This Outline of Critical Theory is taken from Vol. 1 of my PhD Dissertation: The Social Construction of an Architectural Reality in Design Education.

© 1997

Tony Ward

Postmarxist Critique of the Base-Superstructure Model Critics of orthodox marxism have pointed to this distinction between the

economic base and the determined superstructure as the core cause of the failure of Soviet communism and the failure of marxism as a formative ideology for social change. Beginning with the anarcho-synicalists like Makhno, through powerful dissidents such as Luxemburg down to the New Left of the 1960s and later postmodernists, these critics have all maintained that the revolution which will emancipate the masses cannot wait until all of the conditions for its existence are in place.

In the face of the Gulag revelations, which emerged from the 1930s onwards, Western marxists searched for an adequate means to explain both this and the ap-parent refusal of capitalism to collapse. The doctrinaire version of marxism to which the party was attached promised the inevitability of the capitalist collapse. Marxist economics were held to be a natural law, governed by the same kind of forces as determined other natural phenomena (such as gravity). This deterministic version of Marx's historical materialism was first seriously questioned by the Hungarian marxist Georgy Lukács and Karl Korsch and has subsequently been taken up by numerous other authors.1

Lukacs, particularly, argued against the mistaken orthodox view of marxism which saw the inexorability of change stemming from a defined economic "base", suggesting that this theory contradicted Marx's own philosophy and amounted to what Marx had called a "contemplative materialism" - one which ignored the all-important 1 Lukács, G., op. cit., 1971. See also: Korsch, K., Marxism and Philosophy, Monthly Review Press, New

York, 1971. A more recent and very interesting critique of Marxism which extends beyond conceptions of economic determinism has been furnished by André Gorz. Gorz suggests that it was Marx's modernist utopian conception and glorification of work which lay at the root of the failure of Soviet communism. According to Gorz, Marx believed that work carried the seed of liberation for the proletariat, but that the enslaving nature of mechanized work was never fully anticipated by Marxists or, although recognized, was never taken as a factor which would alienate the workers from the utopian ideals of the Revolution. In other words, the glorification of work under communism served only as a mask for the alienation of the workers from the creation of their own agency in the process of history. Gorz further maintains that even had the Revolution led to direct worker control over the means of production this would still have led to similar alienation, simply because of the scale of the industrial enterprise needed to bring Russia into full industrialization. He, like the Bolsheviks, asserts that such dramatic industrialization process could only have been accomplished through massive centralization of resources. His thesis is that we now need a new utopian model which understands the liberation of the workers not through work, but from work. See: Gorz, A. Critique of Economic Reason, Verso, London, 1989.

factor of human subjectivity and action. By ignoring the element of human subjectivity and agency, Lukacs suggested that "orthodox" marxists had also abandoned the very thing which could provide the basis for revolutionary action. This position was supported explicitly by Engels himself in his later writings. He maintained that:

"According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I ever asserted....The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure....the class struggle and its results- also exercise their influence on the course of historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form."2

Reinterpreting Marx

Yet the record is not so completely unambiguous. Marx himself seems to have taken a variety of positions and to have "softened" his insistence upon the primacy of the economic sphere in his later years. He suggested that the law, as a superstructural element was falsely characterised as being separate from and subordinated to capitalist production, whereas we have seen how they are mutually implicated.3 Most often Marx portrayed the determining element of history as the sum total of the relations of production - which necessarily included the workers themselves, rather than only the machines, plant and raw materials. He noted, for instance, that this totality:

"...constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness."4 Occasionally, he isolated the actual instruments of production, but these

instances are relatively few and minor, and as McLellan notes: "He also makes it clear that the instruments of production can never be isolated from their social context....."It is not 'history' which uses men as a means of achieving - as if it were an individual person - its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their own ends."5 This seems to be consistent with one of Marx's most incisive ideas, reiterated

innumerable times, that:

2 Engels, F., "Letter to Joseph Bloch", in: Tucker, R. C., op. cit., 1978, p. 760. 3 Marx, K., Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, (ed.) Easton, L., and Guddat, K., New

York, 1967, p. 39. Marx here is not denying that laws may be broken and hence changed or created. Rather he is observing the process by which we come to believe the illusion of our own freedom from political or hegemonic constraint.

