Page 23 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 14

Contemporary Cultural Theory

brought about an equally unprecedented transformation in the
social position and status of cultural producers, such as writers,
artists, priests and teachers, those whom we might today desig-
nate as, collectively, ‘the intelligentsia’. Earlier forms of cultural
‘patronage’ had guaranteed the material security of cultural
producers at the price of a radical subordination of intellectual
life to the church, the aristocracy and the royal court. Such
cultures required no specifically cultural theory, but only a
theology or a politics. In capitalist society, however, what Peter
Bürger terms ‘the separation of art from the praxis of life’
becomes the decisive characteristic of ‘the autonomy of bourgeois
art’ (Bürger, 1984, p. 49).
The term ‘autonomy’ here denotes both relative freedom
from social control and a corresponding social irrelevance
(cf. Marcuse, 1968). 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 in 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 asymmetry’
(Williams, 1981, p. 102), between capitalist mechanical repro-
duction and the older established institutions of cultural and
social reproduction. As one consequence among many, such
asymmetries 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 inter-
nally contradictory, almost always deeply troubled, narrative
paradigms. Cultural theory is thus the discursive articulation
of a set of characteristically modern social contradictions,
which structure the lived experiences of characteristically
modern kinds of intellectuals. In a society as thoroughly encul-
tured as is ours, such theories become, by turn, the property
not only of specialist intellectuals, but also of the collective lives
of whole communities. They are, then, matters of no small
consequence.

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