Can I quote this example of Cornel West's from my forthcoming essay, Need and Desire in the Post-Material Economy? (Sheffield Hallam University Press):
"This radical rhetoric is painfully exposed in the attention to the imagery of oppression at the expense of the fact of oppression. The cultural left is happy to invoke the suffering of the oppressed as a challenge to traditional ideas. But with no intention of overcoming the material basis of social division, its criticisms are self-serving. This is oppression as a cultural event, for entertainment or titillation.
The American radical Cornel West describes the project of the politics of difference in the following way:
'The new cultural politics of difference are neither simply oppositional in contesting the mainstream for inclusion, nor transgressive in the avant-gardist sense of shocking bourgeois audiences. Rather they are distinct articulations of talented (and usually privileged) contributors to culture who desire to align themselves with demoralised, demobilised, depoliticised people in order to empower and enable social action and, if possible, to enlist collective insurgency for the expansion of freedom, democracy and individuality.' (1990/1993: 578)
The politics of difference is as intimately related to the demoralised, demobilised, depoliticised and disorganised as the court of Louis XVI was to the impoverished peasantry. By having themselves painted in peasant settings and adopting peasant dress, those courtiers romanticised a peasantry that they had no real intention of helping (and who, in turn, despised their noble patrons). Similarly, the imaginary alignment with the disorganised undertaken by this cultural left is concerned largely with expanding the freedom and individuality of its practitioners. Hence West's programme of action:
'This perspective impels these cultural critics to reveal, as an integral component of their production, the very operations of power within their immediate work contexts (i.e. academy, museum, gallery, mass media).' (1990/1993: 578; parenthesis in original)
Revolutionising the academy, museum and mass media is a programme for a generational turnover in the elite, not a transformation of society. Indeed the persistence of these hallowed halls of culture depends on the very disorganisation, demobilisation, depoliticisation and even demoralisation of the mass of ordinary people who finance such institutions by their productive labour, but are generally excluded from them. Perhaps that explains why the motif of demoralisation and depoliticisation is so insistently emphasised in West's telling.
The City of Los Angeles enrolled the museums and galleries in its war on the demoralised and demobilised bums who were messing up its public spaces. Realising that the homeless were dependent on public toilets and washrooms, the City closed them down, persuading museums, galleries and cafes to provide extra amenities. These quasi-public conveniences were policed by the establishments that provided them, so that respectable people could take a leak if they were caught short, but tramps would be given the bum's rush. There is no record of an opposition to these operations of power within the immediate work contexts of the cultural critics (Davis, 1992: 234)
----quote ends -- Jim heartfield