4 McLellan, D., op. cit., 1977, p. 389. 5 McLellan, D., op. cit., 1980, p. 137.

"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past."6 In other words, Marx seems to have seen the relationship between the

economic and cultural realms as more reciprocal than later more conservative and Orthodox interpretations would seem to indicate. This was the perspective on marxism to which critics of orthodoxy, such as Luxemburg, Lucáks and Korsch subscribed. Revolution, for all of these critics, became an issue of process, rather than being viewed as an end product, and that process seems to involve an ongoing dialectic within the superstructural elements and the between them and the economic 'base' upon which they are supposed to be dependent.7

What this meant in simple terms was that it was now realised that elements of culture could and did affect the economic framework itself, and that change to the economic structure can and does take place in more than superficial ways as a result of changes taking place within the social and cultural spheres.

Although he was later to relent somewhat in this analysis (due to criticism from the Party) Lukacs’ work did open up a whole new way of looking at the practice of marxist theory. His work had a substantial influence after its publication in 1923, and was most systematically taken up by researchers at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in the mid to late 1920's. Once liberated from its dependency upon economic change, the cultural component of everyday life could be investigated within its own frame of reference as an instrument of social transformation. As a major element in cultural production this meant that education could now also be investigated as playing an important part in the transformation of society. It is for this reason that we need to look more closely at the social implications of these later theories in regard to the whole issue of cultural production and reproduction and most specifically at the implications this might have for the educational enterprise.8

Marxist Critique, and the Frankfurt School.

Such was the orthodox interpretation of the base-superstructure model. Significant critiques along these lines, though available at the conception of the

6 ibid., p. 137. 7 Lukács, G., op. cit., 1971. 8 David McLellan, one of the most accomplished and knowledgeable Marxist scholars has pointed out that

the more theoretical and process-oriented form of Marxism only emerged with the recent Western publication of three pivotal texts, The Grundrisse, the Theories of Surplus Value, and the entirety of Capital (which had only previously been selectively released through the Moscow publishers). These publications opened up in the West a much broader debate about Marx's theoretical works and have consequently led to a revision of what had been the all-or-nothing dogma of marxist Orthodoxy. See: McLellan, D. (ed), "Introduction", Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 1.

Revolution, were suppressed by the Bolshevik hierarchy, such that it fell to the members of the Frankfurt School like Marcuse and Reich to suggest, much later, that personal liberation and universal liberation might, in fact, be reciprocally or dialectically related, and that the cultural transformation of society might have an important part to play in bringing about human emancipation.9 The inability of the orthodox base-superstructure model to accurately reflect realpolitik required a new interpretation of its internal relationship. This was one of the primary tasks which the members of the Frankfurt School set for themselves.

The so-called Frankfurt School was made up of a loose-knit group of theorists from several disciplines whose work only occasionally overlapped. Max Horkheimer (its second Director), Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Henryk Grossman, Franz Neumann all worked at the Institute, while Walter Benjamin was a research associate, and Jurgen Habermas continues to the present to apply critical theory to the study of the social impact of communication. With the rise of Hitler, the School moved to America, where its work is said to have been negatively affected by contact with American social science traditions of Parsonian pragmatism and by the difficulty in acquiring funding.10

Unlike many orthodox marxists, Frankfurt theoreticians insisted that cultural phenomena could not be analysed within the simple base-superstructure model.11 They based their early analyses on the writings of Lukacs and Korsch. The School did not really achieve prominence until 1930, when its second director, Max Horkheimer laid the groundwork for what was to become a comprehensive critical analysis of society, culture, economic theory and social development. In his inaugural address, Horkheimer set out three policy themes:

1. To restate all of the great philosophical questions 2. To reject orthodox marxism and to re-study Marx in the light of marxism's

apparent failure 3. To develop a theory which would explain the connections between the

factors affecting social development, so as to facilitate the project of uni-versal social emancipation.

9 Marcuse, H., Eros and Civilisational, Beacon Press, Boston, 1955. The problem of Base/Superstructure

stymied a whole generation of disaffected Marxists. Most significant of these was Louis Althusser who, contemporaneously with Marcuse, and in reaction to the "failed" 1968 Paris uprising abandoned his belief in cultural revolution, broke with traditional Marxist base/superstructure philosophy, but maintained that while the (ideological) superstructure was relatively independent, it remained (in his famous phrase) "in the last instance" determined by the economic base. See: Althusser, L. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" in: Althusser, L. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press, New York, 1971.

