.
This arrangement had the effect of separating organised workers according to the specific union in which they were organised; and in those unions structured along federal lines such as the National Union of Mineworkers, there was a further separation according to region, as came disastrously to the fore in the differences between Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire regions during the unsuccessful miners’ strike of 1984-5.
Furthermore, as a consequence of the separation of party political activity from fundamental economic questions and the way in which those questions were referenced by unions acting along sectional and superficial lines, political activity was all but barred from the sphere of production and tended to be confined to the sphere of distribution; while the sphere of production was left largely depoliticised. Thus the essentially exploitative character of capitalist production was rarely at issue in British politics; indeed exploitation was re-defined as maladjustment, where capitalists failed to make a fair distribution of profits; equally, relations between labour and capital were not contested per se, but were naturalised through the institutionalisation of organised labour and its substantive, mediating layer, the labour bureaucracy.
Thus the social relation which in its essentially contradictory character is the basis for modern political contestation, came to be mediated in such a way that the relation itself was removed from the field of political contestation. Through the separation of union from party, and economics from politics, the mediation of historically specific, essentially contradictory social relations came to acquire a fixed character whereby social contradiction and the conflicts ensuing from it were re-located to the level of interpersonal relations where their resolution was also alleged to be found.
The separation of political from economic activity was reproduced in the practice of social theory as a science separate from politics. This separation was most famously elaborated by Weber, who pleaded for the social scientist to keep facts and values ‘unconditionally separate’, and thus to ‘maintain a clear distinction between an academic and a political role’ (Weber 1989: 262). Weber came to insist on this distinction in contradistinction to the relations of theory and practice in Marxism, whereby revolutionary theory and practice, while not identical, were identified as necessary constituents of a unified whole.
For Weber, not only were theory and politics to be kept separate, within theory itself there were separations to be made between different ‘orders’ or ‘spheres’ of life. Observing the division of labour in modern societies, Weber reported that ‘we are placed in different orders in life, each of which is subject to different laws’, thereby requiring discrete analytical approaches. (Weber 1989: 22)
‘The history of rationalism shows a development which by no means follows parallel lines in the various departments of life…. In fact, one may – this simple proposition should be placed at the beginning of every study which essays to deal with rationalism – rationalise life from fundamentally different basic points and in very different directions.’ (1930: 77-8)
While Marxism recognised various starting points and different dynamics in the formulation of critique, the key point was to develop a critique of bourgeois society in its totality as part of the struggle for the wholesale transformation of that society. Sociology, on the other hand, at least in the way that Lukacs interpreted it, maintained the separation of spheres as its methodological contribution to the maintenance of the status quo:
‘Sociology as an independent discipline arose in England and France after the dissolution of classical political economy and utopian socialism. Both these, in its own way, were comprehensive doctrines of social life…..Sociology as an independent discipline came about in such a way that its treatment of a social problem did not consider the economic basis; the supposed independence of social questions from economic ones formed the methodological starting point of sociology. (Lukacs 1980: 585)
The political consequences of the separation of social questions from economic ones had already come to the fore at the end of the nineteenth century in Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism, where the alleged distance between economics and other aspects of human, social activity served as the grounds for reforming the latter in isolation from the former. (1961: 15-16)
In their struggle against reformism and its theoretical underpinning in sociology, Marxists too identified the capitalist division of labour as the origin of the separation of spheres in thought as in deed: ‘The social division of labour creates a series of sub-spheres not only in the economy but in the whole world of social life and thought.’ (Jakubowski 1990: 95) Instead of accepting ‘sub-spheres’ at face value, however, the Marxist critique stressed what was lost in such a one-sided conceptualisation:
‘It divides up the diversity of the totality and develops the individual parts. The connections between the individual parts and the relation of the parts to the whole are lost.’ (Jakubowski 1990: 97)
It was in this context that Lukacs famously identified regard for the totality as the conditio sine qua non of Marxism and Marxism alone. (1974: 27) As Jay points out, this was ‘untrue’ (1984: 14): totalising tendencies had also been evident in ‘bourgeois thought’; yet it was the case that the separation of spheres was the dominant methodological trait in bourgeois thought at the time when Lukacs was writing; moreover this emphasis was in keeping with the general mode of mediation at that time.
