The structure of modern cultural theory

By Thomas Osborne

This book is about the claims of Cultural Theory as a particular kind of intellectual ethos or discipline.

The book argues that Cultural Theory is best seen, at least in its ‘modern’ form, as an ethical discipline. As such, it should be seen as a form of inquiry governed by the guiding idea of the cultivation of critical autonomy and, as such, is designed as much to change what we are in our relations to ourselves as to describe the world as it is in particular ‘positive’ ways. The content of the book develops this argument through critical readings of three canonical writers, namely Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. A final chapter contrasts the ethical idea of modern Cultural Theory developed here with its postmodern derivations, which, it is argued, have taken both a more positivist and even more moralistic form.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781847797223

Thomas Osborne

Thomas Osborne came as a teen in the 1870s from the United States to homestead with his father in Ontario's Muskoka. After five dramatic years he returned to the United States to live and work in Pennsylvania and New York. In 1938 he was killed by an automobile in San Diego, California.

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The structure of modern cultural theory

The structure of modern cultural theory

Thomas Osborne

Copyright © Thomas Osborne 2008

The right of Thomas Osborne to be identified as the author of this work has been

asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN 978 0 7190 7823 1

First published 2008

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Contents

Preface and acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Culture – an antinomical view

2 Adorno as educator

3 Foucault and the ethics of subjectivity

4 Bourdieu, ethics and reflexivity

5 A note on postmodern cultural theory

Conclusion

Index

Preface and acknowledgements

This little book is about the scope and structure of modern cultural theory. The argument is that modern cultural theory is – or perhaps was – a critical and ultimately ethical enterprise as opposed to just an ‘epistemic’ one. The implications of this and whether or not it should matter – or should have mattered – will, hopefully, become clear over the course of the argument. Whether the book should be seen as an obituary for modern cultural theory or an attempt at a renewal of it is best left to the reader’s judgement.

Aside from its status as an argument, the book is, at least after the introduction and chapter one, fairly straightforward commentary – designed as it was initially for a postgraduate student audience. It focuses on the work, in the main, of Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. Seasoned experts on these thinkers will not find anything, except perhaps errors, to shake them out of any epistemological slumbers they may be in. Nor does the book seek to say everything about these three, not even everything about what they have to say about culture, but only seeks to be selective in relation to its specific argument. Given that the book is not written by a dedicated specialist on any of its chosen trio, it is all the more necessary to acknowledge – in addition of course to all those many authorities whose works have been consulted but not exhaustively referenced in the text itself – the real kindness of friends who have taken the time to read an earlier version in manuscript and who provided extensive criticisms and comments on it: Graham Burchell, Gregor McLennan and Charlie Turner – plus a sceptical but generous reader from Manchester University Press.

Introduction

Ethics and educationality – Disciplinarity – Principles of reading – Theory and detachment – Problematics – Reconstructing modern cultural theory – Adorno, Foucault, Bourdieu

This book is concerned with the scope of cultural theory in its modern – it might even be said in its modernist – form. This introductory chapter considers what this concern might mean, and why it might be of interest.

Ethics and educationality

The three thinkers under most consideration in the pages that follow – Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu – might hardly be seen as representative of cultural theory per se if that enterprise is taken to be what it is often taken to be. But this book is not about cultural theory in, say, its Spenglerite form, the analysis of the cultural predicament of such grandiose, epochal and over-schematic concepts such as ‘Western man’ or Occidental reason. Instead, for all their manifest dissimilarities, these writers are taken as paradigm cases of a certain kind of specifically modern agenda in cultural theory – which is, in fact, a much more modest enterprise. This book is an attempt to outline what that relatively modest agenda is, arguing that the texts in question possess more than just ‘positive’ or epistemic relevance to cultural expertise but are – recalling a phrase from Michel Foucault – something like ‘practical texts which are themselves the object of a practice’.¹ The contention is that the agenda of modern cultural theory is strategically or ultimately ethical – to do with the cultivation of particular critical attributes – rather than primarily epistemic – to do only with the production of objective knowledge; and that these texts in modern cultural theory refer, overtly or implicitly, to the ultimately ethical quest for autonomy as a guiding, if quite possibly impossible, ideal.