10 Held, D., Introduction to Critical Theory, University of California Press, 1980, pp. 36-7 11 ibid., p. 79.

These themes were to be pursued through a systematic empirical and theoretical study. Although there was no "plan" or unitary "critical theory" which co-ordinated all the work of the Institute's staff, there was a great deal of overlap as its members followed their own (wide) disciplinary methodologies in pursuit of the themes. Indeed, if there were any common principles upon which they worked, chief among these was the imperative of what Kellner has termed "intradisciplinary study".12 The other abiding principle of the Frankfurt School was a passionate commitment to human emancipation, animated by an empathy with the suffering of the powerless. From 1930 until 1969 (when Adorno died) the Institute produced an impressive body of work, covering a wide range of social investigations. Large parts of this work became very popular in the 1960's and formed the theoretical basis for the social revolution of that time. The scope of the work carried out at the Institute was very broad and in some instances anticipated much of the later work of the Postmodernists like Lyotard and Derrida.

The Work of the Frankfurt Theorists

Without going into great detail it would be fair to say that the main achievements of the Frankfurt theorists were in raising the critical awareness of the use of culture as an instrument of social reproduction and the theorising of the alienated relationship of men and women to their environment brought about by the tendencies of capitalism. These two achievements were also their greatest failures because the theories upon which they were based were not conceived reflexively.

Their critique of marxism was a task which led the Frankfurt theorists into extensive research about the diverse areas of superstructural (cultural) factors. The psychiatrist Erich Fromm, like Marcuse, studied Freud, but finally broke with Freudian interpretations of the relationship between the suppression of the libido and the development of civilization, suggesting, that the main reason why people did not embrace liberation was not only because they sublimated their libidinous desires into work in the interests of social survival, but because of a deep seated anxiety at the prospect of being individually and responsibly alone.13 Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno on the other hand, supported the Freudian interpretation and attempted to integrate Freudian insights with Marx and Engels' conceptions of human relations.14 12 Douglas Kellner makes a distinction between "interdisciplinary" study and "intradisciplinary study",

suggesting that the work carried out at the School was more than a mere assignment of different study aspects to differing disciplines, but rather a coming together of disciplines to form a common theoretical base for future research. In this respect, Kellner likens Critical Theory with recent Postmodern Theory which challenges rigid disciplinary boundaries. See: Kellner, D., Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1989, pp. 7-8.

13 Fromm, E., Escape From Freedom, Avon, New York,1965. (original version 1941) 14 Horkheimer, M., 'Egoismus und Freiheitsbewegung", Kritische Theorie, Vol. 11 pp. 73-81.

Horkheimer reviewed the role of the family in capitalist production (as had Marx)15 while Marcuse16 critically reviewed the work of Wilhelm Reich in an attempt to bridge the gap between Lukács' theory of reification and Reich's development of character analysis, specifically his concept of "body armouring".17

Horkheimer and Adorno18 studied the relationship of man and nature (as also did Marcuse) - suggesting that such relations were based upon a model of domination which would ultimately lead to environmental degradation and collapse. In this they prefigured the Green movement by 30 years. In the same work they also devoted considerable attention to the reproduction of culture through commodification, coining the now famous term "culture industry" to explain the role of Marx's commodity fetishism to the reproduction of culture.19 While in exile in the United States, Marcuse20 Horkheimer21 and Adorno22 all critically analysed Aesthetics and the status of art as a cultural and revolutionary medium. This theme was also taken up by Benjamin in his widely-influential The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 23

More recently, Habermas has investigated the truth claims of science and the

role of communication in the process of cultural reproduction and has criticised the Postmodern movement while defending as incomplete the project of Modernity.24

Critical Social Theory: The Abandonment of Class.

One of the first studies undertaken by the members of the Frankfurt School was an analysis of the concept of class which is so central to marxist writing and theorising. The social category of Class has today acquired a somewhat unfashionable reputation, and in poststructuralist theories has been replaced by notions of cultural dominance and subordination. This shift began with the work of the Frankfurt School. In critiquing orthodox marxism, its members instead laid greater emphasis upon other variables - what they called the “culture industry” and the alienating relationship

15 Horkheimer, M., "Authority and the Family", Kritische Theorie, Vol. 1, pp. 325-329, Eng. Trans. in:

Critical Theory (Trans. ) O'Connell, M. J., Herder and Herder, New York, 1972. 16 Marcuse, H., op. cit., 1955, p. 21. 17 Reich, W., The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Penguin 1978. See also: Reich, W., Character Analysis,

Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 1976. 18 Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. W., Dialectic of Enlightenment, (Trans.) J. Cumming, Herder and

Herder, New York, 1972. 19 Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. W., "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception", ibid.,

pp.120-167. 20 Marcuse, M., Counter-revolution and Revolt., Beacon Press, Boston , 1970. 21 Horkheimer, M., "Art and Mass Culture" cf. Adorno, T. W., 1972, pp. 291-292. 22 Adorno, T. W., "Aesthetische Theorie", (eds) Adoerno, G. and Tiedman, R., Gesammelte Schriften , Vol.

7, 1970. 23 Benjamin, W., "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", in: Illuminations, Harcourt,

Brace and World , 1968, pp. 217-252. 24 Habermas, J., Towards a Theory of Communicative Competence", in: Inquiry, Vol. 13, 1970.

between humans and their environment created by the processes of capitalist production.

While both of these critical analyses shed new light upon the processes of social transformation, they also failed to generate a working basis for revolutionary praxis and, in the process, undermined existing acts of resistance such as the Paris Movement. Several authors have suggested that the Frankfurt School, in their abandonment of strict marxist interpretation of history, diluted the movement for social change in the 1960's. The abandonment of orthodox marxism in the period after the war by the members of the Institute is noted by Martin Jay:

"...(after 1945) the Frankfurt School travelled the last leg of its long march away from orthodox marxism. The clearest expression of this change was the Institute's replacement of class conflict, that foundation stone of any truly marxist theory, with a new motor of history. The focus was now on the larger conflict between men and nature."25 In the Frankfurt analysis, the relationship of capitalism as exploitative of

nature is replaced by the notion of a generalised misuse of nature by humankind. In the process class, as a meaningful category of social and political analysis was elided from critical discourse. This, has since resulted in shaping postmodern discourse in important ways, in the replacement of "class" by the "race, class, gender and ethnicity" multiplicity which characterizes the subject positions of the oppressed in much postmodern theorising.26

It was this kind of analysis by the Frankfurt School to which Lyotard was referring when he suggested that the failure of the 1968 Revolution was not the cause of Postmodernism, but itself a symptom of a defective critical analysis arising out of earlier analyses by the Frankfurt School, in which:

"...the social function of the principle of division, or class struggle, was blurred to the point of losing all its radicality; we cannot conceal the fact that the critical model in the end lost its theoretical standing and was reduced to the status of "utopia" or "hope" - a token protest raised in the name of man or reason or creativity, or again of some social category - such as the Third World or the students - on which is conferred in extremis the henceforth improbable function of critical subject"27 The inability of the Frankfurt theorists to finally reject completely the orthodox

base-superstructure model of marxism was closely linked with their abandonment of class as a meaningful social category, since the determining aspects of the base arise

25 Jay, M., The Dialectical Imagination, Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1973, p. 256 and pp. 173-218. 26 Smith, N., Uneven Development, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1990, pp. 29-30. 27 Lyotard. J. F., op. cit., p. 13

out of the class conflict attendant upon the struggle for surplus value. Their emphasis upon cultural reproduction added insight into the alternative importance of culture but only as a reactive element in the social dialectic.

Cultural Theory as a New Critique

Reflecting upon the meaning of the category "culture" I have noted how, in orthodox marxist philosophy, it is distinguished and made subservient to the economic "base" of social production. I have also hinted that, as a category, the word "culture" includes a whole gamut of social forms which stem (in marxist analysis) from this economic base. "Culture", then, is taken so far to mean all of those social practices which form the basis of and shape the collective social life of the community. But things are never so straightforward. Raymond Williams defines "culture" as one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. He notes that the etiology of the term derives from a range of meanings: "inhabit, cultivate, protect, honour with worship".28

He suggests that it was originally a noun of process to do with tending, which eventually conflated the dual meanings of natural growth and husbandry, to equate, by the seventeenth Century with human development. From this, the word developed into a noun, culture, meaning an abstract process or a product of such a process. Up until the nineteenth century it was occasionally used as a synonym for civilisation. By the eighteenth century, the noun had acquired definite class associations. According to Williams, the meaning was reified as an element of class distinction through its nineteenth century transformation in the German kultur, denoting civilisation.

