Culture for Communists?
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I don't know much about art but I know what I like. But I don't think this is true of just communists.There's The Culture in the Iain M. Banks novels, a vaguely communistic future civilisation.There's The Culture with the Sunday Times every week but it's hardly for communists, mostly featuring people with a new book to sell or a film coming out. But A A Gill's TV reviews are a bit of a laugh.If we see the distinction between work and leisure becoming distinctly blurred in a socialist society, if not disappearing altogether, then maybe the word 'culture' will only exist in a science lab.
Right, got space to do this now. So, Raymond Williams, credited with being the founder of cultural materialism (his book was 'Culture and materialism', which was a blast against mechanical materialism and the official Marxism of the 1950's). He describes culture4 as a 'whole way of life' including 'structures of feeling'. He later amended that to 'whole ways of life'. Now, I'd be a lot happier (per he science debate) if people used 'culture' where 'ideology' is often used. To say that knowledge is cultural, and that we have inevitable cultural biases, to my mind, avoids the perjorative sense of ideology, and in fact emphasisies the entirely antural state of culture (culture, as Williams points out, is a term derived from 'Agriculture', growing things). I think it perfectly fair and right to talk about a socialist culture (indeed, it becomes useful, because that becomes the doorway to a study and understanding of that culture).In socialism, it may well be there will be different cultures across the planet. Take one example, there may not be full agreement on what constitutes democratic behaviour. In the Nineteenth century, in the United States, it was common for large gangs to gather around voting stations (there weren't official ballot papers, so rival groups would print their own, and distribute them at the station). Judges ruled it was only intimidation if a man of average physical courage would be detered. So, theat is, only intimidation if more than half the voters would be put off. Yet, in a very physical culture, that was deemed fair and democratic. This isn't relativism, per se, but a recognition that in different conditions, people may apprehend and feel differently about different ways of doing things.
YMS wrote:Now, I'd be a lot happier (per he science debate) if people used 'culture' where 'ideology' is often used. To say that knowledge is cultural, and that we have inevitable cultural biases, to my mind, avoids the perjorative sense of ideology, and in fact emphasisies the entirely antural state of culture…I'm only going to make a short comment on this thread, because what I'm about to say has been said often enough on the 'science' thread.If one accept 'cultural bias', then one is fooling oneself by avoiding the use of 'ideology'.Culture is ideological, not 'natural' (which is a meaningless statement once one accepts culture is a human product, and thus variable). 'Natural' is always used by conservatives to emphasise the status quo.Being 'pejorative' about human knowledge is no more than 'coming to consciousness'.Humans produce distorted knowledge.To argue otherwise necessitates arguing for a 'copy theory of knowledge', that we are at one with 'nature'.As for your comments about 'socialism', it's totally ahistorical and idealistic. So much for your alleged 'materialism'.That's it, on this thread.
Culture is what we do, including creating ourselves, and creating difference. That is our creative nature. It's nonsense to talk of distorted knowledge if its the only knowledge we have. Differentiating between culture and ideology is making a useful distinction because it is the differentiation between the effect of power and the effect of our own self activity. Saying we all are always within ideology is merely as banal as saying humans have consciousness.Anyway, we have to include the theory of alienation here as well. If our products become alien to us us, and relations between people become relations between things, we are estranged from our nature and from our culture. The end of commodity relations thus becomes the flowering of culture, as we focus on growing humans not things.
Just another quick point. We also need to address value. So, peopel accept there is high cultyure and low culture: Is the Mona Lisa better or equal with beavis and Butthead? Both are cultural products, and some might be equally awed by either. An absolute relativist would say they are equal and we cannot assign a higher artistic/cultural value to one than the other. But if we say one is 'better' than the other, and we start to compile an ordinal value to the products of culture, we create a 'cannon' that can exclude or include different groups (and possibly different cultures). One way out is humanism, and appeal to a common humanity and (yes, again) aesthetic reaction, how does it make us feel, are all humans awed by Shakespeare (even in translation)?Below is a well known (and possibly controversial passage from Marx on this theme:
Charlie M wrote:Let us take e.g. the relation of Greek art and then of Shakespeare to the present time. It is well known that Greek mythology is not only the arsenal of Greek art but also its foundation. Is the view of nature and of social relations on which the Greek imagination and hence Greek [mythology] is based possible with self-acting mule spindles and railways and locomotives and electrical telegraphs? What chance has Vulcan against Roberts and Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the Credit Mobilier? All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them. What becomes of Fama alongside Printing House Square? Greek art presupposes Greek mythology, i.e. nature and the social forms already reworked in an unconsciously artistic way by the popular imagination. This is its material. Not any mythology whatever, i.e. not an arbitrarily chosen unconsciously artistic reworking of nature (here meaning everything objective, hence including society). Egyptian mythology could never have been the foundation or the womb of Greek art. But, in any case, a mythology. Hence, in no way a social development which excludes all mythological, all mythologizing relations to nature; which therefore demands of the artist an imagination not dependent on mythology.From another side: is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and the saga and the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer’s bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?But the difficulty lies not in understanding that the Greek arts and epic are bound up with certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they still afford us artistic pleasure and that in a certain respect they count as a norm and as an unattainable model.A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child’s naïvité, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm? There are unruly children and precocious children. Many of the old peoples belong in this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm of their art for us is not in contradiction to the undeveloped stage of society on which it grew. [It] is its result, rather, and is inextricably bound up, rather, with the fact that the unripe social conditions under which it arose, and could alone arise, can never return.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm
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