AestheticsSocietyPolitics

—An Interview with Tony Bennett

■　Wang JieXu Fangfu

Tony Bennett is Research Professor in Social and Cultural Theory in the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydneyand a Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne.He has held previous positions as the Professor of Sociology at the Open University in the UKwhere he was also a Director of the ESRC Centre for Research on Sociocultural Changeand as Professor of Cultural Studies in the Faculty of Humanities at Griffith UniversityBrisbanewhere he was also Director of the Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy.He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.Tony Bennett has published extensively in the areas of literary and aesthetic theorycultural studiescritical museology and cultural sociology.This is an interview with Professor Bennett by Professor Wang Jiefrom the Nanjing Universitynow working at the Shanghai Jiaotong Universityand Professor Xu Fangfufrom the China University of Petroleum(Beijing)at the Nanjing University on May 122009.

Wang Jie（Hereafter referred to as Wang）：I’m so glad that you came to the seminar we planned in Manchester.The Chinese version of your Culture and Society in China has aroused much attention from Chinese academics.There are already quite a few papersmaster degree theses and doctorial dissertations that study this bookwhich means that more and more scholars in China have become interested in your studies and works.One point of such interest is in your early studies on Lukács’s account of Marxist aesthetics.So could you talk in more detail about your early studies and about the relationship between your early studies and Marxist aesthetics？

Tony BennettHereafter referred to as BennettMy interest in Marxist aesthetics developed via a somewhat circuitous route.My backgroundmy initial trainingwas not in literature or art or aestheticsbut in the social sciences which have always provided the vantage point from which I have engaged with aesthetic issues.My first degree was in politicsphilosophy and economics from the University of Oxfordand then I went on to study for an MA at the University of Sussexwhere I enrolled in a programme in the sociology of literature.It was in this context that I first became interested in Lukács’s workan interest that carried over into my doctoral thesis on the relations between Lukács’s concept of literary realism and his concept of class consciousness.This was in the late 1960s at a time when there was a huge growth of interestin both Britain and Americain the continental European traditions of Western Marxism.The work of Adornothe work of Benjaminthe work of Gramsciand the work of Lukácsall of theseamong otherswere made available in English in a spate of new translationsand were avidly read and hotly debated.This was at the same time that the work of the early Marx-Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscriptsin which Marx sowed the seeds of a historical and humanist aesthetics-was first made available in English translation.There wasthena significant revival of interest in Marxist thought as these largely heterodox traditions played into the debates and politics of the New Left.

It was in this context that there was widespread interest in Lukács’s work among the left intelligentsiaparticularly in view of the role he played in opening up new areas of critical debate in the Soviet bloc in the wake of the 20th Party Congresshis role in the Hungarian uprising and as member of the shortlived Imre Nagy governmentfor exampleand the challenge to the literarycritical orthodoxy posed by his 1956 book The Meaning of Contemporary Realism.As I only later became acquainted with Lukàcs’s more formally developed Marxist aestheticmy original interest in his work was not prompted by questions of Marxist aesthetics as such.Ratheras I have already indicatedmy interest was in the parallels between his account of literary realismdeveloped mainly in the1930s through to the 1950sand his discussion of class consciousness in his earlier 1923 book History and Class Consciousness.I found the Hegelian acrobatics of the latter-his rereading of Marxism as the philosophical selfconsciousness of historyand his attributing to the proletariat the role of realizing the historical unfolding of the dialectic-quite intoxicating at the time.His argument that only the world view of the proletariat could offer a historicalphilosophical position from which the totality of the historical process of human selfdevelopment could at last be made comprehensiblehis construction of the proletariatas the identical subjectobject of the historical processthat isas the product of history which recognizes itself as the instrument through which history will realize its immanent tendency to fulfillment in communist societythese were enormously stimulating ifas I would now see themprofoundly mistaken ideas whose appeal to a generation of student idealists washoweverunderstandable.My more specific interestthoughwas to trace how a similar structure of argument informed Lukács’s account of different moments in the development of literary realismparticularly from critical to socialist realismand to clarify howin spite of the considerable political difficulties he experienced during his period in the Soviet Unionhe was able to imbue his conception of socialist realism with a critical philosophical content that was often quite at odds with the official Stalinist interpretations of this doctrine.

