Advancing Cultural Studies International Workshop
Södergarn, Lidingö by Stockholm, 4-5 February 1999
Peter Dahlgren
Professor
Department of Media and Communication Studies
Lund University, Sweden
With its emphasis on the relationship between culture, meaning and power, Cultural Studies has addressed the field of the political in a variety of ways. Seeking to elucidate the political dimensions of texts, social relationships, spatial arrangements, and so on has been a driving force Cultural Studies' analysis of meaning. Such themes as the politics of difference have also figured prominently. Some strands of political philosophy ñ e.g., 'radical democracy', associated with Chantal Mouffe (1992) and others, together with theories of identity and subjectivity, often with a feminist angle, have been probing the linkages between citizenship, identity (sometimes called political subjectivity in this context) and democracy (cf. Voet, 1998; Dean, 1997; Preston, 1997; Clarke, 1996.). The media are of course central to politics and democracy, and we are seeing now the addition of this element to the broader concerns with citizens and democracy, incorporating perspectives from Habermas on the public sphere as well as from theories of civil society (e.g., Dahlgren, 1995). And certainly this trajectory is being amplified by studies about the Internet and its relationshp to democracy (cf. Fisher et al, 1996; Holmes, 1997; Loader, 1997; Loader 1998; Tsagarousianou et al, 1998).
My interest is to develop a program of studies about citizens, media use and democracy, from a Cultural Studies-inspired perspective, incorporating not only themes such as everyday practices and identity, but also elements from the Habermasian perspective on communicative action and deliberative democracy (cf. Benhabib, 1996). One can see this both as making use of Cultural Studies to enhance media research and reinjecting themes about media and democracy back into Cultural Studies (Dahlgren, 1997a). My focus will be on citizenship as agency, practices and identity, on people in their everyday lives and in particular contexts. Mass media and interactive media figure prominently here: how they are strategically selected and used tells us a lot about people's sense of themselves as citizens. Yet I do not envision detailed reception studies as these are normally understood, since my intent is to get a larger picture of each respondent's engagement in the social world. Following them in their everyday lives would of course not be feasible, so my methodological approach will be depth interviews. I have already, with the help of assistants, conducted 12 interviews with women who are in some way engaged in the civic/political field and who take a critical gender perspective. The goal here is to ascertain, via their life histories, how they were able to choose these paths, and what role the media have had in these choices.
Democracy has many dimensions: legal, institutional, traditional/historical, but also cultural and subjective. These latter dimensions cannot be reduced to simple reflections of other socio-historical circumstances. And what democracy actually is, or rather, what it means, what are its definitive features, is not self-evident, nor static. There are different traditions within political philosophy and we see different versions of democracy around the world. The criteria for a good democracy are not universal; they are even politically contested within every society. The concept is of course an historical-cultural construction, it is contested, it evolves, in both theory and practice. And in most everyday circumstances, including political activity, the word is largely used as a mantra. I am not interested so much in people's formalized definitions, but rather in illuminating what it might mean to various people from an agent/actor point of view, based on what people say and what they say about what they do, particularly in regard to their identities as citizens in Sweden today. I envision a number of studies based on depth interviews with different groups of people, representing different societal sectors and apparent different degrees of political engagement. I won't go further into research design in this text, but will instead chart some of the conceptual terrain.
We can schematically make a distinction between a formal democratic system, with its institutional structures, laws, parties, elections, media processes, etc., and a complex, multi-dimensional civic culture, anchored in everyday life and horizons, which both reflects and makes possible this system. (If civic culture should be used in the singular or plural form remains to be seen; and my conception here should of course not be confused with the behaviorist and psychological reductionist use of the term in political science studies from the 1960's). Both the system and the civic culture are mutually dependent; both evolve in relation to each other. The notion of civic culture points to those features of the socio-cultural world which constitute everyday pre-conditions for democracy. I am thinking here of those values, norms, practices and procedures that may promote or hinder democratic virtues (however understood), including forms of interaction among citizens (cf. Dahlgren, 1997b) and even 'civility' itself (cf. Hefner, 1998).
The civic culture, at this stage of analytic development, is both an empirical and normative referent, much like the Habermasian notion of the public sphere. (We can note that a public sphere, which builds on the media and on citizens interaction, must be enveloped by a civic culture if it is to function. A civic culture can be situated as part of the Habermasian life-world). A civic culture does not presuppose homogeneity among its citizens, but does suggest minimal shared commitments to democracy, a kind of civic loyalty to the democratic vision (Mouffe, 1993; Clarke 1996). This civic commonality can be expressed in different ways and manifested by social and cultural groups who are very different from each other. Indeed, if citizenship as an identity suggests a belonging and potential participation within some collectivity or collectivities, then mapping out the various 'we-nesses' and their relationships to each other, becomes a central feature of the project. Senses of community can be structured by, for example, nationality, geographic/spatial factors, ethnicity, social class, in varying constellations with each other. It may well be the case that some practices that people engage in may be perceived by them to embody democratic ideals,, but they may not necessarily discursively frame such practices in terms of civic culture or even citizenship. We mustn't be too wedded to a given vocabulary.
One of the hallmarks of late modern society is the pluralization of our 'selves'. Without getting tangled up in too much theorizing, we can simply note that in our daily lives we operate in a multitude of different 'worlds' or realities; we carry within us different sets of knowledge, assumptions, rules and roles for different circumstances. Some of these elements reside more at the core of our identity, others more in the periphery. Yet, all of us are to varying degrees composite people. The idea of composite identities also pertains to citizenship. We are used to thinking of citizenship in relation to the formal, systemic view of democracy, citizen being a legal category, with rights and obligations. Yet, if the political system is to function, citizenship must also embody a dimension of individual identity. It may well be that for many people, even citizenship has become a form of plural identity, with different inflections at work in different contexts.