In emphasising separation, Weber’s epistemology was consistent with his ontology. For Weber there could be no essential, singularly social relation from which the unity of social reality is derived, and of which the logical appropriation is the precondition for grasping social reality in its totality. Rather, in pursuit of knowledge the social scientist must cross endlessly between parallel spheres of human activity, each with its own separate values:
If we set out the causal lines, we see them run one moment from the technical to the economic and the political , at the next moment from the political to the religious and then to the economic, and so on. Nowhere is there any resting point.’ (Weber quoted in Beecham 1974: 254)
In the Weberian articulation of social theory and politics, the former is a free-standing entity to which politics may subsequently respond. Theory therefore precedes politics, and the former must not be open to the latter. However, the separation of theory from politics is itself a political act, as Lukacs was quick to point out. Furthermore, in the enforcement of separation, Weberian sociology was the logical counterpart of the historical development of labour bureaucracy and the concomitant mode of mediating capaitalist contradiction which is thereby rendered invisible. Just as production relations were assumed in the course of the latter and politics only came into play post festum, so under the terms of the former, social theory is as prior as it is depoliticised, and politics, again, is introduced only as a second order response to social relations which are as naturalised as their true character is suppressed.
Separation as the conditio sine qua non of mediations past, is explicit in the mediating role of racism, which, ironically, also constituted a unity of those separations discussed above. Racial thinking, the ideological precursor to racism as a social force, entails the separation of capitalist contradiction from the social relation in which it is inherent, and its displacement to the level of intersubjectivity. Here some social groups are identified as being incapable of operating as full, human subjects, and in their fictitious incapability the real contradictions of capital - between social production and private appropriation, between the potential for unlimited production and the limits to the production of profit - are re-formulated. At the level of ideas, therefore, racial thinking assimilates the limits of capital to the allegedly limited subjectivity of social groups whose allegedly limited subjectivity is in turn the basis for their redesignation as racial groups.
However, for this kind of thinking to operate as a force in society, it must have a social base as well as its own internal logic, however flawed. In Britain in the early twentieth century, this social base was not confined to the capitalist class for whom racial thinking served as an apologia. Racial thinking also coincided with the interests of the newly emerging labour bureaucracy, whose continually expanding role as mediators between labour and capital was as much dependent on the continuing expansion of national capital as it was on the organisation of labour. In this context, therefore, the establishment of the labour bureaucracy in its mediating capacity was concomitant with the consolidation of British nationalism which became embedded in it. Moreover, just as chauvinism took hold in the increasingly inappropriately named Second International, so labour leaders and union officials in Britain served the national interest, and their own interests as mediators, by disseminating racial thinking among their membership and by implementing racist employment policies which further divided the international working class.
That they lacked the political independence which might have enabled them to challenge the mounting pressure of British nationalism, was itself partly a consequence of the separation of politics from economics whereby production relations were not only assumed but also assumed to operate on national lines, so that the conflict between labour and capital was subsumed in the unity of nationhood which is also the separation of the nation from those designated either as aliens, i.e. non-nationals, or as lesser members of something less than the nation (colonies, Commonwealth), or as each of these in succession.
Thus racism served as a doubly effective form of mediation in the era of capitalist crises: not only was it a form of the mediation of capitalist contradiction; it also mediated between those other forms of mediation which depended on separation as their modus operandi.
