Michael Hirsch: The Concept of the Civil Society. Notes on learning in cultural institutions

I.

The concept of the “Civil Society” has established itself over the last few decades as the counter-concept to both the state, as well as to the formal systems and organizations within modern society. But it is a counter-concept with positive connotations. It denotes an antithesis to the circumstances of a social system that have become autonomous and are generally regarded as a kind of ineluctable fate. What once was a specific approach in critical theory - describing society as an alienated force that now acts independently of people - is nowadays a political and intellectual truism. Today, every critical and every alternative political and intellectual movement bases itself on a diagnosis that is shared by every conservative and affirmative outlook as well. Society as a whole is seen by contemporary observers as intellectually impenetrable and politically uncontrollable – in keeping with both a post-historical as well as post-humanistic world picture. This picture is the outcome of not only the concrete political and politico-economic developments of the past few decades, but also of the theories that have been advanced to describe them – Post-Structuralism, System Theory, Post-Marxism and Deconstructionism. The foreignness of society and with that the heteronomy that people experience is no longer viewed in the light of the classical normative assumption of the autonomous political appropriation of society by the people. To make my point brief: I consider this approach by the Zeitgeist to be a mistake. Indeed, I would call for a return to the ideas advanced in Theodor Adorno’s Criticial Theory, which in my opinion are anything but outdated, even if they have yet to be properly exploited.
The contemporary mind has responded to the implicitly resigned tenet of a post-historical society with the idea of the “civil society” – a formula that allows one to bring together all the positive valuations that contrast with the familiar negative manifestations of the present-day world. It negates the market-oriented logic of economics, as well as the bureaucratic logic of the state and the private logic of the housekeeping family. But it also negates the medium of legislation - the classic means by which “reformist” politics restructures social conditions. By contrast, the space of the civil society serves as a space for spontaneous development – a spontaneous counter-development vis-à-vis the dominant systematic and organizational forms in society. It is the space of self-organization and free association of individuals. In other words, it is the space of learning. Its basis lies in the ability of the citizenry to associate freely, in voluntary political and cultural federations of individuals. In contrast to the instrumental and bureaucratic logic of bourgeois society, these voluntary associations constitute the medium of the civil society.
The form assumed by this opposition and all of its various components is dualistic. I would like to ask just how productive this dualism actually is nowadays. How strong do these voluntary associations look? This question is of immense importance for the overall organization and self-image of our culture, for it bears on the conception and organization of not only our universities and academies, but also our museums and galleries, our theaters, and our public broadcasting and television companies. How do they describe their function in and for the society they relate to? My thoughts on a critical and progressive concept of learning are as such a small part of an overall program for a methodology and political economy of culture on which I am currently working.
So my question is: what form could open and interesting institutions of learning assume? As I see it, this question must be viewed in the light of two historical developments. Firstly, in precisely the field of culture there is now a firmly entrenched tradition of critiquing institutions – a method that intellectuals use to respond to the systematic conditions immanent in professionally organized cultural production. In the meantime, this has developed to include a critique of education, a critique of organized science, a critique of museums and kindred institutions in the visual arts, and so on. These critiques have come to be a permanent part of the respective sub-systems in our culture. But at the present moment we can foresee a point at which the critical intention behind such a (self) critical discourse becomes a latent contradiction - to the same degree that the discourse itself is institutionalized.