The notion of culture as the organic expression of differing social practices - "cultures" (in the de-classified plural) was initiated by Herder, who, in his Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784-91) decried the normative and classed meaning of the term and saw it as an instrument of colonial domination. The main thread of meaning, however seems to have derived from the German etiology in which Kultur has come to mean the independent and abstract noun which indicates a particular way of life, as well as the productions of works of an intellectual or especially artistic activity. This is now the most common usage in theatre, film music, literature and architecture as a way of describing not only these activities, but the works which sustain them.29

Within the fields of social and cultural anthropology, the word has come to be used in the sense of material culture, while in history it invariably connotes the symbolic or signifying systems. In general, Williams suggests two parallel and major meanings. The first is that which is normatively associated with fine art, the other with

28 Williams, R., op. cit., 1983, p. 87 29 ibid., p. 90.

popular culture. While the former has been more prevalent since the nineteenth century, the latter has gained increasing importance and support in the sense suggested by Herder as a legitimation of decolonisation. Culture therefore has ambiguous and complex meanings. In this study, it will be used critically in the former sense - as a critique of high culture, and as a promotion of popular culture. It will also, by inference, be used in a more general sense as a set of social practices which have no reference to hierarchies or social stratifications.

The Frankfurt Theorists' Classed Conception of Culture

This lengthy analysis is important because in the critical study of culture, the ambiguity of the term has helped to shape the paradoxical and ambiguous meanings inherent in cultural theorising. This was certainly the case with the critical analyses of the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt critiques of centralized Soviet socialism, coupled with their analyses of the production of culture under capitalism established the basis for new conceptions of culture as a major factor in the social process.30 While they apparently refused to conduct their analysis of culture within the frame of reference of the old marxist base-superstructure model, Horkheimer and Adorno were themselves paradoxically unable to abandon their own beliefs in either the ultimate influence of the economic base nor in the primacy of their own cultural baggage in their theories of culture.

They established the importance of culture as an instrument of social and political reproduction, but not as a vehicle for social and political production. They saw it as a mechanism of oppression, not of liberation. Real culture, for them, was high culture. Popular culture, on the other hand was seen as a social manipulation carried out by the productive forces for the purpose of consumerism and social reproduction - making sure the peasants stayed in their place, lulled into soporific passivity by alienating forms of popular cultural production. In this belief, they missed the essential importance of the "youth culture" of the 1960's, and its capacity as an instrument of social change.31

Aware that social and cultural conditions had changed dramatically since the time of Marx (through the greater concentration of capital, more advanced technology and sophisticated modes of administration, and so on) the members of the Frankfurt

30 Horkheimer, M., "Art and Mass Culture", in: Critical Theory, Seabury, New York, 1972; Horkheimer,

M. and Adorno, T. W., op. cit., 1986, pp. 120-167. 31 It is interesting to note that Horkheimer, particularly, eschewed the student movement of 1968. Of the

members of the School, only Marcuse saw its potential for radical liberation and for a way out of the evolution/revolution dilemma. Horkheimer and Adorno were more circumspect. Following on from their analysis of the "culture industry" they saw the youth culture of that time as a social creation operating in the interests of capitalist consumption (and hence production). Kellner, D., op. cit., 1989, pp. 1.

School realised that the scope of domination had extended well beyond the work-place into the domain of cultural and social life itself.

“Culture” for the members of the Institute was not viewed dialectically - that is to say that they did not recognise their own view of the social category of “culture” as itself being culturally determined. In other words they stood outside the sphere of their own analysis. This is nowhere more clear that in the work of Theodor Adorno and in his joint work with Max Horkheimer into what they called the “culture industry”. They distinguished, for instance, between "authentic art" (meaning "high culture art forms") and popular culture which they saw as diametrically opposed, the former seen as potentially liberating, the latter as stultifying.32 As Kellner has astutely remarked:

"...for Adorno, "authentic art" provided insight into existing reality, expressing human suffering and the need for social transformation, as well as providing an authentic experience which helped to produce critical consciousness and awareness of the need for individual and social transformation. Art for Adorno was thus a privileged vehicle for emancipation. Aesthetic experience alone, he came to believe, provided the refuge for truth and a sphere of individual freedom and resistance. The problem was that only authentic art could provide aesthetic experience, and it was precisely authentic art which was disappearing in the administered society."33 While acknowledging that the critical theory of culture and the culture industry

developed by Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse offers many useful insights into the role of the media and the the relationship between the production, communication and reception of normative values, Kellner, for one is quick to point out that:

"Part of the problem is that for Adorno and many of his colleagues, the artefacts of the culture industry are simply beneath contempt....Such an arrogant, grandiose gesture of absolute disdain, however, precludes understanding what gratifications popular culture actually provides, and what needs it serves, in however distorted a fashion. This attitude also leads critical theorists to neglect, albeit with some exceptions, analysis of specific films, television programs or artefacts of popular culture, since they assume in advance that such artefacts are merely a debased form of culture and a vehicle of ideology which are not worthy of detailed study or critique.34

32 This characterization of the Institute members was not monolithic. Benjamin, for instance was one

member who called for a recognition of the importance and value of popular culture as a vehicle for emancipation. See: Benjamin, W., op. cit., 1969, pp. 217-252.

33 Kellner, D., op. cit. , 1989, p. 129. 34 ibid., p. 142. In this attitude to popular culture, the Critical Theorists like Horkheimer and Adorno

promulgate a theory of aesthetics which closely paralleled elitist views of design which privilege "high architecture" over "building", and the professional aesthetic of the day (whatever it might be - yesterday "Postmodern Historicism", today "Deconstructivism") over popular culture aesthetics. Despite Venturi's assertion that designers have much to learn from Las Vegas and Disneyland, his own designs and those of his colleagues and contemporaries still tend to reflect the "we know what's good for you better than you know yourself" aesthetic of the design professionals. Paradoxically, one can say that the culture industry as defined by Horkheimer and Adorno, is better reflected in the production of these professional, commodified aesthetics than in the expressions of popular culture which still tend to develop from grass

This is clearly a serious oversight, for even a cursory glance over the historical

record indicates that oppressed peoples and liberation movements have almost invariably coalesced around popular forms of culture - from Blues, through folk music to protest songs. Furthermore, recent events in Bosnia and elsewhere have indicated the amazing ability of popular cultural forms to survive intact after decades of the most apparently determining institutionalised cultural superimpositions. It is particularly sad that those members of the Institute who held this view of culture and aesthetics also missed the radical potential that their other theories and writings precipitated in the youth of the 1960's. They did not seem able to draw a distinction, for instance, between those aspects of popular culture which grew organically from the fertile ground of oppression itself, and those which were created and administered from above. It was, paradoxically, in the 1960s that the Frankfurt theorists would have their greatest impact - upon the youth culture which they had disparaged as culturally alienated and conditioned.

The Significance of Culture as a Critical Category

Taking "culture" in its broadest sense ie. as a "set of cultural practices" we are able, by linking it to conceptions of the State, as well as to related social stratifications, to see how particular cultural practices become emphasised and legitimated while others are marginalised. Education, Architecture, Design and Planning are all cultural practices and all have a profound impact upon everyday life - whether for emancipation or alienation.

One of the main functions of education, for instance operates through what Raymond Williams calls a process of "selective tradition", - that is through the selection and organisation of particular forms of knowledge, which are then imbued them with a Truth value and passed off as the only way of perceiving reality.35

Within this structuring, hierarchies of knowledge are established and legitimated, such that the hierarchies themselves become normative structuring devices for further cultural production. Certain texts become canonised as having a particularly close relationship to Truth, and therefore as being possessed of superior qualities over other texts etc. and in this way the whole corpus of formalised knowledge becomes a structured medium for the continued reproduction, celebration and legitimation of particular works and are reciprocally legitimated by them. In addition, focusing on culture as a medium of social stratification allows us to

root origins. It is only later that these popular expressions are appropriated by the culture industry and re-circulated as high culture forms. Typical examples, for instance, would be the appropriation of punk fashion and rap music.

35 Williams, R., Problems in Materialism and Culture, Verso, 1980, p. 39.

understand how power and culture intersect. We are able to recognise whose values have the greatest value within society, and to interrogate what precisely is the relationship between cultural production and material production. We recognise, for instance how some subject groups are pushed to the margins of normative cultural values while others are validated and supported. We are able to interrogate how the cultural productions themselves correspond to the collective values of these groups and to understand in more insightful ways the relationship between particular forms of production and domination.