Wellthis has been a long answer to your questionbut these are the aspects of Lukács’s work that attracted my interests in the context of the British New Left engagement with continental Marxism.

Xu FangfuHereafter referred to as XuThank you.Then besides Lukácswhat other people are your studies influenced by？

BennettI was just about to say that. Although Lukács’s work was very influential in Britain in the 1960sthat influence soon began to wane as many of its founding premises were called into question by the alternative traditions of Marxist thought-and of intellectual traditions critical of Marxism-that were made available by the translation of contemporary FrenchGermanand Italian critical social theory.The most influential body of Marxist work here was that of Louis Althusser andindeedof the Althusserian school more generally.Although I had been deeply interested in Lukács’s workit soon became evident that both it and the Hegelian and humanist traditions it represented had become a theoretical and political dead end. Althusser’s critical engagements with these traditions pulled the ground from beneath Lukács’s formulations in a number of ways.His critique of what he called the expressive totality that informed the interpretations of Marxism proposed by Lukács and others proved devastating and lasting.The conception of the social whole as governed by some form of holistic unity such that all of its parts expressand are expressed bythe social totality to which they belong simply fell apart in face of the more supple analytical possibilities opened by Althusser’s sense of the disjunctive relations between the different levels or parts of a social formation.This isn’t to say that Lukács was the primary target of Althusser’s criticismshe wasn’t.But it was easy to see how they applied to his work.The political limitations of Lukács’s position also became increasingly evident.Whileas I have indicatedhis interpretation of the proletariat as the identical subjectobject of history was seductiveit also rapidly became clear thatat bottomlittle more than an invocation of the idea of the proletariat to fill a space in his MarxistHegelian system of concepts that was needed to give it a logical coherence.As part of a broader intellectual tendency whose logic Jacques Rancière has identifiedbut which was also evident to many of Lukács’s contemporaries in the debates unleashed by the Bolshevik Revolutionthe burden that Lukács placed on the proletariat of resolving the contradictions of history by bringing them to fulfillment was really just an exercise in philosophy and nothing more than that.His conception of the proletariat was more concerned with the idea of the proletariat than with the historical reality and particularity of workingclass strugglesindeedhis famous notion of klassenbewusstsein-of imputed class consciousness-explicitly declared thatat the level of philosophyMarxist thought should deal with the consciousness of the working classes ashistoricallyit ought ideally to be rather than as it actually was.

XuDoes that mean that Lukács’s version of Marxism is not practical enough？

BennettIt’s not a question of degree so much as of the kind of practicality it lent itself to.The issues are quite complicatedbut when translated into the then current debates about the relationship between the Communist Party and the massesLukács’s formulations did-albeit it with some qualifications-offer a sophisticated philosophical justification for the Leninist view thatsince it embodied the idea of the proletariat and understood its historical interests correctlythe Communist Party might legitimately act against the actual views and wishes of the working class in any given historical moment.

Butto bring our discussion back to the questions of literary and aesthetic theory you first asked aboutthere waswithin the Althusserian traditiona different approach to these questions that I found more interesting and productive than Lukács’s humanist and historicist aesthetics.This approach was partly elaborated by Althusser himselfalbeit only briefly in two or three essaysbut was more fully developed by his student andlatercollaborator Pierre Macherey.So far as Althusser was concernedhis formulations of the relationship between art and literature on the one hand and ideology on the other opened up a new approach to these questions.Lukácsof courseoffered an account of the ways in which what he characterized as truly great literature differs from its minor formsarguing this was true of works expressing the world views of progressive social classes since thistheir role of representing humanity in the makingenabled them to give expression to the highest levels of historical selfconsciousness available in a given epoch as distinct from the partial and limiting-and in this sense ideological-artistic perspectives associated with the world views of dominant classes.