Secondly, and this corresponds to a more general level of society, we must ask whether the dualistic logic in the semantics of the civil society still concurs with its own mode of operation. Twenty years ago, Ulrich Beck wrote his manifesto of the civil society. His book, Risk Society, presented a resounding program based on the capacity to learn in a civil society. According to Beck, an avant-garde of creative learning arises within the voluntary associations in a civil society – while simultaneously being surrounded by a culture based on organized politics, economics etc. that is oriented to short-term goals and refuses to learn. In particular, the forms of grassroots democratic action groups and protest movements since the 1970s, as well as the increasingly vociferous alternative and critical sciences, acted as cornerstones for the author’s scheme. This scheme contrasts the immobile, fixed, ponderous structures of bourgeois society with the mobile and adaptive ways of thinking and doing typical of the civil society. And the basis for Beck’s scheme, which was typical of the level of consciousness in the 1980s and early 1990s, was a stable dualism between two types of sociation and two types of organization. Within the structure of Post-Fordism and Neo-Liberalism - which at that time were already in their nascence and today have become firmly rooted - this stable dualistic logic gets confused. And this confusion stems from its underlying normative assumptions. For in the age of Post-Fordian Neo-Liberalism, economics, technology and science have brought about a phenomenal deterritorialising movement, in comparison to which the civil society’s ways of acting, thinking and discoursing seem like an institutionalized refusal to learn.

II.

What previously appeared to be a counteractive force is now being sucked into the vortex of the economic and technological dynamics that have been unleashed. And with this, the civil society is being subjected to an enormous process of economization. Which is not simply perceived by all of us in our daily lives. It also is becoming a threat to our cultural institutions, for they are now no longer threatened merely by bureaucratic logic, but also by economic logic. And nowadays this logic presents itself as the new categorical imperative –together with the norm of adaptability and increased efficiency. Compatibility with global standards and economization are the fate to which the governments are increasingly subjecting their schools and universities, etc. Technocratic reforms from above are the rule of the day. And the line of attack taken by such reforms seems quite clear: the open spaces that are characteristic of educational institutions, as well as other public cultural bodies, are reduced if not completely destroyed. The logic of bureaucracy and of economics - from which the civil space wishes to demarcate and distinguish itself - increasingly inhabits this space. Thus the current reforms in the educational system spell a marked increase in the professionalisation of higher education. Whilst once the inherent logic of all education, indeed of culture as whole, was rooted in its autonomy from the interests of bourgeois society vis-à-vis the job market and vocational training, we are now looking at a potential breach of this autonomy.
What is the sense behind this autonomy? Its sense lies in formulating and practicing its own cultural and intellectual imperatives; in bracketing out all of society’s interests, particularly those that bourgeois society pursues through the cultural institutions it runs. The specific form of learning that is facilitated in the cultural space is negative. It is in fact a negative potentiality. It forms and justifies itself through its capacity to interrupt, bracket out and countermand. The opening up of an open space or free scope for intellectual exchanges creates firstly and primarily a negative potentiality. This comes across above all as negative inasmuch as it brackets out all purpose (including even the edifying purposes of non-purposeful art, education or science). The possibility that is brought about here by the potentiality of such bracketing is first and foremost an im-possibility. The capabilities that are taught here are first and foremost in-capabilities compared to those capabilities that bourgeois society demands for a self-transforming job (or also cultural) market. To take an expression from Jean-Luc Nancy, this may be termed unworking – an unworking of all social values and works, and an unworking of the social norms of work and the justification of every individual through the reality principle that is encapsulated in gainful employment. The civil in a civil society reveals itself through a negative relationship of this kind to the dominant structures and imperatives of bourgeois society. If successful, this can be taught and learnt in schools, universities, academies, theaters, museums and galleries. The freedom in such open spaces is the freedom of non-determination; which is simply another word for the freedom of self-organisation and of free association.
Today this liberty is seriously threatened. It is threatened by the ongoing professionalisation experienced in all areas of culture. And threatened first of all as a result of a very trivial reason: there is a structural surplus of intelligent and highly qualified people in the field of cultural production. In keeping with a simple economics of supply and demand, this pushes down wages and worsens working conditions in the various cultural fields. The intelligentsia is becoming increasingly proletarian and its situation increasingly precarious. This is particularly apparent in Germany when one looks at the Universities, where it has hit the younger generation especially hard. There has been a radical deterioration in their work conditions and their incomes - although the economy drives and reforms introduced by the state also mean that other factors play a role. The upshot is that as an open civil space, this area is experiencing an appreciable curtailment of intellectual exchange and education. And ultimately this is because it is increasingly being submitted to a professional logic of comparability with other “professions”. But it was always fundamental to the activities of a university lecturer, for instance, that he or she was never subjected to this. Freedom to dispose one’s time is no less a part of the freedoms involved in research and tuition than freedom from outside determination as to what is taught. Only in this kind of free space can the essentially anarchic virtues of free mutual exchange exist.