But we need to be a little careful as to what is meant by notions such as ethics and autonomy here. In claiming an ethical status for these texts, the contention is not that they are highly normative, providing us with guidelines as to how to live or what to do in certain situations under certain circumstances. Modern cultural theory may be, so to speak, ultimately ethical but ‘ethics’ refers for the most part in these pages to something rather narrower than this: to the reflexivity of the intellect – that is, specifically to critical ethics. This is why it will often be claimed here that modern cultural theory has an ‘ethico-critical’ constitutive interest. Of course such a restricted understanding of ethics will have plenty of implications for wider ethical views – who we think we are, what we might do and so forth – but, none the less, should not be confused with them. There are plenty of things going on out there that have ethical relevance, and modern cultural theory is no doubt only a very minor and rather limited one. Modern cultural theory is an intellectual – though not necessarily a narrow, boringly academic – enterprise which, though part of the real world, should not be viewed as seeking to be co-extensive with it, not least because the real world deserves more due than that.

In any case, if there is any specificity to modern cultural theory in relation to ethics, even aside from the necessary restriction of its concern with such matters to ethics of the intellect, it is that it is fundamentally a critical – even at times seemingly negative – enterprise. This critical character gives it something of a paradoxical aspect: serving not so much to put forward positive theories of or propositions about ultimately ethical conduct as to be, in fact, quite often counter-ethical, challenging the existing conceptions and preconceptions that we may have. This is why there are occasions in this book when the notion of ethics is contrasted with that of morality: understanding morality as the codification of right or wrong forms of living, and ethics as the reflexive aspect of morality – where morality, if anything, undoes itself.² In any case, whatever its ethical ambit, modern cultural theory has absolutely nothing to do with any given system of morality.

What, then, is the aim of the critical ethics espoused by modern cultural theory? If there is a predominant aim it is that of critical autonomy – the Enlightenment ideal, discussed further in Chapter 1, of maturity in understanding, of not being dependent upon another’s judgement. And again, such critical autonomy is obviously tied to but hardly co-extensive with autonomy in a wider sense: the autonomy – not necessarily just of individuals but of collectivities – against the forces of heteronomy in general. But this is autonomy in a very ‘thin’ understanding. In this sense, modern cultural theory is only ultimately ethical, not immediately so; it does not typically purvey concrete views of what autonomy is; it does not straightforwardly seek to ‘inculcate’ this or that concrete form of autonomy but only to prepare the ground for it, as a value, through critical, intellectual work; it is a kind of exercise, then, not the thing itself.³

Intrinsic to this ‘thin’ and limited idea of critical autonomy in modern cultural theory is an idea that is captured here by a rather horrible neologism – educationality. Broadly speaking, the idea of educationality is designed to capture the sense that those writings that can be considered as being emblematic of modern cultural theory are not, for all that, necessarily ‘pedagogical’, seeking to teach this or that specific set doctrine or rubric. Educationality is different from pedagogy. Adorno, Foucault, Bourdieu – these are not really experts, but educators, perhaps in a sense that is not wholly unrelated to that invoked by Nietzsche in his essay ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’: somebody who stirs things up, who challenges our ‘anthropological’ preconceptions but – importantly – not someone who should or can be necessarily followed.⁴

Disciplinarity

Our three thinkers are tied very loosely together in thematic terms, and even more loosely in ideological or methodological terms. If the argument of this book is that there is a distinctive agenda to modern cultural theory that separates its scope from those of other kinds of inquiry, including other types of cultural inquiry, we can be forgiven some scepticism as to whether we should ascribe the status of a ‘discipline’ to it or even whether it matters whether we do so or not.⁵ Within the social sciences, economics could be described as a discipline, and so might psychology. Being disciplinary is not necessarily a good thing however. For example, it is highly questionable as to whether political science is a discipline, or whether it should be. The argument here, anyway, is not that modern cultural theory is a discipline. Or not exactly.

