[Bilimsel Haber] book review: Culture's Vanities: The Paradox of Cultural Diversity

[gpultar@cstgroup.org]

David Steigerwald. Culture's Vanities: The Paradox of Cultural Diversity in a
Globalized World. American Intellectual Culture Series. Lanham: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2004. xvi + 276 pp. Index. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-7425-1196-0;
$27.95 (paper), ISBN 0-7425-1197-9.

Reviewed by: Daniel Weimer, Department of History, Northwest Vista College.
Published by: H-Diplo (August, 2005) Twentieth-Century Ruse

"Culture," as a term and ill-defined concept, pervades our daily lives according
to intellectual and cultural historian David Steigerwald in his wryly-written
new book, the first in a projected trilogy. We encounter references to culture
in such venues as public policy, academia, and popular entertainment, but for
the author this profusion of culture is quite troubling, if not downright
confusing. At the heart of Steigerwald's book is a paradox--one in which the use
of culture as a concept to "explain nearly everything" (p. xi) in contemporary
America is contradicted by a dire deficit of actual, lived culture in the
developed world, particularly the United States. That is, first industrial and
then postindustrial (globalized) capitalism has nullified the material basis of
what Steigerwald considers true culture and thus we live in an "Age of
Anti-Culture" that belies any claims to a multicultural or diverse America.
Capitalism, through constricting bureaucracy and rampant commercialization, has
so leveled and homogenized most Americans in their work and free time that any
assertions to cultural differences--whether based in ethnicity or race--are in
fact mere abstractions or more precisely coping mechanisms to deal with the
alienation inherent in late capitalism. Culture, let alone multiculturalism, is
impossible to create and sustain under consumer capitalism and those
intellectuals and policymakers who maintain that economic and political
inclusion and difference can survive side by side are naively ignoring the
material realities which undergird contemporary America. In order to arrive at
such a conclusion, the author, in a series of seven essays, examines the
twentieth-century career of culture as an aesthetic and anthropological concept
and then the misuse of culture during the last quarter century as it relates to
work, ethnic identity, race, and Leftist thought. The Marx- and Weber-inflected
analysis rests upon a wide range of published sources, ranging from scholarly
monographs and articles, to legal documents, business journals, and popular
periodicals.

Steigerwald explains in the first three chapters that it all started to go wrong
when material abundance began to unmoor humanity from its struggle with nature.
The human impulse to distinguish itself from nature acts as the basis of
culture--the "creation of unnecessary goods" which center "us in traditions and
community settings" and "precede our birth and remain after death" (pp. 20-21).
Industrial capitalism not only made struggle with nature irrelevant but it also
shifted our energies away from production to an emphasis on the consumption of
goods. Hence, we created and still inhabit "an age of anti-culture, because it
alienates human beings from nature, disparages fine work, and dissolves away
organic connections to the past and future, not least by running on a scheme
that simultaneously replaces everything and destroys everything" (p. 23).

This unfortunate but familiar story then segues into a discussion of the
aesthetic and anthropological ideas about culture. Culture's lot continued to
decline in the twentieth century because both the aesthetic and anthropological
conceptions suffered from inherent flaws--subjectivity and abstraction
respectively. Aesthetically, by the early twentieth century strict standards of
craft and beauty had given way to taste in assessing cultural objects (such as
art, literature, music) which meant that consumption or reception rather than
production became the site of valuation. From here, taste degenerated into mere
consumer choice, which had a veneer of human agency about it, but in fact played
into the hands of marketers. In anthropology, following the lead of Franz Boas,
culture came to signify "a way of life." But unlike Boas, who adhered to a
stringent definition of culture that necessitated linking material culture,
social relations, art, and religion as a structural, coherent whole, later
definitions of culture became more abstract to the point that anyone could "lay
claim to solidarities that hardly exist in practice" (p. 51).