In the current era, by contrast, the mode of mediation generally tends towards the inclusive rather than the exclusive. This characteristic was also signalled in the poetics of Tony Blair’s New Labour politics, in which ‘politics’ shifted away from contestation between representatives of mutually exclusive social groups within the nation, towards the politician as representative icon, a cultural figure who like an actor or a priest represents shared meanings and values and who is called upon to play the lead role in ritualised events such as the mourning of the People’s Princess or the ‘peace process’ in Northern Ireland.
Inclusion is also explicit in the expanded role of cultural policy at national, regional and local authority level (DCMS 1999, Blair 2000, Jowell 2001), and in the central policy unit dedicated to the eradication of social exclusion, to give but a few examples among many. Here the inclusive role of public sector cultural institutions is comparable to that of brands in the private sector. Each operates as a mediator between consumers who identify with them. Furthermore, participation in either institutionalised images (brands) of the private sector or branded, public institutions such as museums and music festivals, is genuinely inclusive – up to a point.
For in so far as it tends towards art, culture is addressed to the human subject at leisure, where there is no necessary conflict as there is in production. This is altogether different from social arrangements in which hegemonic mediating forms were derived more closely from the essential contradiction in production relations and its expression in political conflict, so that the separation of social groups was both a necessary and an explicit element in their operation. Inclusion is now the direct order of the day, except perhaps in one important aspect: inclusive mediating forms exclude the possibility of the universal subject, hence in the terms of cultural mediation the present is continually separated from the potential for future transformation.
However, the more culture veers away from the exclusively artistic to include the everyday, the more it finds itself responding to the intersubjective effects of the essential contradiction in production relations, with all the exclusions to which they are amenable. This is where the ‘inclusion’ of cultural mediation turns out to be selective.
That culture was not always the most efficacious form of mediation is shown not only by the contemporaneous obscurity of Nossiter’s fairly recent thesis (1978), which called for the re-orientation of British industry and institutions towards culture and tourism, but also by the fate which befell the cultural policy underlying Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869). Arnold proposed the inclusion of the burgeoning masses within a shared, national culture as the best defence against the anarchy which would ensue if some such means were not found to incorporate them. Yet Arnold’s proposal was largely neglected for the best part of a century, during which time capitalist social relations were mediated and hence stabilised through the mode of separation described above, and principally by means of the organised labour movement with its institutionalised separation of one group of workers from another, and of politics from economics.
In the current period, however, culture is the preferred form of mediation, almost as Arnold would have wanted; but only at a time when the ruling elite is most fearful not of anarchy but of anomie. Whereas the bourgeoisie of a century ago was fearful of the inclusive dynamic of proletarian internationalism, hence the attempt to encompass most of the British working class in a form of exclusion, namely nationalism, its latterday counterpart is more concerned with the effects of alienation and atomisation, tellingly described by Putnam (2000); hence the concerted attempt to locate and promulgate the experience of shared meanings.
Anomie as it is perceived in today’s ruling milieu is tantamount to the exhaustion of pre-existing mediating forms from which great swathes of the population are increasingly alienated; thus the readiness on the part of government to sponsor cultural policy as the search for new and newly inclusive forms of mediation, just as branding has played a similar role for the corporate sector.
The significance accorded to cultural policies is new, as is their proliferation. The turn to cultural policy on the part of the state occurred at approximately the same time as the corporate emphasis on the meaningful aspects of the commodity. Cultural policy in the public sector is thus the historical corollary of branding in the private sector. In both instances there were precursors for recent developments, i.e. cultural policy is not entirely unprecedented, nor is branding, although in their earlier manifestations neither of these activities were typically designated as such. What is new is the centrality of branding and cultural policy in their respective realms (private and public sectors), thus indicating that these are specific instances in the general turn to cultural forms of mediation. What is retained from the previous mode of labourist, political mediation is the acknowledged significance of participating in the mediation process itself. However, whereas in the era of the labour bureaucracy what was ultimately mediation was nevertheless acted out as contestation, in our newly modified times the explicit and implicit expectation is inclusion – mediation for its own sake.
