Page 217 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

WAITING ON THE END OF THE WORLD? 205

of crisis the longstanding historical distinction between the ‘popular’ and
the ‘cultivated’. For there were now whole cityscapes, soundscapes,
visualscapes and pleasurescapes, whole ‘worlds’, existing quite oblivious of
the canons of ‘art’, ‘culture’ and ‘good taste’. In the obvious challenge to
earlier assumptions over the ‘knowledge’ and ‘meaning’ of culture, the
provocation of modern, mass culture acquired a fundamental political
resonance as the ‘culture and society’ debate slowly came to be
democratized.
The ‘masses’ Stuart refers to have become individual historical subjects,
at least in western capitalist societies, not so much through the
representative organs of parliamentary democracy (a fairly limited
institution, especially in Britain), but through the diverse modalities of
urban popular culture. It is there that the greatest exercise in the powers of
individual and local choice and taste has been realized, effectively remaking
the field of culture in a far more extensive fashion than the presence of the
‘masses’ in the more restricted field of politics has so far achieved. To
adopt this perspective is to raise questions about the understanding of
power and politics in the everyday world. Perhaps the particular histories of
culture and politics in Britain, and elsewhere in the West, suggest that it is
not a more political culture that is needed but rather a culture that interrupts
and interrogates the existing codification of the ‘political’. This would be to
reiterate and reinforce the Gramscian proposition that it is ‘civil society’
that makes ‘political society’ possible.
Those areas traditionally most excluded from the ‘political’—
identifications secured in gender, race, sexuality, the familial, but also in
the psychic and the poetic (in sum, what was once consigned to the
anonymous world of the ‘private’)—provide the languages in which daily
sense is usually secured and where eventually more extensive communal
and social meanings (politics) take shape. It has been in these areas, in the
‘microphysics of power’, that political discourse has experienced its most
significant interrogations and innovations over the last thirty years: black
power, feminism, gay liberation, ecology. Meanwhile, the ‘real world’ of
institutional politics does indeed often seem to be a mere simulacrum:
untouched and uncontrolled by sentiments and sensibilities that originate
elsewhere, an empty sign-play that constitutes ‘government’. The effects are
felt, are real enough—in Europe the systematic tendency towards
dismantling the welfare state; in Britain a major war waged in the South
Atlantic in the name of national sovereignty—but the machinery remains
distant and opaque, the language rarely rising above the semantics of
slogans. This is the other side of democracy, your abstract involvement
(representation) is disinvested of real involvement (power). Most of us do
indeed experience institutional politics as a simulacrum of power, not as an
intervention in the ‘real’.