Althusser’s approach to the relations between art and literature on the one hand and ideology on the other was quite different.His contentionbriefly summarizedwas that art and literature offer a way of seeing ideology at workopening up its operations to inspectionmaking them visibleand thereby generating the possibility that the subject might free her-or himself from its hold on their consciousness.He wasthoughconcerned to differentiate art and literature from science as well as from ideology.He did soin essenceby arguing that whereas science-by whichof coursehe meant Marxism-might give us a knowledge of how ideology works through a system of conceptswhat art and literature do is allow us to seeto glimpseto foreground the operations of ideologies so that we might disentangle ourselves from their effects.Ideologyfor Althusserisof coursedefined as a mechanism for producing subjectsfor calling people into certain positionsinterpellating themso that they then recognize themselves as subjects of particular kindsof a classa nationorindeedof humanity.It was immediately clear thatfrom this perspectiveLukács’s mancentered account of the aesthetic as the realm in which there are achieved the forms of selfrecognition that are appropriate to different stages in the progressive development of mankindis itself an ideology according to Althusser’s definition.It is a mechanism for producing subjects that enchains them within a certain identification of themselves in a subjectcentred account of the historical process that revolves around the category of man.

Thisthenwas one more reason for thinking thatwhatever its historical interestLukács’s aesthetics had little contemporary relevance.This is notthoughto suggest that the Althusserian approach to the questions of artliterature and the aesthetic is without its problems.At the same time that I was first reading Althusser’s workI also became interested in the work of the Russian Formalists-a group of early twentieth century literary theorists whose work attracted a lot of interestin the 1970son the part of structuralist and poststructuralist literary and film theorists.I was greatly struckreading them at the same timeby the similarities between Althusser’s account of relationship between literature and ideology and the Russian Formalists’account of literature as a practice of defamiliarization.For the Russian Formaliststhe effect of what they calledliterariness”-that isthe defining and distinguishing aspect of literary texts-was produced by works that manage to defamiliarizeto make strange earlierconventionalized literary forms of representation.They spoke of literature as a method for dishabituating earlier literary formsand opening up the world so that it might be seen anewin a fresh light.There are evident parallels-differences tooof course-but strong parallels between this conception literariness and Althusser’s conception of literature as a mechanismso to speakfor cleansing our eyes of the distorting effects of ideologyand I explored these in my first bookFormalismand Marxism.

While both positions are very productivethe strength of the similarities between them suggested that the Althusserian position is best understood as a variant of the modernist literary aesthetic which the Russian Formalists were the first to articulate in rigorous theoretical terms.Thisthoughsuggested that the very attempt to establish a Marxist aesthetic might be mistakenindeed incompatible with its claims to be a revolutionary system of thought.For this meant-and Althusser put this point very forcibly-that its historical vocation was not to provide new answers to old questionsbut to revolutionise the problems that thought should concern itself withto produce new problems in place of the earlier bourgeois traditions it claimed to displace.Without thisindeedMarxists could not legitimately claim that Marxism had opened up a new scientific terrain-the terrainfor Althusserof history-and Marxism would need to be seeninsteadas offering only alternative solutions to a set of questions still posed in terms inherited from bourgeois philosophy.And thatit seemed to me then and now，is exactly what the various attempts to establish a Marxist aesthetics that had been developed in the history of Western Marxism amounted to.What do we find when we look to Kant’s Critique of Judgment，which remains the key text of Western aesthetics？We find an attempt to differentiate aesthetics as a particular faculty of judgment from the faculty of moral reasoning and the faculty of intellectual judgment，with each of these being interpreted as invariant modes of human cognition.How can such a concern to establish，not empirically but through the methods of the transcendental critique，such historically invariant modes of the subject’s mental appropriations of reality be squared with a method whose aspirations to be a revolutionary science rested on its claims to be radically historical？

Well，I think it is now clear that Marxism is in general a much less revolutionary system of thought than its proponents have claimed.Be this as it may，it is I think clear that its engagements with the aesthetic have been largely philosophically and theoretically conservative.Virtually all Marxist attempts to establish an aesthetic have been concerned to differentiate the aesthetic from both science and from ideology as three different universal modes of intellectual cognition.So the structure of the argument that informs such Marxist aesthetics is thus the same as the structure informing Kantian aesthetics.Indeed，to generalize the point，the different schools of Marxist aesthetics are distinguished from each other mainly in terms of the different preMarxist philosophers they refer to in seeking a warrant and ground for their procedures and distinctiveness.So we have Hegelian versions of Marxist aesthetics（Lukács），we have Kantian versions of Marxist aesthetics（Lucio Colletti），and we have versions which look back more to Spinoza or Leibniz（Althusser）.In all of these，moreover，the aesthetic is treated as a historically constant form of perception or judgment.