If culture could not provide the most appropriate form of substantive mediation in the era of capitalist crises, neither was cultural thinking a sufficient form of epistemological mediation. In epistemology as in ontology, such was the salience of separation during the classical period of imperialism that while successive schools announced a series of turns to all-inclusive culture, the frequent repetition of these announcements indicated that ‘culture’ and the interdisciplinary study of it were not then sustainable as an over-arching conceptual framework, whereas the intellectual climate was amenable to the separate and separating strands of sociology.
However, from the 1960s onwards there arose a continuously developing and increasingly influential critique of the dominant forms of mediation – the cultural critique. Its episodes became more frequent and increasingly significant, until it eventually acquired the status of orthodoxy. Within the limits of this paper, there is no space in which to investigate the historical development of this critique in either its academic form as Cultural Studies or in its political manifestation as the New Left. Rather, I shall review these interdependent movements only in respect of their hostility to separation as the organising principle of aggregated interpersonal relations, and hence as a challenge to the erstwhile form of the mediation of capitalist contradiction.
Beginning with the insistence that social theory and political practice must not - indeed, could not - be separate, the cultural critique went on to attack the separation of politics from economics, the separation of production from consumption, the separation of workers into particular unions, and the separation into particularised social groups of those who by dint of ‘race’, gender or sexuality were denied formally equal rights. Furthermore, the cultural critique was keen to overcome the separation between ‘culture’ and everyday life, to the point where in its purview ‘culture’ comes not only to encompass everything in everyday life, but also to account for it.
Through the turmoil of the 1960s (of which it was both an expression and a constituent part), the cultural critique came to prominence in the universities. Martin (1975: 58) observed both its increasing influence in academia and its correlation with the oppositional stance of les evenements and their aftermath Nearly 40 years on much of the agenda associated with the cultural critique is now recognisable not only in universities but also in the rhetoric of public and private sectors. It is therefore central to mainstream discourse. But it would be as crude to say that the critical ambition of the New Left/Cultural Studies has been taken over by the centre, as it is to say that the increasingly image-laden, culturally-driven rhetoric of public discourse bears no relation to reality. Nevertheless, it is the case that the emphasis on inclusion which once was associated with the cultural critique in particular, has now been generalised in the way that the social relations of capital are played out. This cannot but have an effect on the political positioning of the cultural critique. Here objective conditions have overridden the subjective ambitions of those who formulated and developed the cultural critique, and re-positioned them not only against their will but also behind their backs.
Developed as a platform for opposing capital as it was lived out in those mediated forms which privileged separation, the holism of the cultural critique, which drew frequently upon Lukacs, remained oppositional for as long as the general mode of mediation continued to rely on separation and exclusion. But just as the conditions have changed in which capital as a social relation is both its own self-expansion and the reproduction of society, so the form of mediation necessitated by and sufficient to such changed conditions, has changed also. Where, according to the logic of capital in the era of economic crises, there was a need for mediating forms dependent on separation and exclusion, according to the logic of capital as a social relation, now modified in accordance with changed circumstances, there is a greater need for the most inclusive form of mediation, namely culture.
In these, changed circumstances the cultural critique is politically re-positioned malgre lui: its inclusiveness becomes mainstream even though its adherents are convinced that it remains oppositional, as once it was. They have not changed so much as the conditions around them, and in these changed conditions the desire to maintain their oppositional stance takes the form of the need to project on to current conditions a configuration of mediating forms which was pertinent previously, during the lifetime of the earlier, general mode of mediation reliant on separation and exclusion. Hence the New Left/Cultural Studies constituency continues to generate a one-sided critique of ‘neo-liberal’ capital as expressed in its historic emphasis on the abstract money-relation, at a time when the general mode of re-mediating capitalist contradiction entails not only recognising but frequently privileging the naievely concrete particulars of culture over the extraction of surplus value from abstract, human labour.
