Any potential European Cultural Movement must avoid the increasing phenomenon of contempt of culture.

Leonardo Kovačević is a philosopher based at the Multimedia Institute, Zagreb

To speak on the meaning of European culture and on the directions of its progress without any reservations concerning the word ‘culture’ is to do nothing more that to summon up the vagaries of contemporary cultural politics in Europe. This intentional in-distinction of two different domains often prompts critiques from both sides, political theory (criticising culture) and cultural theory (criticising politics). I would like to tackle the question of the phenomenon in relation to the first critique, the critique of culture from a political point of a view. Although my intention is not to provide any kind of an apotheosis of culture, I argue that culture has become the object of vehement critique transformed lately into contempt. In that what follows, I shall try to show what is behind this contempt and what notion of culture is imposed on us by this contempt.

Is culture guilty for everything?

The manifestation of this contempt can be seen in the increasing tendency of the denunciation of culture as a reign of a petty-citizen ideology or as a sphere where public symbolic exchange intertwines its forces with capital. But the real target of the denunciations of this kind is not culture itself, but rather a certain kind of ideology that is taken to be a major cause of all social problems. The very indistinctivness of its notion makes culture apt to become the medium or even universal support of this cause. In this process, culture has obviously become guilty for all possible social diseases. But it has also become a solution deus ex machina when the search for hidden causes of these diseases has failed. Lately we are witnessing a rising contempt of culture, especially in the works of Alain Badiou, who in his latest book What is Sarkozy the name of? marks the notion of culture as completely opposed to art and thus as the realm of mediocre consumerism in a market of various symbolical values.

Since we also get used to hearing similar tones and sentences from Slavoj Žižek, I would like to begin my short analysis with one of his typical anecdotes concerning the critique of a culture. In a few articles by him we can read his inversion of the famous sentence attributed to Goebbels: "When I hear the word 'culture', I reach for my gun". This phrase was also used by Godard in his movie "Contempt" and it is put in the mouth of the producer who replies to Fritz Lang: "When I hear for the word 'culture', I reach for my cheque-book". According to Žižek, the dogmatic opinion of today’s leftist discourse would be the inversion of Goebbels’ phrase: "When I hear the word 'gun', I reach for my culture". Žižek of course makes allusion to the idea of a culture as means of pacifying and reconciling passions and aggressive drives. What lies behind this cynical and dismissive relation toward culture is evidently an inversion of the Freudian idea of civilization and its discontents which presupposes that culture means nothing but a kind of general state of repressed desires finally sublimed in a cultural commodity. But Žižek’s critique of culture in a form of inversion of Freud is still limited by the notion of culture that is conceived merely in terms of libido: as a kind of libidinal economy of value exchange. The first two slogans, pronounced by Goebbels and by the fictitious character of the producer in Godard’s movie, a producer who is interested in making just another commodity of an entertainment industry, make two basic reproaches to culture that help our contemporary intellectuals (like Žižek) to finally dismiss culture. The first reproach is proclaimed in the name of politics: more exactly in the name of some purity of politics, of a desire to establish a firm and homogenous social order. In that case, culture represents an obstacle to that kind of politics because it is always impure, it is a mixture of various intertwined values for which it is difficult to find out the real origin. It is a mixture of all too different knowledges and artistic experiences.

The second reproach is mostly proclaimed by those people whose principal concern is a struggle against the free circulation of Capital, that is to say against the economical superdetermination of social life. From the historical viewpoint, it was marxism and especially the marxist critique of fetishism that was involved in this struggle. In the line of this tradition of critique, it was Adorno who constructed the most powerful critique of culture. He divided culture in two, into the low culture of the masses, a consumerism that is ruled just by the law of a market, and into the high culture of art. Supporters of the critique of fetishism caused this splitting of the idea of culture into, on the one hand, all that is pathological, fetishistic, and the on other all that is sublime, all that is the expression of the very heights of the human spirit. The first idea of culture is supposed to be inseparable from market dynamics and the other not so much. Let everybody conclude for himself if it is possible today to separate any culture and art from the market. So the argument of a complete determination of a culture by a market seems to be superfluous.

Culture as manifestation of anarchical equality

But the supporters of both kinds of cultural criticism are more and more influential. I argue that this criticism develops itself towards the contempt of culture. I suppose there are two main reasons for this. The first is less dangerous: sometimes we are just sick of culture, we are saturated with it and we feel weak vis-a-vis all the social problems, and all we have as a tool to deal with them is culture. In that case, we just reverse the problem and culture becomes guilty for everything.

The second reason is far more dangerous: it concerns the imposing of one's intellectual mastery or superiority by the denunciation of culture as a realm of common places or as not-real-thinking but mere chatter. This version of the contempt of culture always wants to impose some form of thinking – that is to say, some hierarchy. The bad news for these ‘intellectual authorities’ is that culture as symbolical exchange does not know any privileged places for thinking nor the right way to do it. The idea of culture always implies some anarchical equality, a battleground of free argumentation, without any given form. So it is not at all surprising that culture should have become equally a target for pretenders to intellectual mastery and for the State and its mechanisms of a power seeking to suppress this excess of egalitarian activities that permeates more and more all social domains.

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