the poverty of a political culture

Unless one were to change "Americans", little can be changed about US politics. Ill informed, lacking an education in political theory and history, suspicious, covetous, and displaying symptoms of the narcissism of small differences towards any group that appears to be making social and/or economic progress (first Catholics, then Irish, then Jews, then Blacks, then Women, then Gays, then Mexicans, etc.), Americans are a sorry lot. Claiming practical knowledge bred of healthy exposure to the "real world", they are as gullible as the most benighted country bumpkin: ready to believe the worst and fear the best, they sell short when they should hold out for long. In the defense of "Americanness", they act "un-American". In the defense of liberty, they act illiberally. Worse yet, the American electorate has given rise to a political class that is scandalously inept. The carnival barker, the circus impresario, the sales huckster, and the soap box demagogue are still models of political comportment and representation, which is why money and policy are interchangeable entities in American politics. Unfortunately, the difficulty of the task the 99% demonstrators have set for themselves is daunting: it is not simply to change a banking system or create a chimerical people's capitalism but rather to change an entire form of subjectivity.

the poverty of social scientific culture

According to the New York Times, the cultural explanation of poverty (i.e., the “culture of poverty”) is back in. The Times confirms this fact with a quote from an essay by Mario Small, David Harding and Michèle Lamont: ‘“Culture is back on the poverty research agenda,’ the introduction declares, acknowledging that it should never have been removed.” Searching the globe for further confirmation, we are informed, based on the golden chestnut of the censorship imposed by “political correctness,” that: “We’ve finally reached the stage where people aren’t afraid of being politically incorrect,” said Douglas S. Massey, a sociologist at Princeton who has argued that Moynihan was unfairly maligned.’ We are then offered a presumably un-PC and deeply thought definition of culture: “‘Robert J. Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard, culture is best understood as ‘shared understandings.’” Best understood: but for whom, social scientists?

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The problem is these particular scholars of poverty (excluding Lamont) don't know what "culture" is from a scientific point of view, aren’t “current” with the ways contemporary scholarship on culture has developed, and end up reproducing folk knowledge derived from a folk category (as Bourdieu might say) rather than anything approximating social scientific knowledge. What’s equally ridiculous is that complaints about “the poor” have been couched in moral terms since the 17th century: they drink too much, fuck too much, have too many babies, are godless, and so on. The same moralistic language was behind the “welfare reform” of 1996, which presumably “ended the welfare state as we know it” (Bill Clinton's goal). The aim of that legislation was to “reduce illegitimacy.” People didn't wait for Rob Sampson, or Saint Daniel Moynihan and the benighted Oscar Lewis (who actually emphasizes social structure), to produce a cultural explanation of poverty. Meanwhile a "full employment policy" that was in discussion during the 1940s never got off the ground because, well, gubmint shouldn't compete with the free market. Oh well: maybe those politicos and their social scientific epigones are the ones with an impoverished culture of civic duty, not to mention a culture of intellectual poverty.

an invitation

Dear Ascona,

I am preparing a project by K. W. at the Marian Goodman Gallery which could be best described as a kind of 18th century Salon - cum - conversation game. The themes of the project revolve around which cultural values (apart from technological innovations) are necessary to transform Western societies into sustainable systems. The project takes into account Foucault's concept of technologies of the self, investigating if the term 'technology' and the innovatory potential it implies is legitimate when it comes to constructions of self and relationships. Similarly, it looks at what the 'new' in the Situationists' 'new situations' and 'new passions' could mean in concrete terms and also reflects on older cultural formations like the 18th century, antiquity and their specific aesthetics of existence. 

We felt that these issues might interest you and correspond with some of your areas of research.

We hope to hear from you.

I did not respond to this invitation, in part because the range of thematics for the salon were difficult to hold in mind all at once. But it might be easier to take each of them separately.

...which cultural innovations are necessary to transform Western societies into sustainable systems.

It will seem odd to have to refer to historical materialism at this point, but short of a transformation of the short-term thinking that is pervasive in these societies, the notion of "sustainability" will not have anything to do with ecological balance; sustainability will mean nothing other than the perpetuation of the firm, the accentuation of the credit column. Without addressing the production side, these cultural values will primarily address consumption. Can we moderns (and postmoderns) live with less as the price for sustainability? From what source would the value of self-imposed scarcity arise in a society of really existing abundance?

...the Situationists' 'new situations' and 'new passions'...

Debord was right about the spectacle; however, psychogeographic experience and its conductor, the dérive, remains the province of the lucky few, who have the leisure time to participate in theoretically orchestrated strolls. The new "situations" envisioned by the SI were temporary: "Our central idea is that of the construction of situations, that is to say, the concrete construction of momentary ambiances of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality." It is not clear how such "momentary ambiances" could take on the institutional characteristics that would be required to make social systems sustainable. 

...older cultural formations like the 18th century, antiquity and their specific aesthetics of existence.

Without trying to understand the connection between these two eras and their "aesthetics of existence," what comes to mind immediately is that societies in the 18th century and antiquity were institutionalized aristocracies. The "18th century" means the "court society" (Elias); "antiquity" means the philosopher-kings and their Roman epigones. While Habermas found the kernel of modern, democratic publicity in the 18th century salon (but why does the invitation not mention the coffeehouse?), it remained limited demographically. The polis and the forum were both socially constrained spaces, open only to Oikosmänner. These facts are not especially noteworthy except that they indicate that however universal the pretensions of these cultural formations were, their reach was restricted. Several questions are suggested: (1) do transformative cultural values only originate in these constrained spaces that are unconstrained by "necessity" and, if this is in fact the case, can they be redistributed? (2) If a cultural avant-garde (e.g., the SI) is the likely primary beneficiary of transformative culture values, in what way will these values impact "systems"? If we accept Weber's analysis of the protestant ethic, one could argue that the new cultural values will only impact systems when they find an elective affinity with a broader range of non-aesthetic experiences and practices (as well as technological capacities).