Page 268 - Cultural Theory

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••• Cultural Citizenship •••

concerned with how we might foster free and equal forms of participation within
political and cultural processes and institutions. For Habermas (1990) the idea of dis-
course ethics is based upon the notion that the rightness or the justness of the norms
we uphold can only be secured by our ability to give good reasons. In turn, these norms
are considered valid if they gain the consent of others within a shared community. The
political and cultural question becomes how to promote genuinely cosmopolitan defi-
nitions, practices and understandings of public space?
An institutional definition of civil society (usually made up of relatively indepen-
dent organizations likes churches, trade unions, schools, and the media), however,
does not go far enough. Arguably Habermas’s analysis of citizenship stops short of an
investigation into the ways in which civil society has become historically and cul-
turally constructed. That is, while he correctly emphasises the normative importance
of rights for fostering civic solidarity, he understates the cultural dimensions of what
he calls a ‘cosmopolitan consciousness’ (Habermas 2001: 112). It has been the
strength of cultural studies and post-structuralism in that they have been able to
highlight the ways in which civil society becomes coded through a multiplicity and
often antagonistic discourses (Mouffe 1993). Further, that cultural understandings of
citizenship are concerned not only with ‘formal’ processes such as to who is entitled
to vote and the maintenance of an active civil society, but with whose cultural prac-
tices are included and excluded. That is with who is silenced, marginalized, stereo-
typed and rendered invisible. As Renato Rosaldo (1999: 260) argues, cultural
citizenship is concerned with ‘who needs to be visible, to be heard, and to belong’.
What becomes defining here is the demand for the recognition of difference and cul-
tural respect. Whereas liberalism commonly recognises that a political community
can generate disrespect by forms of practical mistreatment (torture or rape) and by
withholding formal rights (civil, political and social), notions of cultural citizenship
point to the importance of questions of hierarchy and disrespect. That is, cultural
citizenship is concerned with ‘the degree of self esteem accorded to his or her man-
ner of self-realisation within a society’s inherited cultural horizon’ (Honneth 1995:
134). Our question is how to balance claims to justice and recognition in the context
of contemporary commercial and public cultures. I now intend to pursue these issues
by investigating the ways that consumerism and consumption has sought to rework
our understandings of citizenship.

Consumer Culture and the Death of Citizenship

In this section I aim to explore the relationship between consumerism and citizen-
ship. In doing so, I want to build upon and establish a more complex relationship
between these terms than currently appears to be available. We need to avoid polar-
ising the debate between two of the perspectives prevalent within the literature. The
first is that consumerism merely undermines the practice of citizenship. Such argu-
ments posit that the declining fortunes of Western democracies are tied to a culture
of ‘contentment’ amongst the middle-class population, or that a substantial aesthetic
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