In my opinion, it is very important to note that the traditional forms of intellectual freedom and independence in universities, academies, museums and other cultural fields act as concrete institutional safeguards. These include a legally certified freedom from outside administrative influences (e.g. in the form of the freedom of research and tuition), as well as individually certified legal positions regarding a secure income (permanent positions on the basis of a solid biography). And it is here we really see the extent to which personal rights are linked with organizational rights when it comes to intellectual freedom. There can be no intellectual independence if the individual’s material needs are not securely covered. In the context of the typically precarious forms of employment under Post-Fordism, adopting almost any position on aesthetic, intellectual or political issues can have negative consequences for the material well-being of employees working in museums and universities. It follows that the nature of one’s intellectual activities tends to become coloured by one’s own life plans – or indeed strategies of survival. And further, that every tactical move in the cultural field tends to be subject to one’s own “professional” calculation.
Inevitably the open exchange of ideas – the community of those living and acting in the culture - suffers as a result. This is because a plurality of intellectual exchanges requires that relationships are possible within the space of mutual exchange that are free of any enforced joint identity (in the sense of belonging to a group, a nation, an ideological community, or a systemic context), or of any compulsion regarding a personal identity. Esentially the civil society’s space for exchange and Being-with [Mit-sein] can only be an open space if it is one of non-identity. The advanced ontology of community in present-day philosophy revolves around such concepts as Being-with, non-identity, unworking and free singularity, and formulates something that is often referred to as a politics of singularity. Yet in my opinion, its relationship to politics is not as clear as initial impressions might suggest. My thesis is that the advanced forms of thinking currently in operation suffer precisely from a lack of political and judicial institutionalization. Every cultural achievement since the late 1960s is currently in danger of becoming an element within the context of a Neo-Liberal policy to bureaucratize and professionalize the cultural field – regardless of whether voluntary, decorative, or hypocritical in nature.
This applies no less to the ontology of the plural community than it does to the category of unworking and the contemporary idea of inter- or trans-disciplinary cultural production. In the meantime, they have come to number among the conventions of the cultural discourse. But the question arises as to whether - in the light of the increased professionalization of the practices and discourses in the visual arts and science – they are not merely something that is cited and simulated: whether, under the prevailing circumstances, they are not often simply decorative self-descriptions of the science and art business. It appears that these tough institutional structures deactivate and usurp emancipatory and intellectually advanced cultural forms. And this is true so long as the majority of those involved are compelled, as a result of the “professional” requirements regarding how they assert themselves - both materially and symbolically -, to reproduce the (compulsion to) identity of people, ideas and projects.

III.

As such, my thoughts produce a contrary picture of the situation: the advanced, progressive ideas that intellectuals come up with in the direction of an open civil exchange of ideas, a community without identity, of an open space for encounters and friendships, contrast with the social structures and constraints, the hierarchies and power relations of bourgeois society. Under certain conditions this contradiction may be a productive one. Under certain conditions this contradiction can lead to genuine learning experiences. In my view, successful educational experiences are always the ones that break the mold of the normal systemic context, the normal expectations, the normal procedure, the normal curriculum of the cultural field involved. Under the current conditions, this can be achieved in some fields, albeit with certain limitations. For instance, learning situations can be created in which, as mentioned earlier, the normal professional context is suspended. For some time the visual arts as well as organized science have experimented with producing situations of this kind, to varying degrees of success. It is evident to the keen observer just what structural obstacles hinder these experiments. And it may be conjectured that these attempts also suffer largely from exaggerated demands – in particular the demand that the desired freedoms of unworking, open space, and transdisciplinarity are realized directly within the professional enterprise and the institutionalized cultural forms. A situation in the visual arts is foreseeable in which the institutionalization of institutional critique neutralizes the latter’s critical achievements, leading to curious rituals of affirmation. This process of incorporating critique has some highly ambivalent features, for it is a process of learning that tends to heighten the adaptability of professional systems, rather than the open spaces for the thinkers and doers who operate within them.