In taking issue intellectual enterprises cast in this mould，the arguments that I developed in Formalism and Marxism，and also in a later book Outside Literature，tried to do two things.First，they questioned the validity of any project that aimed to establish the distinguishing properties of the aesthetic as an invariant form of perception or cognition，urging the need to locate the analysis of the aesthetic，as a particular kind of judgment，as the locus for a set of historically mutable capacities.Second，I argued that if the aesthetic were to be theorized and distinguished from science and ideology in these terms，the proper task for Marxist analysis was to concern itself with the social and historical conditions which made the production of such a distinctive aesthetic effect possible.There wereof coursea number of other theorists whose work tended in similarif not identicaldirectionsmost notablyperhapsPierre Macherey.It isindeeda tendency which I think developed out of the critical trajectory of AlthusserianismmainlyI thinkbecause Althusser’s formulations identified with exceptional clarity the dependency of the categories and procedures of Marxist aesthetics on the earlier systems of thought it was supposed to have surpassed.

WangFoucault once said there are some aesthetic elements in Marxismbut there is not such a thing as a Marxist aesthetic.What do you think of his idea？

BennettI’m not familiar with the text in which Foucault made that particular commentbut I certainly think it’s true on both counts.As I have just indicatedI think the whole history of the attempt to establish a Marxist aesthetic has been fraught with difficulties because it is based on a mistaken endeavor.It is undeniably truethoughthat the Marxist political imaginary-the very vision of communist society as a realm of freedom based on the historical surpassing of the constraints of necessity produced by the development of society’s productive forces-rests on a particular historical reinterpretation of the KantSchiller concept of the aesthetic as the realm of free play.But I find Foucault’s own relations to the question of the aesthetic something of a conundrum.He wrote quite extensively on aesthetic topics in his early workhis essays on Raymond Roussel and RenéMagrittefor example.I think thatfor the most parthis engagement with such topics is pretty much indistinguishable from the terms in which other left French intellectuals at the time wrote about literary and aesthetic matters.Unfortunatelythese are not questions he ever returned to in a significant or sustained way after the changes of direction announced in his later intellectual proj ects.His conception of an archaeology of knowledgefor examplethe concern with the relations between technologies of power and technologies of the self developed in his work on the history of sexualityhis work on governmentality andmore particularlyon liberal government and its relationship to practices of freedomthese are clearly projects which point in a different direction from his earlier aesthetic writingsalthough exactly how he saw these differences and their implications for aesthetic matters-orindeedif he gave such questions much consideration at all-is not clear.

The major exception to this is his conception of the aesthetics of existence which he developed in his various engagements with the legacy of Kant and of the Enlightenment more generallyand his elaboration of the relations between critique and the practice of freedom.Howeverthis is not an argument about the aesthetic as something associated uniquely with art and literatureit’s more about the production of a critical relationship to the ways in which everyday life is livedwhether by the means of art or by other meanssuch that everyday life can be developed as a creative locus for selftransforming acts of freedom.So the conception of the aesthetics of existence is not connected with the notion that the aesthetic is embodied only in great works of art produced by geniuses.That saidFoucault’s formulations remain caught within the orbit of Kant’s conception of the role of the aesthetic in bringing about the free coordination of the facultiesand it’s far from clear to me that his approach to the aesthetics in connection with questions of freedom is consistent with the terms in which he approaches the role of other knowledges in making up the kinds of freedom through which the forms of power associated with liberal forms of government is exercised.

XuSo according to Foucaultthe aesthetic is not high culture.

