While Australia seems determined to surrender the remains of its political sovereignty, meekly negotiating a choice between full commitment to AUKUS or submission to Trump on tariffs, our related struggle to sustain some degree of cultural autonomy grows ever more difficult. The globalisation of cultural products—the increasingly manifold ways to technologically consume books, films, music and so on—has been ably assisted by the repeated failure of successive governments to enforce meaningful quotas for home-grown culture. Meanwhile, AI threatens to supplant human culture with ceaseless algorithmic production. The vexed question of what culture is, its connection to social life and politics—a question that had receded somewhat in the naïve celebrations of global and postmodern consumption—now returns with a certain urgency as AI threatens an ‘extinction event’ for culture. This is not simply because of AI’s power to replicate and reproduce, but because the existing devaluation of culture makes it ripe for automated nihilism.
There is no doubt that some academics, artists and performers have tried to counter this situation. But this must be set against the larger backdrop through which culture has been reframed by many others working within the same fields. One might start by noting how many philosophers, cultural studies academics and creatives welcomed what they regarded as the postmodern condition: the collapse of any distinction between high and popular culture. Whatever one thinks of this claim, it was only possible due to the rise of global markets and information technologies that resituated cultural consumption, creating privatised experiences (mobile screens, endless choice) that collapsed pretty much everything into a ubiquitous cultural flow. The hybridity of postmodern culture—the recycling of texts, tropes, images and so on—might have granted a temporary escape from tradition and generic norms, but it weakened the conditions that allowed such cultures to form in the first place, with a flood of new cultural product that cannibalised its sources to service the market eroding the social relations that originally produced them.
One consequence of the global circulation of cultural commodities was a collapse of cultural autonomy. Detached from their original contexts, now available to anyone with a tv, phone or computer, any claim to the specific importance of this or that cultural object carried less weight. This was celebrated at the time as part of a new democratic trajectory. Culture now belonged to everyone—but in another sense, it belonged to no one at all, severed from place, physical audience and history.
These changes enabled a different kind of cultural politics to emerge. The contemporary practices of cancellation and of critiquing cultural appropriation reversed long-held progressive positions on artistic freedom and aesthetic autonomy. While motivated by the desire to address power and exclusion in areas such as race and gender, the rapidity with which much of Western culture came to be seen as unambiguously problematic could only occur once the importance of culture, established within older settings, had faded. It’s easier to dismiss for example, ‘high’ culture as elitist, Eurocentric, enabled though colonialism and so on if you see it as merely one set of choices within a global smorgasbord.
In this sense, progressive critiques of culture are naïve in that they fail to see this changed setting in which culture unfolds. It also makes it harder to defend something like a national culture. Right now there are numerous examples of Australian culture collapsing into the global marketplace. The news that Triple J’s Hottest 100 contained the lowest number of Australian artists since it began merely confirmed a consistent trend. A combination of the effect of platforms such as Spotify with algorithms that marginalise local artists, the collapse of music festivals, the shrinking number of affordable places to live and perform, has diminished a once vibrant music sector. Elsewhere, the sale of Text Publishing to Penguin Randon House inevitably reduces the chances that anyone will publish Australian authors whose work falls outside the mainstream, rendering any sense of Australian culture one-dimensional and consumerist. If that were not enough, plans by new platforms such as Spines and Microsoft’s 8080 Books to flood the book market by publishing tens of thousands of books a year—made possible by the use of AI to edit, proofread, translate and so on—could be catastrophic. What would it even mean to read an Australian book within this deluge of symbolic content? What cultural or social context would it connect to?
For some this is of little importance. Some progressive writers now regard national culture as being so entirely imbued with settler-colonial logics of domination as to not be worth bothering with (Julianne Schultz’s recent book, reviewed by Dan Tout in this publication, serves as a typical case). This suggests a transition away from something like Adorno’s ‘know one’s tradition in order to hate it properly’ to a complete rejection of, or phobic relation to, tradition itself. It is not, however, that the new politics of culture is better at seeing though ideologies of domination, but that we regard culture differently; these sorts of absolute judgements become possible because the stakes are lower.
Such low stakes also drive the ‘logic’ that underpins many of our public institutions. Australian universities, made over in the instrumental mode, no longer assume the intrinsic importance of the arts, music and literature, but regard them as vehicles for the acquisition of marketable skills for beyond the academy. What once constituted ‘culture’ has disappeared. This is not a progressive move, but a nihilistic one: cultural studies scholars who once championed the study of hip hop over Mahler now find that the university has no need for either. Once you reject any idea of cultural autonomy as hopelessly corrupted, it becomes difficult to mount a substantial defence of culture outside of the narrow parameters of ‘contribution to the economy’, ‘community wellbeing’ or ‘social cohesion’, which may well explain why the state has little interest in protecting local culture.
The other side of a left-progressive critique of culture, unwittingly aligned with the instrumental thinking that flattens it, is an equally naïve aestheticism in which culture is enjoyed outside of any social context, which often involves repackaging ‘high’ culture in consumer-friendly mode. For example, ABC Classic FM now mimics commercial offerings though a fetishisation of audience feedback, hyperbolic hosts and the general avoidance of difficult music, so that classical music is repurposed towards consumer pleasure, involving the inclusion of faux-classical film and videogame soundtracks, or where classical music itself is geared towards mindfulness, wellbeing and the like, implying that such music requires some overt supplement to have any contemporary value.
Once you reach this point, it’s a small step to a broad censorship of art and artists. Consider last year’s case of Jason Gillham, the young pianist whose performances were cancelled by the MSO after he spoke about the targeted killing of journalists in Gaza. In dismissing the pianist, MSO management remarked that ‘Mr Gillham’s remarks went beyond the remit of his contract’. The disturbing insinuation that artists are contractually bound to certain forms of expression is made possible by a culture that devalues artistic and aesthetic autonomy. Once you move away from taking an art form seriously, it’s a small step to cancelling artists who offer something beyond the ‘comfortable’ experience. This is evident in the latest debacle—the acceptance, then rejection, of Khaled Sabsabi’s work for the Australian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The utterly reductionist take by politicians and those capitulating members of Creative Australia on Sabsabi’s art—that the mere depiction of a terrorist figure is itself problematic—highlights not only an aesthetic failure but a moral one as well.
How we see culture now is part of a larger change that is profoundly social, in which cultures once experienced as part of place, or nation, or situated aesthetics, are disembodied via globalising consumer technologies. The radical critique of culture from an earlier era was often simply mapped onto this very different situation. A cultural politics that judges this or that writer or artist through the filter of gender or race can only progress so far without considering this larger transformation. Otherwise, it remains trapped within the very structures that undermine the meaning of art and culture, making it harder to convince others of its importance, to convince them fund it, to advocate for artistic autonomy (aesthetic and political) and the reform of cultural institutions that have been captured by the framework of the commodity. To not see this is to pave the way for an AI takeover in which algorithms determine acceptable content and further privatise a sense of shared experience—not so much a revolution as an extension of what is already happening.
Comments
Great analysis. Where do you think we can go from here?