Our Time Comprehended in Thought

Hegel famously said that philosophy is its own time comprehended in thought. Now in the context of his particular system this actually has quite a specific meaning, concerning the relationship between conceptual and social development. But let's riff off it a bit, and consider it more just as a sort of slogan to undergird what was once called "philosophy of culture". Today's blog post is my ode to philosophy of culture, musings on the plausibility of its central presupposition and what it might look like today. I'm not really going to do any philosophy of culture in this blog post, just point to examples, summarise what I take to be an emerging overall picture therefrom, and suggest a line of future inquiry.

We live in a society.

What I mean by philosophy of culture is the attempt to draw out, clearly express, and expose to critique, the ideas underlying a given culture or mode of life. The core presupposition is that such a set of ideas exists. It is not after all just obvious that the art forms, behavioural norms, laws, modes of entertainment, intellectual output, and political organisation of a culture shall all embody or express commitment to a given theoretical outlook or perspective. Maybe everything is just an incoherent jumble, the result of ad hoc situational compromises that could not be rationalised if considered together. To be a philosopher of culture is to take your stand on the ground of affirming that there is actually something to do here, that ideational-cultural analysis will reveal something more illuminating than an incoherent mishmash. That it won't just be the forced imposition of a form comprised by the theorists' fantasies of consistency and imposed upon a disordered material. 

This sort of philosophy of culture does not occupy the heights of prestige it once did in professional philosophy, but nor is it entirely lost and forgotten. The early twentieth century saw some especially famous examples of this sort of work. Cassirer is probably still remembered as one of its best practitioners, and just personally I think his Philosophy of The Enlightenment is a top tier example of the genre. He does a great example in that book of arguing that apparently disparate strains of thought in Enlightenment philosophy were actually expressions of a shared creative drive, that could also be seen underlying scientific and political developments of the era. One may or may not be convinced, but it is a sterling example of what sort of arguments and interpretive moves a philosopher of culture may bring to bear to bolster their case.

A bit closer to home for me, the Africana tradition also produced some of the most famous philosophers of culture. Alain Locke's work on the Harlem Renaissance, most especially his famous anthology The New Negro, was a very deliberate attempt to not only draw out and express but also consciously shape and guide an interrelated set of poetic, philosophical, aesthetic, and musical ideals that might well serve black Americans. (Precisely because it was a bit artificial in its attempt to create as much as report on a shared culture, Locke's vision of things did get some pretty forceful pushback in its day.) CLR James is another great of the genre. His commitment to equality and democracy is just as much expressed in his overtly Marxist political essays as it is in his analyses of literature and sport. In all such works James shows one how ideas about human capability, cooperation, and fellow-feeling found expression and met resistance in various spheres. By the end one might really believe that the way cricket is played, the way ancient Athens was governed, and the way Charlie Chaplin acts may actually all be interrelated. 

Those are the good cases, what of the bad? I don't like linking negative exemplars but I will note a couple of characteristic problems with the genre. First, as already alluded to, there is a severe risk of the theorist just imposing a pattern upon cherry picked examples. A sufficiently interesting pattern with a wide enough variety of cherry picked examples can sort of redeem this by sheer chutzpah. But for the most part what will happen when this occurs is that the basically samey ideas of a member of the upper middle class are found in the basically samey cultural media that such people imbibe. It's just not that interesting to learn that one of the seven ideas about Gender one might find expressed on a slow news day in Buzzfeed can be read into Game of Thrones. (A variant of this which is just as boring is when a writer develops a Schtick. So it's not what all the other bourgeois are saying, but for this person in particular it's just as formulaic. So if you know what they thought of Avatar you can predict what they'll think of Kung Fu Panda without even having to read the book. So to speak.) Second, I think there is a strong tendency to endorse myths of a golden age in a way that renders the writing dull. Decline narratives can be interesting. But if you are just going to present a made up version of American suburbia in the 50s (or Confessional European monarchies in the 1500s) and sort of wistfully sigh as you contrast it with present cultural life, but at length using language only a PhD holder could understand, that's no more interesting than one more "Did you know that Daenerys is Problematic?" piece. 

