Page 15 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

INTRODUCTION

Such patron-age systems—and there are a number of important sub-
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variants —provide some real guarantee for the material security of
the intellectual, but only at the price of a radical subordination of
intellectual life to the often quite immediate cultural needs either of
the church or of the aristocratic or royal court. The “sacral art” of the
High Middle Ages “is wholly integrated into the social institution
‘religion’”, explains Peter Burger. The “courtly art” of the early modern
absolutist monarchies, he continues, “serves the glory of the prince
and the self-portrayal of courtly society. Courtly art is part of the life
praxis of courtly society, just as sacral art is part of the life praxis of
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the faithful”. Cultures thus organized require no specifically cultural
theory, but rather only a theology or a politics respectively. 19
But in capitalist society, according to Bürger, “the separation of art
from the praxis of life becomes the decisive characteristic of the
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autonomy of bourgeois art”. In this context, the term “autonomy”
denotes both (relative) freedom from social control and a corresponding
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social irrelevance. At a slightly different level of analysis, that of the
producer rather than the product, it denotes also both the freedom to
write or to paint or to think much as one pleases and the freedom to
starve as the price of so doing. And as the logics of capitalist development
proceed, such autonomy comes to apply not only to “bourgeois”
high art, but also to the newer arts of the newly culturally enfranchised
“masses’; not only to art, but also to other cultural forms, even to
religion in the more pluralist of post-Reformation, Protestant societies.
These autonomies have never appeared either unproblematic or
uncontestable, either to the cultural producers themselves or to others.
Hence the various forms of political and religious intervention into
the cultural commodity market, for example censorship, subsidy and
education. The cultural conflicts thereby instigated are evidence,
according to Williams, “of the most significant modern form of
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asymmetry” between capitalist mechanical reproduction on the one
hand, and the older established institutions of cultural and social
reproduction on the other. As one consequence amongst many, such
asymmetries as these have prompted the emergence of contemporary
cultural theory, not as a single body of authoritative discourse, but as
a set of competing, often mutually exclusive, often internally
contradictory, almost always deeply troubled, narrative paradigms.
For, insofar as the modern intelligentsia can be said to inhabit any
particular social space, it is that locatable somewherein the nexus

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