Books: The Politics of Culture: The Case for Universalism

When The Politics of Culture was published last December, the cover featured a photograph of a mother and child in Tate Modern. The image was taken in 2007 at a press view and was used for the book without the permission of the mother (Kids in Museums director Dea Birkett).

The publisher pulped all remaining copies. The replacement edition has a rather austere image of a very large, empty space – the ramp of the Turbine Hall – devoid of recognisable people.

This is a shame, because it is the complexity of human interaction within the power structures of the cultural sphere that is the subject of this book.

Arts and multiculturalism

The book’s author, Munira Mirza (culture adviser to the mayor of London), tackles an important topic: the role of the arts in society at a time when multiculturalism is under attack as a well-intentioned but misguided policy that has alienated communities and undermined social cohesion.

Mirza has an agenda to challenge notions of cultural value based on community identity and the subjectivity of the individual. This is, she argues, a dead end that reinforces social division, an “anything goes” relativist perversion of the value of culture.

Instead, she would have us return us to a unifying Enlightenment ideal of culture that transcends difference and celebrates a higher notion of aesthetic, accessible (and improving) to all.

At the centre of the book are two case studies: the Rich Mix arts centre in east London and cultural policy in Oldham in Lancashire, where Mirza grew up. What they have in common is the idea that culture can drive economic regeneration and address social exclusion.

Mirza gives the thumbs-down to Rich Mix, whose objectives to connect with the everyday issues of locally diverse communities set up a logical contradiction: by celebrating difference, social division is reinforced.

She is kinder to Oldham, where the cultural interface was contrived to create neutral territory where diverse cultures can meet.

But even in this “third space” a tension emerges between communities that meet and discover common ground, and policy-maker’s intention to affirm cultural difference.

Framing the case studies is an analysis of a (rather patchy) history of cultural thinking. This is followed by an exploration of the contradictions of community-based cultural policy and practice.

The book ends with a resolution in the form of advocacy for a universalist approach to cultural practice that transcends local and individual identity.

Where Mirza is at her best is in her unsparing dissection of the ambiguities, contradictions and occasional hypocrisy of identity politics and cultural instrumentalism – much of it associated with New Labour and its addiction to meaningless performance measures.

For all her espousal of a higher sense of cultural objectivity, Mirza is weak on some of her history and cultural context. Her claim that humanity’s ability to think rationally about the world, rather than be shaped by circumstance, began in the 18th century, is debatable.

I am also puzzled by Mirza’s treatment of art as synonymous with culture and creativity. There is a reading of the forces that shape contemporary culture and society that would invest as much potency in technology and science as in art.

If we are to be encouraged to return to the founding tenets of the Enlightenment, the pernicious divisions between the arts and sciences, which emerged in the 19th century, should be repudiated as they also look increasingly outdated in the 21st.

Unclear conclusions

I also take issue with Mirza’s diagnosis and cure. Some of the shortcomings she attributes to sloppy thinking may be down to poor practice. As Bernadette Lynch points out in Whose Cake Is It Anyway?, her study for the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, community engagement methods are often deeply flawed.

Mirza fails to show how an externally ordained, universalist cultural policy, based on “objective criteria of judgment” would palliate the ills she describes in east London and Oldham. She is mistaken when asserting that a community is only interested in its own cultural identity.

I recall an instance when community members were invited to select and be filmed talking about an object from a museum’s collections. A South Asian woman chose an African carving, describing it as a female archetype, which seemed to speak to her across time and place.

A more democratic, non-prescriptive and personal kind of universalism can emerge when an individual is given the space and authority to explore their responses to the creativity of “the other”.

Tristram Besterman is a freelance adviser and writer on museums and culture