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Thursday March 28, 2024

The lost debate of art and culture

By Amir Hussain
October 08, 2016

Culture is one of the most contested concepts of sociological inquiry into the collective being of social, political and economic life. With all its contestation, culture is a collective experience that evolves, develops and signifies a sense of oneness among a number of competing identities and narratives that are, in turn, shaped by varying factors of historical evolution. These varying factors of economy, politics and arts form, in their complex combination, identities in historical times; these then give birth to the culture of a certain people.

However, this historical journey is not a smooth and linear progression with proportionate interconnectedness of politics, economy and arts. Rather, it is formed by a number of inner strains, dialectical processes and interaction of human agency and prevailing structures of collective life.

The so-called primitive cultures were shaped by the collective need for food, shelter and security which helped organise people into a symbiotic relationship for co-existence. These primitive cultures were not primarily determined by race, language, caste, creed and colour as we understand them today as the key determinants of culture. The art of primitive human beings was less allegorical than its progeny, perhaps because of its expression of self without the fear of being controlled or ruled and also as a result of direct interaction with nature for survival.

The primitive cultures and tribal formations were pragmatic unifiers for survival against external threats where order was maintained by the collective ownership of food, shelter and all other proceeds of collective labour. The feudal societies of the medieval era with the private ownership of collective assets like land transformed the way cultures were evolved in the primitive societies.

In the feudal societies, guild-based cultures were evolved; these were shaped by trade, occupation and relationship to the means of production like the culture of land tillers, tenants, nobles, clergy and monarchy etc. In the aftermath of the industrial revolution, culture became a sophisticated domain of asserting supremacy through geographical and physical acquisition of the so-called uncivilised and low-cultured people.

From the late 18th century towards the second half of the 2oth century culture was used as an instrument and pretext of colonisation to civilise people. The genesis of Western art and cultural discourses in the colonial period provided the intellectual legitimacy to colonial rule which is most succinctly propounded upon by Edward W Said in his book, ‘Orientalism’. One of the most powerful critiques of THE scholarship of colonial era, the book makes an invaluable contribution, inter alia, to the postcolonial critical theory of art and culture.

Postcolonial political theory strives to provide a counter-narrative for politics and economy which get intertwined with the discourse of art and culture. And it is not only about servility to the power of colonial art and culture; it is true even beyond colonial experience that all forms of human creativity have been used by rulers to tame the ruled. Religion, art and culture have been the instruments of control and a means to dilute the possibility of direct confrontation between the ruler and the ruled.

Thus culture and art have always been political in human history but the creation of art and culture itself goes beyond its instrumental use. It would be reductive and kind of simplistic to equate culture and art with politics; and paradoxically this would endanger the very theory of human liberation. Transformation of human consciousness is an intricate interplay of the politics of the objective reality of existence and the creative faculty of art and culture.

Postmodern art tends to disengage human creativity and production of art and culture as two separate domains of social life, in Chomsky’s words a meaningless and disparagingly superficial worldview. The most heinous crime committed by modernity was the classification and institutionalisation of art and culture. Postmodernity has deprived it of the authority and authenticity of expression and the possibility of liberating the consciousness of the oppressed. With the globalisation of politics and economy, our culture and art seem to be losing their classical role of pragmatic unifier for peaceful coexistence and survival.

With the free flow of capital and information, a global culture is being manufactured; this culture strives to promote consumerism without engaging those who produce capital. This globalising culture and art alienate people more than cementing them together because the very processes of creation are far removed from those workers of sweat shops and factories who make globalisation possible.

The authenticity and ingenuity of globalising art and culture is restricted by multiple validity claims of symbolism, imagery and even the language that is being shaped as a reaction to the homogenising trends of corporate culture. Simply put, in an era of globalisation we are not talking to each other meaningfully across socio-political contexts.

We live in a world of knowledge deficit. Our modern commercial means of communication and branded identities – the insignias of corporate magnanimity – vandalise art and culture to irreparable proportions. The modern identifiers of culture – language, race, religion, geography and so on – get crystallised as the natural state of social life. And the processes that produce these identifiers lose their relevance. Hence, the possibility of the production of meaningful art is also fading away.

Contemporary German sociologist and philosopher Jurgen Habermas advocates communicative action and a meaningful universal language where people understand the essence of what they speak to each other above their parochial validity claims. In art and culture communicative action is possible only when the co-creation of art and culture is not restrained by ‘inflexible direction forced through by economic and administrative rationalisation’.

Beyond the theory of co-creation there is another dimension to understand the functionality of art and culture, which suggests that the perennial survival instinct preceded the formation of art, artefact, music and poetry etc.  According to this view, survival instinct gave birth to various forms of art as a means of expression for individualistic and collective self-preservation. The proponents of this point of view further assert that art, in a way, may loosely be associated with the allegorical expression of human feeling to protect and promote the instinct of survival and to diffuse the bravery of the primitive man of direct confrontation.

Civilisation and civility in a way provided the façade for artistic expression to castrate the brave and self-conscious primitive man and to sublimate the natural instinct to a less real, timid and peevish mode of confrontation.

Note: This has been written with the hope that my art-loving friends, artists, art producers and managers of the creative industry will not take me to task for braving into a subject that is theirs and that they will, instead, rather help build on this lost debate.

The writer is a freelance columnist based in Islamabad.

Email:  ahnihal@yahoo.com