What of such work for the present cultural moment? (I will limit myself to discussion of the Anglo-American sphere, which is what I know best.) Probably the ur-text for contemporary philosophy of culture people would still reach for is Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition. I'm a fan of that text on the whole, but I must admit it is a bit dated and hasn't entirely held up well. To my mind instead the most interesting trend of thought in contemporary philosophy of culture has been the study of interlinked material and ideological changes following the rise of Thatcher/Reagan that led to today's cultural infrastructure.

If I had to summarise the picture that emerges from this it would be something like the following. The Thatcher and Reagan era's brought about a sweep of cultural, economic, and ideological changes. There is something right in saying these were atomising -  the little platoons of civic society were disbanded, communal organisations that had served as a counter-weight to capital were undermined, forms of life that had been a source of pride and community were rendered economically infeasible. But seeing this as just an age of atomisation in line with a kind of right-libertarian ideology fails to capture the full complexity. For one thing, it just misses out on important features. For instance, there is a modal aspect, a sort of naturalisation of this or a sense that it is not just one cultural form among many but in some sense the only real viable cultural form. Thatcher's claim that There Is No Alternative came to be reflected in much intellectual, artistic, and political life, permeating our self-understandings. For another thing, it misses out on actively discordant elements of the cultural form we came to adopt. First, from the right, much was actually done to emphasise the family as the proper unit of meaning and social support, and also in fact of economic organisation. (My only tiny contribution to this genre is a coauthored piece on another blog where we look at the rather strange history of normative ideals and family organisation throughout the 20th century.) Second, intellectual trends on the left very much played a part in this cultural transformation.  Sometimes with active assistance from the security services the intelligentsia of the late 20th century began to reorient themselves around versions of liberal egalitarianism that were broadly consonant with this new atomised status quo. Even in more radical circles old ideals of solidarity and a universal proletariat were nuanced with ideas from feminist theory, anti-racist theorists, and so on. The intention of the left intellectuals doing the nuancing was often as not the creation of a more perfect universalism. But its result was often a kind of fracturing of identity that can be seen in our politics and art which cohered quite well with the broader social changes surveyed. At its most pathological this fracturing made any kind of left organising extremely difficult, even as the impetus for it came from within the left itself. Even as one is encouraged to think of oneself as part of an identity group rather than an atomised individual, if that group is sufficiently fine grained enough the difference is academic.

What then is the upshot? Well it is of a time infused with ideas of people as bearers of very specific identity markers determining much about them. These markers are so specific as to create very little grounds for common solidarity, and so people are left with no real or effective cultural unit beyond their family (and even that not so often). Standing alone this means we are buffeted by impersonal market forces that cannot really be controlled or changed, since no one person is capable of doing that. The felt experience of powerlessness has led in some cases to an explicit ideology to the effect that there is no real alternative, and more normally to politics and art that simply presupposes as much without comment, at most hoping for tweaks around the edges. While this cultural philosophy has had serious downsides which we have largely dealt with through sheer brutality, it's important to remember that it is not a straightforward decline narrative. Some of the cultural units people were previously part of were ascribed identities that were actively hostile to their wellbeing, so dissolving those has for many been a genuine liberation and something any friend of human happiness should celebrate. All in all, we freed ourselves from all those ties which bound us, and considering that some of those ties were more properly chains this was a real liberation - but now standing alone on our own two feet we found ourselves totally exposed to an indifferent market, thereby giving a small number an absurd degree of power over the rest, and our perceived powerless before this led to a defeatist intelligentsia and a cultural environment lacking hope or imagination.

In the face of this, the task of the contemporary philosopher of culture seems to me basically constructive - ours is an era whose critique ought be focussed on the false modal claim underpinning and entrenching so much of what is worst in our world, and the best way to do that is to render vivid alternative possibilities. I think that if our generation is to fulfil its historic mission then this time of ours should be an age of utopias.