The thinkers considered most prominently in this book amount to two philosophers (Adorno and Foucault) and a sociologist (Bourdieu). Perhaps that is how they should remain to be seen in actual disciplinary terms. By describing them as (modern) cultural theorists, the contention is not that they consciously adhered to an academic or disciplinary enterprise called (modern) cultural theory. It is to claim that they can be understood, according to a common thread, an agenda, or ‘genre of inquiry’. Cultural theory, as reconstructed here, is nothing more – or less – than a genre of discourse, and that genre is what this book aims to reconstruct. But it is not exactly a discipline that will appear, only a kind of thematic thread or ethos; a thread bound, as already mentioned, by a very simple idea which is also an ideal – that of critical autonomy. More on this in due course, indeed throughout.

Principles of reading

Adorno, Foucault and Bourdieu wrote in very specific – and mutually heterogeneous – registers. We shall come back to the question of the mutual coherence of their work, or lack of it, in the conclusion. In any case, rather than taking their own methodological conceptions of what they are doing entirely at face value, this book seeks to pass their work through the unifying lens of certain, rather basic, principles of reading.

We start with the principle of maximisation. Here the aim is simply to seek to do honour and service to those writers considered here. It is to be hoped, anyway, that the versions of the cultural thought of Adorno, Foucault and Bourdieu that appear here are entirely free of the ressentiment of ‘interpretation’. The aim is to maximise the value of each example, even if on occasion this will entail reading an author against himself, or at least attempting to distinguish the force of an argument from its content.

For example, there is the celebrated – or perhaps notorious – case of Adorno and jazz.⁶ Adorno sincerely hated jazz. No ironies on that score. But, still, one can read Adorno on jazz in a way that maximizes his argument to the extent that it can be pushed beyond a local argument with jazz aficionados and the like to become more generally an argument with – ultimately ethical – implications for ways of thinking about maturity, responsibility and autonomy. Yes, Adorno hated jazz. But the force of the argument goes beyond jazz and is relevant for its diagnosis of forces that – just as Adorno, rightly or wrongly, regarded jazz – impede our ethico-critical sense of autonomy.

There is a second principle of reading – that of coherence. In this sense the book is perspectival and deliberately so. In each case, the emphasis is not so much upon the work of an author as a whole as upon the critical and educational value of their works in relation to culture: works that are portrayed as, to put it too elaborately, rhetorical ‘technologies’ that guide our thinking towards certain themes and problems and away from others. Of course, texts and oeuvres are leaky. As already suggested, the emphasis here is no doubt a construction, or at least a rationalisation; and if there are merits to this, these lie precisely in the coherence it provides.

There is also – a third principle of reading – a redemptive motive. The concern is to free these thinkers from what are, in fact, often rather bleak misconceptions about them; pessimism in the case of Adorno, a sort of determinism or fatalism in the case of Foucault, and reductive sociologism in the case of Bourdieu. In each case, albeit with the partial exception of Bourdieu whose example is ambiguous (but illuminatingly so), it is argued that there are grounds for thinking that the opposite emphasis is actually the correct, more coherent, more relevant, more satisfying one.

The fourth principle relates – perhaps oddly – to a certain empiricism that is to be found in the work of each thinker. That is not to say that they are not theorists at all; for theory is not necessarily opposed to the empirical; it is opposed only to a refusal of reflection – or to put it more provocatively, to stupidity. But in each case here, the argument is that the work of these thinkers is not simply ‘grand theory’, about just about everything there is, but is quite closely focused on specific problems. This makes the texts as much about doing things as about stating, or theorising, things. But what then becomes of the theoretical aspect of cultural theory? What in fact is theory in this context? Answering these questions brings us to a fifth principle of reading – detachment.

Theory and detachment

This book is not against theory but is sceptical about the idea of abstract, general or ‘grand theory’. Indeed one of its aims is to show the extent to which thinkers such as Adorno, Foucault and Bourdieu themselves often, in effect, resist this idea of theory. There is certainly no grand theory in Foucault. There is a lot of repetitive methodological reflection in Bourdieu and a lot of what is, for some, undoubtedly somewhat tortuous German philosophy in Adorno, but perhaps not much theory. But this lack of grand theorising is a good thing, not because grand theory is bad but because it is not really theory at all. Theory is not to be opposed to the material, the empirical, the problematic, the case-study. Rather theory is, if it is anything, only the activity of reflection itself – which is why its opposite is only non-reflection, or just passivity, or even, as already mentioned, just stupidity.