Architecture, too, is a cultural production. Within any given social context, particular buildings will be canonised or validated as being exemplary. These will (within the cultural community of architects) be designated as "architecture" - setting them apart from the rest of building production by virtue of certain ascribed qualities that they are supposed to possess, and which are valued by the community of architects.

Where these two worlds intersect - the cultural world of "education" and the cultural world of "architecture" - is one place where these structuring values are formed and reproduced. It is therefore vitally important to make clear a rudimentary connection between culture-knowledge-education-architecture-values and the processes of cultural and social reproduction. What emerges from this connection is a sense of culture as a site of struggle between competing interest groups which are differentiated by intersecting vectors of race, gender, class, etc. and which correspond to the broad and generalised designations of high-culture and common-culture. These dynamic and shifting polarities operate at every level of cultural production. This characteristic of culture as a field of struggle emerged in the social dynamics of the 1960s, in what became known as the "youth" culture, after Horkheimer and Adorno had completed their own analysis.

The Emergence of a Counter-Culture of Resistance, Britain in the 1960s.

The 1960s in many ways forms an important cultural turning-point, exemplified by the emergence of a youth culture celebrating its own cultural forms and origins, and developing counter-hegemonic themes and instrumentalities which would find their way into the political theorising and activism of the New Left. In particular, this process began in England, most specifically in the development of an authentic Northern England cultural dominance in what had previously been the most suppressed and marginalised element of a classed British society. It was the developing identity of the "Liverpool sound" which gave substance to a whole coalescing culture of disaffected working class children in the slums of the North of

England, and which did indeed provide a disaffected and socially and economically oppressed group with a symbolic culture of resistance.

Although the British 1944 Education Act allowed the streaming of “intellectually gifted” children to Grammar School (effectively ensuring that only small numbers of working class children could slip through the net and that the proportions in the numbers of intellectual and manual laborers remained unchanged), nevertheless some educated working class children (including this author) still gained access to tertiary education. Their numbers were augmented by numerous returned servicemen demanding access to professional education. The result was an unprecedented cultural shift in British society, in which working-class culture began to be seen by the working class themselves as a valuable culture in its own right, challenging the received (and classed) meaning of Culture as an exclusive mark of social distinction and upper class status. This shift was evidenced in numerous literary, stage and film productions of that time, all of which celebrated, rather than apologized for, working class culture.36 The anti-heroes of these works provided powerful role models for the emergent youth, many of whom carried the cultural shift into new areas, particularly the music industry. As the American sociologist Stanley Aronowitz rightly notes:

“...the music of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Kinks cannot be understood simply as a further development of tendencies internal to Rock as it took shape during the late fifties and early sixties. Rather...these particular expressions of individual creativity by artists such as Jagger, Lennon or Davies are only comprehensible in relation to the expressions of social creativity unleashed in England at that time by “the deep, spontaneous revolt of working class youth against British bourgeois society which it articulated” and which, while economically rooted, took predominantly cultural, even sexual forms....English rock during this period directly assaulted the linguistic hegemony of standard “U” English with such striking success that one may even find impeccably educated, upper-class English youth affecting a Liverpool accent.”37 Culture was now firmly bracketed in the plural. Society was no longer made up

of the cultured and the uncultured. There were cultures, often opposed to each other - giving rise to what Roszak would call the youth counter-culture.38 It will be noted that

36 For instance: Braine, J., Room at the Top, Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1954; Delaney, S., A Taste of

Honey, Methuen, London, 1959.; Osborne, J., Look Back in Anger, Criterion Books, New York, 1957; Alan Sillitoe, A., The Loneliness of a Long-Distance Runner, Allen, London, 1961 and Sillitoe, A., Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, London, Paladin, 1990; Storey, D., This Sporting Life, Longmans, London,1961; Waterhouse, K., Billy Liar, Longmans, London, 1966. All of these novels were made into very successful films of the "British Kitchen Sink" genre, and their combined influence on British cultural life was extensive.