BennettNohis‘take’on the aesthetic operates in a different register from high/popular culture distinctions.

WangSome think Foucault and Bourdieu are postMarxists.Do you think this is true？

BennettWellin Foucault’s case it’s very clearhe’s definitely a postMarxist.I don’t know that he ever troubled to define himself explicitly as such.But he indicated in many of his works what he saw as the major conceptual shortcomings of Marxist thoughtwhile also making it clear his concern was to identify the historical limits of Marxism rather than to take up a position against it as a whole.He was not antiMarxist.That saidhe was certainly critical of theworkerist”strand within Marxist thought because many of the political issues that he was concerned with-questions of sexualityfor exampleor the issues of prisoners’rights-could not be adequately theorized or addressed through the prism of class politics.More generallyin The Order of ThingsFoucault was expressly critical of those aspects of Marx’s thought he viewed as outdatedhis view of labour for exampleseeing this as but one species among many of nineteenthcentury political economystill restingfor exampleon Ricardo’s view of labour.He also made it clear in later interviews and articles that he regarded the Marxist analysis of ideology as fundamentally flawed in virtually every respect.In a thinlyveiled criticism of Althusser he made it clear that he thought the attempt to distinguish science and ideology by interpreting the latter as essentially subjectcentred was invalid.More fundamentallyhe objected that the binary distinction between truth and falsehood informing the Marxist account of ideology could offer no account of what he called the politics of truththat isof the forms of power that are bound up with and exercised through particular systems of knowledge.Whereasin Althusser’s formulationsideology operates through an invariant subject mechanism in the context of ideological state apparatusesand is always distinct from the subjectless forms of understanding he attributes to scienceFoucault operates with no such Chinese Wall between truth and falsehoodscience and ideologyfocusing instead on the ways in which socially validated knowledges operate as machineries of truth with specific and very real power effects.

So he has an entirely different cut into the domain of thought than Althusser or Marxist thought more generally.Equally importantand this goes back to some of my earlier remarks on LukácsFoucault was strongly critical of the mancentered structure of humanist interpretations of Marxism proposed by Lukács and others.Here he shared a good deal of ground with Althusser’s theoretical antihumanism.The mancenteredness of Marxist accounts of history as a process of Man’s becomingthe mancenteredness of Hegelian or Lukácsian aestheticsFoucault took issue with thesearguing the need for a displacement of humanist thought by examining the historical formation and relativity of the discursive mechanisms that had produced Man as an object of knowledge.

XuSince Foucault criticizes the mancenteredness of such discoursesthen does he have his own idea about the center of aesthetics？

BennettNohe doesn’t.That is the point reallyI think.What Foucault’s work stands foramong that of many of his contemporariesis the clear conviction that we cannot read history as a kind of subjectcentered process.History can only be read in terms of its discontinuitiesnot a continuous process.Marxist accounts remain wedded to a conception of history as a continuous process.Of courseit is one marked by revolutionary rupturesmoments of profound crisisand even periods of setbackbutunderneath it allthe steady growth of the forces of production and of human productive capacity constitutes an engine pushing the overall historical process inexorably on from one stage to the next.And if he saw history as discontinuoushe also disputed the view that societies are structured in such a way that all of their constituent parts are subordinated to a singleorganising centre of power.This has become a significant aspect of postFoucauldian thought more generally.It isfor examplea key feature of the work of Gilles Deleuze who wasof coursestrongly influenced by Foucault.

Perhaps Foucault’s pithiest summary of the need for new decentred approaches to the analysis of power was the slogan that we have yet to need to cut off the king’s head in political theory.By thishe meant that we need to develop ways of thinking about power that do not suppose that power in contemporary societies is still organized as it was in the absolute monarchies in western Europewhere power was concentrated in the figure of sovereign.So his account of sovereign power isas a specific historical form of powerone linked to Western forms of absolutism in which power was concentrated at one pointthat of the sovereign.This isn’t to suggest that sovereign power has since been entirely superseded.But to cut off the king’s head in political thought means no longer thinking of power exclusively in such termsit means thinking of power as emerging at multiple points and being exercised through multiple routes.Thisagainis a point of significant disagreement with Marxism.It means that for Foucault power is not concentrated either in capital or in the state as the political expression of the power of capital.This doesn’t mean that the state or capital are unimportant loci for the organization and exercise of distinctive forms of power.But they are not exclusive centres of power.