>From here, Steigerwald explores the uses of "culture" and "diversity" in
corporate America. The push for diversity in the corporate world during the
1980s and 1990s masked how little control employees had over their labor and
workplace diversity acted as a booby prize to soothe the alienation that
resulted from working in corporate bureaucracies. Again, Steigerwald emphasizes
that diversity within rigid bureaucracies is pure delusion, as is the notion
that bureaucracies can best preserve diversity. All the while, ever-growing
corporate conglomerates geared products to increasingly narrow
"cultures"--whether race, ethnic, age, region, or "lifestyle" based--and
cultural production (such as popular books and music) become mass commodities
unconnected to any form of "enduring life" (p. 102).

Next, the use of culture to discuss ethnic identity and race during the past two
decades comes under similar scrutiny. For Steigerwald, race and ethnic identity
movements set themselves against the notion of assimilation, which was deemed a
tool of WASP domination. For instance, ethnic identity movements, particularly
in the 1990s, held out the hope that minority inclusion in mainstream economic
and political institutions would result in multiculturalism and a "mosaic"
society. Yet, this claim ignored two critical points. First, economic inclusion
subjects everyone to deracination and social homogenization--alienation is not
specific to white males, they've just experienced it longer. Thus,
multiculturalists' arguments that assert choosing an identity could stave off
alienation cannot account for the author's second point, which is that
intermediary institutions and structures, such as family, kin organization,
language, and religious rituals and beliefs, that serve as buffers between
authentic cultures and consumer capitalism have broken down with inclusion, not
to mention being eroded by time and space. Moreover, identity movements falsely
claimed that "differences could be 'imagined' and freely chosen regardless of
material circumstances" and that "it was possible to cloak oneself in ancestral
identities without either opting out of the bureaucratic-technological order of
things or, for that matter, embracing the rigid orthodoxies and self-denying
obligations that every ancestral culture contained" (pp. 145-146). This same
criticism holds true for race thinking. African Americans have had their
intermediary world eroded due to the civil rights movement (though Steigerwald
notes that it was an "incomplete revolution") and by the 1980s blacks were "both
structurally assimilated and deracinated, just like white ethnics" (p. 181).
Likewise, prominent African-American intellectuals, such as Henry Louis Gates
Jr. and Cornell West, who averred an authentic black culture as a source of
power have ignored this turn of events.

The author's final substantive chapter centers on Leftist thought since the
1960s, which maintained that culture, not economics, acted as the main site of
social conflict and potential liberation. During the 1960s, when Black
Nationalism rejected integration and sought refuge in African identity, Leftist
thinkers faced a crisis. If America's material abundance meant that economic
struggle among the working class was unlikely then another venue of conflict was
required. Following the thought of Herbert Marcuse and Antonio Gramsci, American
Leftists believed that culture (long ignored by dogmatic Marxists) mattered most
in achieving human liberation. Steigerwald faults the Left for distorting
Gramsci's concept of hegemony to explain how power works--namely that while
Gramsci insisted that culture and economics were crucial areas of struggle,
American intellectuals on the Left believed that "cultural resistance" alone
would subvert capitalism. Thus, "hegemony," like culture, became an inflated and
imprecise concept.[1] In the end, "progressives grew increasingly indifferent to
the hard work of political and economic change, to coalition-building and
patient organizing" as well as being "convinced that liberation required a
culture war, as opposed to either a class war, or for that matter, political
conflict" (p. 196). Steigerwald demonstrates the shortcomings of this cultural,
rather than economic, determinism in relation to public policy by discussing the
War on Poverty, which was conceptually influenced by Oscar Lewis's and Michael
Harrington's "culture of poverty" studies. The problem for the author is that
poverty became seen as primarily a mental rather than economic condition which
required community action and "psychological adjustment" instead of wealth
redistribution. Woefully underfunded and conceptually flawed, the War on Poverty
was doomed to failure.