In epistemology as in ontology, the resonance for cultural mediation means that it acquires a social force, and in the acquisition of such force it is comparable (though by no means the same!) as Protestant-ism and race-ism; hence in its forceful operation, I have dubbed it ‘culturalism’.
Culturalism is thus the coalescence of cultural thinking with the need, according to the logic of capital in this specific historical conjuncture, for a modified, inclusive form of mediating the essential contradiction within production relations. Moreover, this modified form of mediation is itself enacted by a widely influential social base, even though many of those who constitute this base do not subjectively recognise themselves within it.
However, the social force of culturalism is weakened by the limits on culture as a widely effective form of inclusive mediation. As previously indicated, culture is at its most inclusive when it is artistic, because the work of art, while originating in social divisions, is the among the forms of human activity which travel furthest away from the essential contradiction in production relations and the conflicts arising from it. But the very distance of art from essential, social contradiction also imposes a limit on its capacity to mediate the contradiction that is essential to social relations in the historically specific context of capitalism.
In culture, in its artistic form, the essential contradiction of social relations is insufficiently addressed for this kind of non-artistic usage, or, which is the same thing, contradiction is all too easily resolved, such that its resolution has proved typically ineffective except among those relatively privileged groups who are themselves distanced from production relations, and therefore find themselves in accord with those forms of mediation which are equally distant from the day-to-day consequences of capitalist production in its essential contradiction.
Therefore, at the interpersonal level, culture, as art, has tended to be a matter of less than urgent concern to most people. Unlike politics and religion, art offered neither the means to resolve conflicts in society, nor even a mechanism for addressing them directly, such is the extent to which, qua art, it is necessarily removed from such conflicts as most people experience them. Hence the people most inclined to engage closely with art were those who recognised themselves in its distance from social conflicts arising from production relations, and who, also on account of their distance from production and its conflicting pressures, were most likely to have the time to cultivate it. By the same token, the poor were also typically time poor in that the contradictory realm of production tended to take up most of their time, allowing less time for the cultivation of that which was further removed from the realm of production and therefore, to them, less urgent.
Regardless of deliberate attempts by the cognoscenti to keep the masses out of the artworld, not least because it can be argued that these are matched by at least as many attempts to herd the masses into edifying museums and art galleries, these are the conditions whereby culture emerged chiefly as ‘high culture’, requiring a high degree of specialist knowledge in order to appreciate it and thus benefit from its mediating capacity, so rarefied and so far removed from direct experience as this has tended to be.
However, the established pattern in which art was associated with a privileged minority and in effect dissociated from the majority of the population, was itself disestablished by a coalescence of reciprocal trends which began to emerge in the period after the Second World War: (1) the Long Boom led to higher standards of living among the working class in advanced capitalist countries; (2) high wages among young people in these countries increased their spending power and served as the economic precondition for the birth of the teenage cultural consumer; (3) higher wage levels coincided with lower levels of class-oriented political activity outside the ambit of the official labour movement; (4) economic well-being combined with the reduced ambition of political activity tended to confirm and amplify the significance of culture, especially, though not exclusively, among the young; (5) orientation towards culture came to acquire a critical and intermittently political significance; (6) the orientation towards culture was not only critical but also self-critical, so that culture as well as politics and economics was subjected to the cultural critique formalised by Cultural Studies/the New Left.
Thus the critique of mediations past encompassed a critique of previous manifestations of cultural mediation, particularly the restriction of the latter to a privileged minority. Under the terms of this critique, ‘culture is ordinary’, which is to say that culture is what speaks of and for the many, not the few, and, furthermore, that many if not all aspects of everyday life are imbued with cultural qualities, which are no longer confined within inaccessible art galleries or a literary canon which appeals only to those with ‘a room of one’s own’ and time enough to inhabit it.
