Page 165 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

which best allows us to disentangle some of these critical confusions of
our time. It is Hegel who helps us to understand the underlying cultural
similarity amidst difference which has always existed in the world (‘concrete
universal’); the many-sided, mixed and contradictory character of cultural
integration in the most united of nations (a ‘unity of opposites’ – one thinks
immediately of ‘the United Kingdom’); and the dynamic, always impure
and ever changing manner through which all cultures develop (aufheben).
In other words, Hegel’s thought is the antidote to ‘alterity’, an antidote
which we avoid at great peril, especially in these current conditions of
advanced capitalist globalization.
The argument of the book has been pursued through a critique of the
foundational theories of Stuart Hall, Anthony Giddens, Scott Lash and
John Urry, and Manuel Castells whose work has played the main role in
shaping cultural studies, structuration and network society theory in the
past 20 years and more. The emphasis of these authors on autonomy and
their rejection of Hegel, albeit from different angles, is well established
in the literature.
I have also examined the work of Paul Gilroy who, in my opinion,
exemplifies some of the dangers and confusion of the application of the
concepts of cultural studies to the issue of identity, in particular, to race.
I tried to show that his is a prime case of the tangle which ensues when one
sincerely adheres to an abstract humanistic ethics. This leads one to yearn
for a universalistic world rid of all essentialisms – for Gilroy’s ‘planetary
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humanism’. But one has little notion of the rootedness of ‘identities’ in
the constitution of the hidden abode. In the given case of racism, one fails
to grasp how racism is not simply rooted in the consequences of the past
but in the very present system of imperialism and neo-imperialism which,
at its core, is a system for the production and export of finance capital.

The realms of consciousness and the realms of the economy

In these concepts of ‘the noisy sphere’ of the market and ‘the hidden
abode’ of production Marx developed one of the most profound insights
into the relationship between culture and the process of economic
exploitation under capitalism. Marx’s point in the passage quoted at the
beginning of this chapter was that political economy had a double impact
on that noisiest of spheres – the zone where public consciousness was
formed under capitalism. This sphere of distribution and exchange – the
market – first gave rise in people’s minds to spontaneous ideas about how
the system functioned which, while reflecting real everyday experiences,

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