The Logic of Culture: Authority and Identity in the Modern Era

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2002), "The Logic of Culture: Authority and Identity in the Modern Era", Library Review, Vol. 51 No. 6, pp. 315-316. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2002.51.6.315.9

Cultural studies is well‐established as a field of research and education now, but still seeks (and, some argue, still needs) to justify itself among older disciplines. Its multi‐disciplinarity and its tendency to fuse past and present count among its strengths and weaknesses. Even its central concepts (and consequently its rationale, critical theory, and methodology) are called to account. Ray teaches at Reed College (USA) and has published other works – Literary Meaning (Blackwell, 1984) and Story and History (Blackwell, 1990). His argument and evidence are wide‐ranging, focused on the concept of culture, without which, arguably, cultural studies itself cannot fairly be understood.

He places this argument in a historical setting extending from the Enlightenment, through the nineteenth century, to the postmodern period of globalized commodified culture. Culture, he argues, is a concept based on a strategy, a strategy for understanding in dialectical terms the competing imperatives of social order and individual freedom, between individual initiatives of understanding and the rules and traditions which undergird them. The roots of this lie in the Enlightenment where discursive practices of rational inquiry and cognitive and moral autonomy grew up, and where a systematic critique arose out of the tension between personal identity and self‐conscious conformity. Cultural practices and discourse, increasingly collective, sought out both individual distinctiveness and what was normatively shared. Ray’s evidence for this dialectic in what was emerging as a Habermasian public sphere draws on the periodical press of the late eighteenth century, which shaped a growing critical understanding of cultural and political causality, a sharper sense of historical meaning and identity, and, through the impact of the French Revolution, a clear view of social differentiation, hierarchy, and cultural epistemology.

On these foundations Ray builds his argument, extending it to the eighteenth‐century novel (including Fielding and Rousseau), which not only educated readers in social roles, but also brought the aesthetic (the experience of beauty) within the realm of systematic understanding. This, he suggests, enabled the cultural dialectic (critique and self‐realization) to develop further, providing responses and discursive practices necessary for articulating the flaneur‐like ambivalence of being of something (society) and critically separate from it (the rationale of modernism). But by borrowing Althusser’s interpellation (the individual is produced as a subject who recognizes him/herself in existing reality, and so recognizes that reality as real), Ray is able to explore the complex process by which the art museum both represented cultural conformity/authority and stimulated critical analysis.

The history of museums and art galleries has its own bibliography, of course, but Ray draws on it here to tease out his case about cultural institutionalization, organized art providing lessons in meaning, putting art on display as a spectacle of cultural reproduction. So the dialectic re‐emerges, since such mechanisms provoke analysis of relationships between past and present, authority and individuality. Such analysis relies on aesthetic logic for its expression, taps epistemic strands both collective and individual, and highlights the probing truth of Bourdieu’s theory of distinction and cultural competence. In these ways, then, novels and art museums enable social triage to occur, by which we come to understand social, political, and ideological classifications.

The final stage of Ray’s argument deals with modern times, with a modernist and post (post) modernist cultural milieu characterized by commodification, globalization, and “glocalization” (where tensions operate between global and local). The dialectical approach is, if anything, more vigorous than ever, in the social science methodologies of the ethnographer, in the deconstruction of high culture and the emergence of popular cultures, in ahistoricism, and in Foucault’s analysis of interpellated subjects. The cultural battlegrounds where T.S. Eliot and Leavis and Williams fought, and before them where Arnold mourned the loss of culture, have moved on into a pluralistic and polysemic domain of many cultures – of television, cinema, advertising. So much we know, as we know of the Marxist critique of the Frankfurt School and culture as commodified exploitation and alienation.

Standing back from these familiar cross‐currents allows Ray to reiterate his view that these now, just as those events and responses in the past, demonstrate the ongoing presence and relevance of cultural studies as an understanding based on dialectics. This logic of culture is not only where we find evidence to suggest that such dynamics are not merely a twentieth‐century and twenty‐first century phenomenon: the logic has been actively present in cultural processes and discursive formations since the eighteenth century, except that now the market is the short cut to social integration which was achieved, earlier social theorists believed, by other means. It is one last step to return to the wider case for cultural studies and for people to teach it and study it systematically for its special understanding of this dialectic.

Ray’s book, then, puts an advocate’s case for cultural studies. Some readers may object to his eclecticism (of taking episodes of historical evidence to underwrite his wider case for cultural studies), but that merely widens his possible audience. The work itself uses an insider lexicon which will make it difficult going for readers unfamiliar to the field, and, ironically, those already familiar with it, are likely to be convinced of the case anyway. Because of this, it is unlikely to win new converts, but it should, and with cleverly organized argument and evidence like this, it does a real service to the growing influence of cultural studies. A final strength, too, is that cultural studies does not need to be a formal course of study to prove its case: it’s “there”, demanding to be better understood. So a work for the academic, institutional and personal, library, above all for readers already in the ball‐park.