In its sensitivity to changing concerns, the cultural critique was a prescient indication of the historical necessity of modified forms of mediation. Even as it presaged the possibility of mediating essential contradiction through culture, however, in its impact it also indicated the contingent limitations thereof. By criticising the distance between ‘high culture’ and the people, and by insisting that culture is closely related to everyday life and that such proximity must be recognised in cultural production and distribution, the critique relocated culture, bringing it closer to the conflicts which are necessarily expressed in everyday life since they themselves are the expression of essential contradiction. Thus, to make culture less exclusive means bringing it closer to essential contradiction in social relations and conflicts necessarily arising from it. As championed by Cultural Studies and recently adopted in both public and private sectors, popular culture therefore introduces the very conflict which high culture avoids or undermines, and in so doing it cannot avoid undermining its own capacity to serve as mediation.
High culture is too specific; in its specificity it is too far removed from general experience; or, more accurately, there are many mediating steps between the experience of inherent conflicts and the form of their resolution in high culture, so that the latter offers general truths but only to the limited numbers of particular people qualified to follow the steps required for their revelation. Popular culture, however, is too imbued with the conflicts that mediation is meant to offset. Popular culture is thus better at acting out derivations from essential contradiction that it is at acting upon them so as to resolve or ameliorate them. Whereas high culture excludes all voices except that which lays claim to the universal, in its inclusivity, popular culture encompasses a babel of necessarily competing voices.
Here, ironically, competing cultural forms such as those associated with diverse ethnic groups or with warring ‘tribes’ of youth, tend to mimic the workings of the market, where, similarly, competition is immanent. Thus rivalries between groups encouraged to identify themselves as components within multiculturalism tend to imitate competition between brands. Moreover, where competition is immanent, the state, as both its guarantor and its regulator, is never far removed. Hence Multicultural Britain, Creative London and national and regional authorities such as the GLA are all closely correlated.
As in the market, so it is on the terrain of cultural diversity: from the workings of competing popular cultures, the state emerges as guarantor and regulator both of particular cultures and the guaranteed process of their regulated competition – a process frequently referred to as cultural politics or the politics of multiculturalism.
Thus cultural politics necessarily posits the state as an entity of the first order, since it is neither cultural enough to operate without the state, nor political enough to demand logical priority over it.
Formally speaking, culture that is furthest away from social conflict and the people who experience it in particular forms, has least recourse to the state, although in practice such ‘high culture’ has often relied on state funding. On the other hand, in so far as diverse popular cultures tend towards a political dimension, i.e. in that they are more closely connected to the survival struggles of particular social groups, they lose the formally transcendent quality of high culture, and acquire the antagonistic character of politics without the latter’s capacity for the resolution of antagonism.
In today’s circumstances culture that is close to the people can only be close to some people, i.e. it cannot but be partial. Qua culture it is expressive of its own party but by the same token, i.e. as expressive and descriptive rather than instrumental and analytical, it does not offer, as politics at least portends, the means of resolving antagonism in favour of one party or another, which in modern politics has also been the party that makes the most convincing claim – materially, intellectually and spiritually – on universalism.
Thus political contestation has offered the (dubious) possibility of the state acting merely as the instrument of that party which represents or successfully claims to represent the universal subject. The political wing of cultural mediation, on the other hand, denies the possibility of a universal subject, and thereby calls the state into existence as the precondition for the expression of cultural differences within reciprocally sustainable limits at the discretion of the state itself. In an age of generally inclusive mediation, where the exclusionary dynamic of mediating forms such as racism has not been definitively overcome but neither does it enjoy the social force of yesteryear, this is the logic underlying the renewal of the state in the diffusion of national and local government policies collectively known as ‘multiculturalism’.
