3.03 Democracy &
Culture
The sort of processes which
can very quickly produce large scale common responses to events as diverse as
the tragic death of a popular princess,[1]
or the introduction of untested genetic modifications into food production,
happen within the oral realm. (However much the process is informed by the
newspapers, expert reports or networking on the Internet). Humans are highly
attuned to the responses of those around them. Our fundamental needs to be social
require this on the most fundamental level of communications. We need to
co-ordinate our responses to be able to act in concert and achieve social
coherence.
The promotion of consensus
is much misunderstood and feared. It seems to suggest to some people either a
social homogeneity imposed by a majority or a consensus manufactured by an
intellectual elite. Either way it leads to an intolerance of difference and a
lack of appreciation of diversity. It seems to imply a process of exclusion
which leads to the worst excesses of populist bigotry or colonial oppression.[2]
Such fears can confuse an
understanding of culture that is fundamentally a process of reaching
agreements. These agreements do not have to be wholesale or imposed. They do
not necessitate intolerance of those who demure. Sub-cultures form, exist,
dissolve and echo in retrospect. Cultures in which millions of individuals are
active are nothing if not dynamic, multi-layered, fractious, in much the same
way that Foucault has shown that the progress of the discourses of knowledge to
be less orderly than our received ideas of progress.[3]
A
culture is also a pool of diverse resources, in which traffic passes between
the literate and the oral, the superordinate and subordinate, the village and
the metropolis; it is an arena of conflictual elements, which require some
compelling pressure - as, for example, nationalism or prevalent religious
orthodoxy or class consciousness - to take form as a 'system'. And indeed the
very term 'culture' with its cosy invocation of consensus may serve to distract
attention from social and cultural contradictions, from the fractures and
oppositions within the whole.
(E.P. Thompson 1991 p6)
However for a culture to be
identifiable, for communication to be successful, in spite of all the chaos and
noise, there has to be a basic set of agreed signs - as with a spoken language.
The question remains as to
exactly how this process of qualitative assessment, which is at the centre of
cultures purpose, occurs in practice, and what part is played by the formal
arts. This thesis cannot answer such an ambitious question but it can attempt
to further articulate the question, to revive Williams's emphasis on the
symbiotic relation of culture and democracy and to propose some fecund ways in which
this occurs.
In contemporary Britain
small innovating groups or subcultures make actions in public fora which serve
as proposals which can be more or less widely discussed, adapted, and then
taken up or ignored. The freer these groups are of institutional and
particularly state institutional framing and guidance, and the more inclusive
in membership, the more open they are to the desires of the population around
them rather than being guided by the needs of the system.[4]
Such groups of artists are
often not in positions to build and maintain archives, publish knowledge and
set up legitimating rituals for their work. They are usually unfunded which
also makes it difficult for them to persist with their activity for very long.
There seems to be a simple continuity
that can be proposed between the processes of culture and democracy. Both are
fundamentally about reaching mutual understanding as a basis on which to
co-ordinate our actions.
Culture may be seen as
particularly important for the direct evaluation of the environment as
experienced through the senses. The results have a performative or material
form which can be critically re-evaluated at any time. Democracy can be seen as
the reaching for a more linguistically abstracted process of rational argumentation
to achieve agreements as a basis of policy and legislation.
There seems little reason to
make any hard and fast boundary between these categories; one flows surely into
the other. But the separation of culture and democracy, both as objects of knowledge
and practices, is a historical fact that has been reified in institutional and
material forms. This separation seriously impoverishes democracy and hollows
out culture in the process. A recent consultation document from the Cultural
Strategy Partnership for London is pervaded by assumptions of a top-down
management of culture which defines culture as a source of wealth and
entertainment but almost completely ignore the elemental function of culture as
pointed out by Raymond Williams.[5]
This distortion of the
purposes of culture puts us in danger. It tries to replace the ability of a
people to respond to their conditions with a culturally integrated leadership
of managers and experts whose self-interests are inevitably modulated by their
dependence on state funding. Of course people do ignore this and get involved
in the independent production of raw cultural responses. Exploding Cinema is a
good example.
This separation may be why
the accounts of democracy I studied barely recognise the contribution of culture
to the momentous changes they describe. It is not at all clear from these
accounts how cultural creativity took part in the processes of communication
that led up to the public dramas of revolution.[6]
If culture can be seen as a continuum which underpins overtly
'political' processes of negotiation on how best we organise socially, then
I need to find a theory that is most appropriate for the elaboration of this
line of thought. Jurgen Habermas seems to have produced the richest body of
theory in this area and I will now go on to look into his theory in more depth.
[1] See 'The Heart of the
Matter: Diana, democracy and popular culture', Stefan Szczelkun (Working Press
pamphlet 1997 16pp)
[2] This discussion is one of
the main strands of critique against Habermas and will be discussed further in
my chapter 'Critiques of the Theory of Communicative Action'.
[3] Again, this refers to
Foucault's 'The Archaeology of Knowledge' which is discussed later.
[4] Open access, inclusion and
democracy being core themes in the collectives I have considered in Chapter 1.
[5] 'Culture and the City - ten
ways to make a difference', a consultation document from The Cultural Strategy
Partnership for London' (www.viscount.org.uk/csp) December 1999. This was a
pressure group of established agencies putting their case to the new Mayor of
London.
[6]
Books read include: Anthony
Arblaster's Democracy, second edition (OUP 1996 orig. 1994); Murray Bookchin's The
Third Revolution: popular movements in the revolutionary era Vol 1 (Cassell 1996) - an account
of the English, American and French Revolution; Peter Kropotkin's The
Great French Revolution (Schocken Books 1971, orig. 1890); D.G. Wright's Popular Radicalism:
the working class experience 1780-1880 (Longman 1988) - includes some
references to Chartist culture; Dorothy Thompson's Outsiders: class,
gender and nation
(Verso 1993) - on Chartism, refers to the working class in the beginning
of the C19th as 'literate and sophisticated' (p55).