Today, historical change is altering the character of Western democratic systems. At the same time, from another perspective, people are altering democracy by what they do, by what they envision (or not). If we treat the civic culture as part of the Habermasian life-world, yes, it is threatened by colonization via strategic action from the 'system'. However, it also embodies the potential for communicative action and intersubjectivity that can inform practices and generate new politically relevant meanings and identities (though I would caution against excessive optimism!).
The actual conditions of democratic systems in Western democracies vary between countries, but some general trends are apparent. The arena of official politics does not command the degree of support and participation it has in the past. Voter turn-outs are declining, even in countries such as Sweden, which has had considerable stability in its electoral patterns over the earlier post war decades. Party loyalty is declining, especially among the young. The formal political system of most Western nations appears stagnant, reactive rather than proactive, eclipsed by developments in the realms of large-scale capitalism and technological innovations. A corrosive climate of cynicism is emerging in many places. This cannot be understood as merely a response to the media, though this is no doubt part of the story. Rather, this atmosphere of 'anti-politics' must also be seen as the consequence of the inability of the political system itself to meet social expectations. Economic insecurity, unemployment, low wages, declining social services, growing class cleavages are all part of the picture. And in this picture we must include the growing societal domain of market forces and the corporate colonization of more and more sectors of social life. This tends, among other things, to promote consumer identities at the expensive of citizen identities, though we should be careful about always seeing them as simple, mutually exclusive polarities. While they are often in conflict, they also overlap and intertwine in some cases; there are newer 'gray' zones between them.
In Sweden today, we can say that the mainstream political arena contains a paradigmatic tension, implying two different notions of citizenship. On the one hand is the social democratic legacy, the corporatist tradition of the welfare state, which emphasizes people's citizenship in relation to the state, the party and other related organizational structures. On the other hand, is the newer version, which underscores the individual's relationship to the market. I won't go into a comparative analysis here, but can simply note that, for example, both versions encompass elements of agency that is entwined with a strong 'consumerist' dimension. We get no simple 'citizen' vs. consumer' dichotomy. The welfare state citizen is a prolific consumer of state-provided services (and in many cases, financial supplements). And for the newer market-based citizen, agency of course also involves a large measure of consumerism; neo-liberal ideology aims at recasting much of the role of citizen into terms of market consumerism. Beyond this basic tension, we see at the margins and beyond the mainstream, other versions of civic culture and citizenship identities starting to take form. Among womens' groups, immigrant associations, movement activists in a variety of areas such as ecology and animal rights, newer understandings about belonging and participating, about inclusion and exclusion, about engagement and non-participation, are emerging.
If the causes are complex, it is nonetheless clear that what we are witnessing is an erosion of civic engagement, a 'great retreat' (Boggs, 1998) from the arena of common concerns and politics, and a withdrawal into 'enclave consciousness', away from larger collective identities and community sensibilities. (This disengagement may not be uniform across the political spectrum, however: in the US, for example, the right wing is more active on the Internet than the left-liberal wing; Hill & Hughes, 1998). The extensive demoralization with formal politics is a theme addressed by many today (cf. Putnam, 1993). In the West we have a crisis of civic culture and citizenship (cf. Blumler & Gurevitch, 1995; Mosco, 1997), which can be linked to a more pervasive cultural malaise (e.g. Bellah, et. al, 1985). Many people in Western societies seem to have at best very rudimentary identities as citizens, as members and potential participants of political society. They to not feel themselves to be a part of a larger democratic project.
At the same, there is counter evidence that evokes a different train of thought. From her fieldwork, Nina Eliasoph (1997), for example, finds that in the microcosms of everyday life, people reveal that what may appear on the surface as apathy towards politics and contemporary issues disguises something else. In discursive situations she finds that they are actually working very hard to avoid the political, to refrain from contextualizing their life circumstances in terms of public issues. Thus, political disengagement may not necessarily be the 'easy way out', but rather something which, whatever the motivations, many times requires a concerted effort. Seemingly, the potential for political engagement stubbornly remains.
It is precisely this kind of ambivalence that holds the door open for some constructive thinking about a democratic future. The ostensible political apathy, disenchantment and disaffiliation from the established political system may not necessarily signal a disinterest in politics per se (cf. Beck, 1998). That is, if we look beyond formal electoral politics, we can see various signs that suggest that many people have not abandoned engagement with politics, but have rather refocused their political attention outside the parliamentarian systems. Or they are in the process of redefining just what constitutes the political (Mulgan, 1994), often within the context of social movements. Observers see a strong shift to what is called life-style politics (cf. Bennett, 1998), which is characterized by personalized rather than collective engagement, and a stronger emphasis on single issues than on overarching platforms or ideologies. And if this is a fruitful development or not for democracy is of course hotly debated.
Notions of democracy and citizenship are in transition, but at the most fundamental level, we need to be able to live together with our differences and settle our conflicts without killing each other. Thus, democracy, however we define it, is crucial. In complex societies, elaborate formal systems of political representation are unavoidable. If significant numbers of people are abandoning these systems, this is not necessarily bad for democracy: the systems may well 'deserve' it. And the emergence of extra-parliamentarian groups is no doubt good, but can also be bad ñ the political orientation of many such groups is fundamentally anti-democratic. Thus, it is very important to remain empirically open ñ to not enter in with many pre-defined notions of what democracy or civic culture are. It is especially important to be alert to sense-making regard to the political itself, how its boundaries are discursively constructed, maintained, and transformed How and at what point do things become political (or not) in the convoluted, criss-crossing streams of communicative flows? We need to be aware of the processes whereby 'the political' communicatively emerges within civic culture. We need to study how people imagine - and do - democracy.
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