The expanded role of culture as an inclusive form of the mediation of social contradiction, is thus linked inextricably to the renewal of the state in its capacity as manager of social inclusion through the mediation of many cultures. One terrible irony is that the cultural critique which defined itself in opposition to state sponsorship of the exclusive mode of mediation previously characteristic of British society, has served to inspire a new generation of state functionaries in their mission to mediate through culturally-oriented inclusion. Another paradoxical outcome is that the demand for the state as the executor of multiculturalism is itself the expression of the limited capacity for cultural mediation afforded by the cacophony of diverse popular cultures. For if cultural mediation requires a further layer of professionals in order for it too to be mediated, its inherent mediating capacity is clearly, if not prohibitively, limited.
Those whose professional lives are derived from this task, i.e. the mediation of mediation, find themselves perched on the horns of a dilemma: either they seek to mobilise the non-partisan characteristics of high culture while at the same time trying to make it more accessible; or they start from the accessibility of partisan, popular cultures while attempting to make them politically acceptable to all who may plausibly come into contact with them. If they do too little, high culture remains irrelevant to many, while popular culture remains all too relevant to those who are either represented or misrepresented in its various manifestations. Meanwhile, if they do too much, in its dilution high culture loses its specifically transcendent role along with the specific difficulties presented by its formal particularity; similarly, in the attempt to make it generally acceptable, the partisan properties of popular cultures are frequently watered down, leaving only forms which are often found wanting. The sanitised diversity of local council or national government-backed festivals is a case in point.
In these latter instances, the trend is towards formlessness or contentlessness, or both: formlessness of ‘accessible’ high culture, which is nothing if not dependent on form; and contentlessness of ‘politically correct’ popular culture, the vacuousness of which cannot be offset by its typically primitive formulations. In such circumstances, the only way of life supported by cultural policy is that of the professional mediators themselves. Their orientation, in which all other concerns whether aesthetic or political are subordinated to the desired outcome of inclusive mediating forms, is fully represented; but everyone else is left far from fully represented, in either the political or the cultural sense of the term.
Here emerges the professional culture of state-sponsored cultural mediation, which is the public sector equivalent of the ‘alternative marketers’ in the private sector, and which, like the latter, addresses the anomie of culturally-oriented professionals while remaining both unable to act as a consistently cohering influence among wider circles in society. Together these two strands comprise the culturalism industry – an industry which supports mediation rather than production.
Thus, capital, an essentially contradictory social relation, has re-configured its institutions and developed forms of cultural mediation in accordance with contingent conditions in an historical cycle of social reproduction and capital accumulation, but without transcending the essential contradiction which still requires continuous mediation , albeit by discontinuous means. Instead this contradiction is re-presented in the turn towards cultural representation as the general mode of mediation. Furthermore, in as much as an extensive layer of functionaries is required whose role is to mediate between potentially conflicting forms of cultural mediation, the cultural mediation of essential social contradiction seems likely to prove as fraught with difficulty as the mediating forms which preceded it, if not more so.
We all know that Rome was not built in a day; but given the provisional character of culture as the contingent mediation of an unstable social form, who knows how long ‘Creative London’ will last?
Heartfield has shown that economic transformation is not taking place in London as advertised. I have tried to show that while London has not found a brand new role, in its re-branding as Creative London, it does play a modified one. Where once was the imperial capital of….capital, when ‘capital’ was itself a term of approval as well the capacity to capitalise, there now stands the capital of cool, where ‘cool’ is a term of approval that also shows disapproval of beliefs and frameworks associated with earlier forms of mediation such as politics, which are as defunct in the new period of cultural mediation as they have been debunked by the cultural critique.
Badged as ‘Creative’, the ‘global city’ of London remains an imperial capital of sorts: centre of cultural mediation; capital of imperialism-in-denial.
Andrew Calcutt is editor of Rising East a.calcutt@uel.ac.uk
© 2004·06
God help the minister that meddles with art
Welcome to this issue
Contents of this issue
Editor’s letter
Academic
Debate
Entertainment
Essays
Feedback
Interviews
Journalism
The Nearly-New Economy
London and the Creative City paradigm
Culture and Anomie
Speaking of Home: Bangladeshi women in London’s East End reflect on belonging
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