37 Aronowitz, A., False Promises, New York, McGraw Hill, 1973, p. 121. 38 Roszak, T., The Making of a Counter-Culture, Faber and Faber, London, 1970.

this oppositional model of culture is very different to that to which Adorno and Horkheimer tenaciously clung. The myriad pop groups who came to prominence at that time controlled their own material - a material which invariable grew out of a rich and fertile regional musical tradition. At the same time, the famous expansion of the clothing industry in Soho's Carnaby Street in "Swinging London" developed not from established rag-trade manufacturers, but from a burgeoning hippie cottage industry transported from the Portobello Road and Kings Road in Chelsea.39

These aspects of popular culture were missed by Adorno and Horkheimer simply because they had decided a priori that all popular culture was the expression of a regime of exploitation and domination. Not only did the Frankfurt theorists fail to recognise the radical potential of popular cultural forms, but their continued reliance upon a determining economic base also failed to adequately theorize the ultimate failure of the traditional marxist model. In spite of their best intentions, they remained tied to an essentially pessimistic view of the world. By abandoning class as an important social category, and simultaneously decrying the very cultural productions which point to an oppositional tendency of resistance arising from class stratifications, they created for themselves a theory infused with despair - and this was their unfortunate legacy to an upcoming generation of social theorists like Foucault, Lyotard and Derrida.

Despite all of these failings, the Frankfurt theorists did at least succeed in helping to release culture as a social category from its elevated social status. Their theory of a culture industry proved, in the end to be reflexively useful. It inadvertently raised the important issue of culture as a medium of social conflict, and this, extended, tended to authenticate the common culture which they found so wanting as, in fact, a culture of resistance. In this sense, their work foreshadowed and paved the way for much of postmodern cultural theorising. Since the work of Horkheimer and Adorno, many further studies of cultural practice have been initiated. Stuart Hall and others at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University have made valuable contributions in this field and are justly renowned.40

39 The distinction becomes more graphic, for instance, if we compare the Beatles with their industry-

manufactured trans-Atlantic "look-alikes", the Monkees. Whereas the former wrote, produced, arranged and experimented with their own music and lyrics in the face of trenchant music-industry opposition, even to the extent of establishing their own recording company, Apple Records. The Monkees, on the other hand, simply performed material provided for them and arranged by others in ways completely circumscribed by media-industry requirements. Here we have a classic example of the difference in ownership of the means of production as an expression of cultural autonomy and production.

40 Hall, S., The Popular Arts, Hutchinson, London, 1964; Hall, S., "Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Poststructuralist Debates", in: Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Vol 2, No. 2, 1985, pp. 91-114; Hall, S., Cultural Studies: An Introduction, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1992; Hall S. and Gieben, B. (eds.), Formations of Modernity, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992.

The Emancipatory Potential of "Culture" Feminist studies have also had a major impact upon our notions of what

actually constitutes the category culture. We now recognise, for instance, a unique and identifiable gay culture, with its own values, aesthetics and power base to shape the environment and to control development.41 Hence the term now has both conservative and emancipatory meanings, and it is generally in the latter sense that it will be use here ie. as a description of sovereign and autonomous social practices which express and bind collective meanings and perceptions of social life. Most importantly, the notion of culture as denoting a set of socially stratifying practices is here rejected, together with the meanings non-reflexively attributed to the term by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. The position taken here, in other words, is that of support for popular culture in the face of kultur. More accurately, I will compare the popular culture of everyday life with the professional culture, suggesting that the latter stands, consciously or unconsciously, in the shadow of the classed meaning of the term.

At the time that Marx's theories were being interpreted in the context of Soviet socialism, culture (as a superstructural element) was still seen as a classed (and therefore peripheral) social phenomenon, In the broader sense in which I use the term here, culture as the everyday practices of everyday life assumes an equal importance as a determining factor in political and social process. The problematic of the inherent paradox of Soviet orthodoxy has been well articulated by Henri Lefebvre, who noted:

“Countless revolutionaries have vainly believed, and still believe, that a spark would be enough to engulf the world. It is not impossible, of course, that a local conflict can turn into a general one - in fact the fear of this is general enough. But in order to change something, is it not first of all necessary to change everything, ie. to change the whole first? Of course it is. But how can everything be changed without a start being made somewhere, without gradually changing each thing, each “being”, each “man”?42 The Frankfurt theorists, in non-reflexively splitting culture into authentic

culture and commodified or false culture missed the essential liberating elements and possibilities latent in popular culture. Popular culture, in its emancipatory potential, provided that resistance to the processes of commodification and social reproduction of which the Frankfurt critical theorists themselves were most critical.

41 Castells, M., "The Gay Community of San Francisco", in: The City and the Grassroots, University of

California Press, Berkeley, 1983, pp. 138-172. 42 Lefebvre, H., The Survival of Capitalism, Allison and Busby, London, 1976, pp. 13.