Foucault’s work on governmentality has been particularly important here in opening up to analysis the many differentiated forms of power that operate through different systems of knowledgeparticularly those bearing on the management of population.Equallythoughit’s something that was evident in his earlier work.Take his Madness and Civilisation.If you want to understand the new ways in which those classified as the mad and insane were treated in nineteenth-and early-twentieth century EuropeFoucault arguesyou have to look at the specific ways in which the knowledge systems of psychology and psychiatry worked in their own specific institutional complexes-the asylum and so forth-with their own ways of marking out insanities as a set of problems to be referred to a particular group of experts.Of courseFoucault admits that there are connections between such developments and parallel changes in the organization of economic relationships.But these are interpreted as parallel series with independent histories whose intersections have to be unraveled rather than relying on any aprior or general theoretical formulation of the relations between them.The new forms of medical authority and expertise tied up with the development of new ways of partitioning and managing the insane have to be looked at on their own terms as an independent sphere of knowledge and power.My own concerns have been similar in trying to disconnect the analysis of culture from the problematic of ideologyand look at the realm of culture as made up of different forms of knowledge and expertise which are brought to bear on the regulation of conduct in specific ways that are not reducible to some unified conception of the state or to the requirements of the economy.

XuThen what about Bourdieu？Is he another postMarxist？

BennettLike FoucaultI don’t think that Bourdieu ever explicitly defined himself as a postMarxist.And his work remained in many ways more closely related to Marxist thought in the sense thatfor Bourdieuquestions of social class remained at the centre of his work.Foucault rarely wrote about questions of social classand had little to say about the role of class in accounting for contemporary forms of social inequality.He did write about class in Society Must Be Defendedbut this was from a long historical perspective concerned with how divisions of classrace and nation have often been superimposed on one another in the course of West European historyand he also offers some interesting asides on class in his discussionin The Birth of Biopoliticsof the relations between the development of neoliberalismthe policy agendas of social exclusionand the moralization of the causes of social inequalities that these agendas entailed.By contrastclass was always at the centre of Bourdieu’s interest throughout his workfrom his early studies in the sociology of educationthrough his work on the relations between class and culture in his most famous book DistinctionA Social Critique of the Judgment of Tastethrough to his later work on housing.It also informed his engagements with the development of the literary and artistic fields.Howeverthe framework in which he approaches class isn’t particularly Marxist.His orientations-which see classes as cultural constructs rather than purely economically determined occupational groups-are more strongly informed by the work of Max Weber.Rather than seeing class conflict as the motor of historyhe is much more concerned to look at class in terms of the unequal life chances associated with different class positions.This is clear in his concern with the respective roles of economic capitalsocial capital and cultural capital in determining life chances.His key innovation-the concept of cultural capital-is thus concerned with how unequal life chances get reproduced as a consequence of the ways in which people from middleclass background are able to transmit privileges and assetseducational assets and advantagesfor exampleto their children because of their familiarity with the kinds of cultural knowledges and competencies that are recognized and rewarded by the education system.So middleclass children are likely to do better than workingclass children in schoolthey are more likely to go to university and to do well thereand so more likely also to be recruited into highstatus and wellpaid middleclass professional and management positions-so as to be able to pass on cultural capital to their children in an another cycle of inheritance.

XuMay I understand it this wayCultural capital is something like thisprivileged parents have privileged children while poor parents can only have poor children.