Education and learning in the emphatic sense always amount, however, to a rising up above the existing circumstances. As such, they are more forms of an ethics rather than politics of singularity. The concern here is with shaping stances – stances informed by criticism and wilfulness, by non-identity and open communication. The open space for this open civil discourse tends nowadays to be sequestered by the professional standards of the cultural fields, following the escalating competition everyone is involved in for such scarce commodities as attention, recognition and income. The story of the last few decades was a success story inasmuch as it even became possible to distinguish oneself in this competition by means of critical and divergent ideas. The failure that can be seen today has come about because this did not lead to changes in the requirements for professional (re-)production in the fields of culture. It is precisely the leftist leadership at our universities, academies and museums tat has responded with nothing but perplexity if not resignation to the current neoliberal onslaught which the state and economy are undertaking against the cultural institutions.
Can we devise models of joint action and exchange that evade this logic of usurpation? What would the ideal type of academy or college look like? Above all it is a question of employing the theoretical achievements of transdisciplinarity not merely as some kind of self-advertisement to be used by cultural organizations when filling out project and funding applications. Transdisciplinarity has to become a real quality of cultural production. And in my opinion, it can only be taught and learnt through a good, broad education. Only on the bases of an intelligent philosophy, social theory, and political theory is it possible to come up with interesting reflections on the practice and the institutional underpinnings of cultural systems. Because only a theory like this is capable of mentally bracketing out the “professional” conditions that prevail in the various fields of the arts and sciences. This bracketing out consists of a certain kind of negation in the sense meant by Adorno. In successful cases it opens up a space characterized by non-determinacy and non-identity. The concern here is to develop certain models of art, theory and learning which, to my mind, do not amount to education in the classic sense of molding a personality so much as in the sense of opening people up to a wealth of references under the aspect of unworking all works (even if they are art works). This also entails a certain open organizational space – an open space characterized by self-organization and free association.
I would say that nowadays, these models have above all a utopian character. They formulate a locus outside of the organized cultural systems and the latter’s specific institutional compulsions regarding identity and production, as well as their hierarchies and power relations. The performative formulation of such a place must be ethically credible. It has to be presented in a public exchange of ideas, in spoken and written language in such a way that this ethical stance manifests as a truly lived intellectual outlook, and not merely a habitual, more or less hypocritical pointer to a canon of critical culture. As such, bringing about situations where ideas can be openly exchanged and learnt from is not just a question of (correct) theory, but above all of the correct ethical stance on the part of the individual. This is the decisive point in any “politics” of singularity: the ethical corroboration of theoretical opinions. Here, more than through theoretical texts or adopted positions, we see the potentiality of learning in a community: as the possibility of having a real effect and of the visibility of the negative. Thus unworking is a shared practice of negation; a form of community without a common identity; a form of learning that does not involve fixed, identifiable topics or knowledge being communicated.
The advanced forms of thought and action in a new ontology of plural singularity cannot be transposed directly to the culture’s existing organizational forms. Although it appears in Jean-Luc Nancy that these are already in direct effect in them, in my view we should talk more of a possibility than a reality or effectiveness. Whether this possibility will bear fruit and find expression depends on the shared intellectual practice of the writers, teachers and artists. It depends on a practice and an ethos, which might be identified by others (regardless of whether so-called colleagues, students, the general intellectual public, or the specific audiences for such events as exhibitions, lectures, symposiums etc.) as true – or perhaps as hypocritical and cynical. As such, the majority of the questions examined here hark back to very old-fashioned ethical questions about the right attitude for people. But also to equally old-fashioned questions about the material organization of social and cultural relations. Without a progressive reform of cultural institutions in this regard, in the long-term even the most interesting intellectual matters will become untrue or ineffective.