Page 282 - Cultural Theory

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••• Cultural Citizenship •••

needs a shared common culture fashioned out of diversity. In a multi-cultural society
diverse cultures constantly encounter one another and change due to the presence
of the other. That Adorno’s (1991) arguments in respect of the guardians of culture
are no longer acceptable is largely due to a growing awareness of different cultural
traditions and practices that fall outside a European avant-guard. However, as Parekh
fully recognises, unless we are content to live in a society of cultural apartheid and
fragmentation then institutional conditions must be created to foster intercultural
dialogue. While a ‘common culture’ cannot be engineered the opportunities for a
common dialogue need to be politically created. Just as Williams argued that the
‘national culture’ needs to be extended and criticised by working-class voices so
Parekh argues similar privileges need to be extended to ‘minorities’. Within this
process both Williams and Parekh highlight the centrality of cultural and educa-
tional institutions. They are both critical of monocultural institutions which aim to
impose a collective conformist culture. Yet for Williams the purpose of education was
to provide citizens with the educational resources so they would be capable of full
cultural participation. This remains a pressing question in a society which has seen
illiteracy rates rise in areas of high social exclusion. To achieve a common culture cit-
izens need basic skills so that they are able to write a letter to a newspaper, discrimi-
nate between different viewpoints and understand a variety of artistic work. For
Wiliams these agendas were blocked by the capitalism and cultural snobbery.
Arguably, if basic literacy rates have fallen it is because society no longer requires
their participation as workers in the economy and the prejudice against people from
poor class backgrounds remains as intense as ever. Alternatively, Parekh places empha-
sis upon the need to develop a genuinely multicultural system of education that aims
to criticise the Euro-centric understandings that pervade educational curriculum. A
good education needs to be able to break with specifically ‘national’ and ‘European’
understandings of history, the arts and sciences, while building in the experience of
minorities into the common narrative of the community. While inspired by different
questions both Williams and Parekh place their faith in a common cosmopolitan dia-
logue where new voices and experiences are brought into the centre of societies domi-
nant self-understandings. That questions of cultural policy have much to contribute in
this regard is a position that they would both seek to endorse, while recognising such
aims are restricted by wider questions of money and power.

Conclusion

We have seen that ideas in respect of cultural citizenship have sought to balance
questions of equality and difference. Here I have sought to stress how we might pur-
sue these questions in respect of the related areas of consumerism and cultural pol-
icy. In particular, I have stressed the continued importance of questions of equality
in a polity that is increasingly dominated by the demands of neo-liberalism and a
number of diverse social movements based upon questions of identity. My argument
has been that a genuinely cohesive cultural citizenship can only survive in a context
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