So given culture's many misappropriations in contemporary thought, is there any
way to salvage it from shallow thinking and capitalism? Steigerwald answers
"yes" in his conclusion, but only if we revive culture's earlier aesthetic and
anthropological meanings and acknowledge the materiality of culture--that
culture must be grounded in the stuff of everyday life, not just act as an
ideal. Specifically, he recommends economic protectionism to raise wages and
insulate local production as well as insisting on fair treatment of
international laborers--which could most likely be achieved through American
multinationals. This action coupled with anticonsumerist values would revive the
intermediary institutions necessary to culture. Anti-consumerism, in fact, is
the most radical of acts to resist consumer capitalism. Equally as important, he
calls for "cultural cosmopolitanism" as an antidote to the provincialism
encouraged by consumerism and identity politics. When it comes to identity, "one
can only be regressive or cosmopolitan" (p. 245). Aesthetically, a revival of
taste--"the cultivation of a refined sense of work well done"--would present a
much-needed check on consuming mass-produced goods (p. 247). Here the reader can
see the relevance of the local foods and antiglobalization movements to
Steigerwald's argument. Similarly, those familiar with the "deep ecology"
movement will find common cause with the author's wish for a sense of place in
capitalism's rootless world.

But the likelihood of this scenario coming about is questionable to say the
least, particularly given the overwhelming force that Steigerwald ascribes to
capitalism's anticultural effects. However, Culture's Vanities is more important
for its analysis than its closing recommendations. Anyone who uses culture as a
category of analysis in their research or those who are interested in
contemporary intellectual history or the multicultural movement would benefit
from Steigerwald's inquiry. As would academics, who have seen the corporate
model grafted onto higher education--the section in chapter 3 on "corporate
culture" is a useful illustration of the "inflation of culture," not to mention
entertaining. One hopes the author will take on another overblown concept in
corporate institutions--"leadership"--in future works. Most beneficial is his
critique of consumption as agency, power, and the basis for culture. Consumer
choice is indeed a thin form of freedom and the author rightly points this out.
Perhaps this is the book's greatest strength: its illustration of how weak
definitions of culture have furthered corporate control and the ability of
capitalism to absorb and appropriate challenges to the status quo. Given this,
Culture's Vanities extends arguments presented in the author's 1995 work, The
Sixties and the End of Modern America, and would read well alongside Thomas
Frank's One Market Under God and The Conquest of Cool.[2] Finally, to the
author's credit, he does not dismiss the value of cultural history. His main
concern is with culture's misuse as the foundation of public policy to the
detriment of economic matters, which makes his discussion of affirmative action
legislation persuasive.

In light of these strengths, however, the book does contain some shortcomings.
First, in the concluding chapter Steigerwald briefly mentions that racial and
ethnic ties could form the basis of cultural renewal since they provide an
avenue to a pre-bureaucratized existence. One wished the author had developed
this strain of thought throughout the text. Second, given the book's subtitle
the work does not provide much substantive discussion of globalization or to
related issues like neoliberalism. Third, the sections dealing with
anthropological and post-1960s Leftist thought lack discussions of prominent
thinkers on culture--Clifford Geertz, Frederic Jameson, and Anthony Giddens, to
name a few. The same holds true for aesthetic matters. There is no exploration
of recent art criticism for instance, and the book is weighted more towards the
recent misappropriation of culture's anthropological rather than aesthetic
meanings. Finally, after reading Culture's Vanities one gets the sense that no
culture, according to the author's definition, remains in contemporary America.
But these criticisms do not outweigh the main value of the book--its persistent
critique of consumer capitalism and the necessity of economic fairness in
advancing social justice. In the final analysis, for Steigerwald, culture
promised much but delivered little. Class, more than race and ethnicity, may be
the best way to understand current differences and inequality.


Notes

[1]. It is necessary to point out that for all of the value of Steigerwald's
analysis of hegemony literature, his judgement of Florencia Mallon's use and
definition of hegemony as a "tautology" (p.208) in Peasant and Nation: The
Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995) is overdrawn. The care that Mallon takes to specify hegemony as
both a process and an outcome/goal is not unreasonable, particularly since she
is examining the process of state formation and that organic peasant cultures
played an active role in nation building and providing alternative visions of
the "nation." If Gramsci's hegemony concept only or best applies to nations with
peasant and working classes, then postcolonial Peru and Mexico certainly
qualify.

[2]. David Steigerwald, The Sixties and the End of Modern America (New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1995); Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism,
Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy (New York: Anchor Books,
2000); The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of
Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).


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