Of course it depends on how you define theory. Theory with a small t is not about building pyramids of ineluctable connections, or even about putting forward concepts designed to seize upon great parts of the world and connect them all up. Rather, it is preferable to think of theory as having a deflationary function. Theory is just those sets of means by which we seek to detach ourselves from an object. That is why the idea of reflection is invoked in relation to it. This sort of theory is a means of disaggregating things, of gaining a distance from them. When we do close empirical research we can become involved with our subject matter to the extent of identifying with it. Theory is what we resort to in order to detach ourselves from this involvement which, taken too far, can make us myopic. All good, genuine empiricists will tell you that they are theorists too.

Perhaps this may come across as an eccentric understanding of what theory is. So be it. This view separates us, certainly, from the rather grandiose image of theory as being about ideational pyramid-building. And it gives us an idea as to how theorising is not itself some kind of separate activity from working with particular materials but is, rather, itself a means of working with such materials in a particular way, in order to gain a perspective. The Greeks: theorein – to see. So theory means distance, perception from a detached point of view, reflection.

Obviously it is best not to read too much into this idea of detachment. It is adapted loosely from the work of Norbert Elias.⁷ Detachment does not imply self-satisfied ideas about one’s ‘objectivity’. There is an ethical aspect to it. It involves a kind of work, a labour of thought. Michel Foucault’s final books illustrate this idea very well. In the preface to The Use of Pleasure, Foucault reflected on the aims of research: not to say the same thing over and over again, not just to present and interpret data, but, as he put it, to get free of oneself. ‘There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently from what one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on seeing and reflecting at all.’⁸

In sum, modern cultural theory in just this sense is ethico-critical work rather than finished ‘knowledge’ – it is work upon ourselves, or at least our self-understandings, not, so to speak, the finished article. It is not a morality system. Yet we can use cultural theory in a benignly critical way: to reflect upon ourselves, to distance ourselves from ourselves in ways that, in certain contexts, might be useful from an ultimately ethical point of view.

Problematics

Maximisation, coherence, redemptive critique, empiricism, detachment. These broad and basic principles of reading, however, are not to be confused with close-knit, watertight methodologies, philosophies or ideologies. In any case, with regard to each thinker considered in these pages, the role of methodologies as such is somewhat downgraded. Adorno, certainly, was a Marxist, a Hegelian and a dialectician, Bourdieu was a realist sociologist engaged with questions of structure and agency, and Foucault was – what? – a post-structuralist discourse analyst or some such esoteric animal. That, anyway, is what the textbooks tend to say. But actually methodological concerns are just about the least interesting things about these thinkers. Methodologies usually come along after the fact. To take the most obvious example, Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge was more of a postscript to his empirical works of the 1960s than a methodologically minded explanation of them.⁹

What come before methodologies are problems or problematics: spaces of concern, object-domains that are essentially constructs.¹⁰ Truth is not relative; there are right and wrong answers to particular questions. But answers themselves are, for all that, only relative to problems. One has to know what questions one is asking, what questions are relevant, what is at stake in any discursive field before one can assess the merits or pitfalls of an argument. The worst form of violence that one can do to an author is not to contradict his or her arguments but to misunderstand his or her problems. And problems are never simply ‘methodological’ since methodologies materialise only in relation to particular spaces of problematisation themselves. Problems always have priority.

Reconstructing modern cultural theory

To analyse modern cultural theory as a genre of discourse, then, is to reconstruct its scope in problematological terms, and not in terms of methodology or the history of ideas. So what are the kinds of problem that will be at issue here in this book? There are general problems, those proper to modern cultural theory qua modern cultural theory; and particular problems, characteristic of the signature of each thinker in question.

Obviously all three thinkers are concerned, in different ways, with the question of culture. A difficult term obviously.¹¹ Adorno thinks that our very notion of culture has been utterly colonised by the culture industries; Foucault, amongst many other concerns, conducts historical investigations of subjectivity, understood as a – more or less – cultural artefact; and Bourdieu attempts to demystify forms of cultural power. So much is obvious, and