BennettYes.That’s a rough summary of it andas you can seeclass was crucially important for Bourdieu.Howeverthis did not incline him to place too much trust in class politics.He toolike Foucaultwas critical of tendencies that sought to coordinate all social struggles around the interests of the working classand was often sharply critical of the working class’s political limitations.He was opposed toworkerism”.That is to sayhe often supported workingclass partiesand the trade union movementin France around specific industrial issuesbut he did not support anything like the Lukácian view which sees the working class asin its ideal forma source of truth.On many issuesfor examplethose concerning the politics of colonialism and immigrationhe was strongly opposed to the antiimmigration stances and positions adopted by sections of the French working classes.Sowhile by no means idealizing the working classby far the greater part of his empirical work was dedicated to showing how the mechanisms that produce inequalities continue to trap the working classes into severely impoverished ways of life and conditions of existence.He was equally concerned to expose the mechanisms that produce and reproduce privilege.

XuThank you for the very enlightening analysis.Now could you talk about the development of your interest and studiesthat iswhat are your recent studies mainly concerned with？

BennettOver the last three to four yearsI’ve been working on two main projectsone of which derives its main impetus from the work of Bourdieu while the second takes its guiding orientations from the work of Foucault.The first project has been very much a team project.Together with a number of colleagues at both the Open University and the University of ManchesterI have worked on a longterm and large empirical inquiry into the relationships between practices of consumption and the organization of class relationships in contemporary Britain.The final results of this inquiry have just been published by Routledge in a bookcalled CultureClassDistinction-which examines in detail the relationships between classcultural capitaland the reproduction of privilege in contemporary Britain-the kinds of things we were just talking about a moment ago-as well as the ways in which such relationships are complicated by considerations of agegender and ethnicity.Of coursein engaging with these questions empiricallywe have also been concerned to probe Bourdieu’s main theoretical concepts-his concepts of habituscultural capitaland fieldfor example-to identify the respects in which they might need to be revised in the light of contemporary theoretical debates in the social sciences.One of the aspects of Bourdieu’s work that has been of particular concern to me in this context is his account of the relations between what he calls the Kantian aesthetic of disinterestedness and the workingclass culture of the necessaryand its adequacy as a historical account of the relations between aesthetic and social practices.For while this aspect of Bourdieu’s work has been enormously productivethere are also many limitations to Bourdieu’s discussion of these mattersmainlyI thinkbecause he considers the social inscription of aesthetic discourse and practices from the singular perspective of their role in relation to classbased forms of inequality.A quite different perspective on the social and political history of aesthetic discourses and practices is opened up if one considersinsteadtheir role in relation to practices of governance.

Of coursethere are different ways of approaching the relations between aesthetics and governanceJacques Rancière’s work suggests one such perspectiveand I find this helpful in some waysbut I have been more interested in the perspective on the relations between the history of aesthetics and practices of governance suggested by Foucault’s work on liberal government.This has formed an aspect of the second project I referred to earlier.The working title for this project is Making CultureChanging Society.Its central concern is with the implications of Foucauldian governmentality theory for the tasks of cultural analysisthe manner in which these should be defined and then approached.How are different forms of cultural expertise and knowledge involved in the organization of what Foucault calledthe conduct of conduct”？What roles are played by different forms of expertise in producing culture in various forms which are then brought to bear on the task of managing the conduct of different sections of the population？Through what mechanisms are different forms of culture connected to the socialunderstoodin its Foucauldian senseas the realm of conducts that need to be managed to promote the wellbeing and security of the population？What kinds of transformative or regulative effects do they have there？These are questions which point to the ways in which different cultural knowledges-like aestheticsof coursebut also historyanthropologyheritage studiesandindeedcultural studies-fabricate distinctive forms of culture in specific institutional contexts like museumsart galleriesbroadcastingand cinemas which also provide their points of connection with the social.

To be concerned with questions of this kind in relation to Foucault’s account of liberal government means paying particular attention to the role that culture plays in making up and organizing the particular kinds of freedom through which liberal forms of government work.There has also been a strong collective context for this aspect of my work which has been developed in collaboration with other researchers I have been working alongside in developing a research theme in CRESC-the UK’s Economic and Social Research CouncilESRCfunded Centre for Research on Sociocultural Change-before my departurein 2009to take up a position in the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney.It’s also work that I have developed in collaboration with my Open University colleagueFrancis Dodsworthand the historian Patrick Joyce from the University of Manchesterand the sociologist Nikolas Rose from the London School of Economics through a seminar seriesGovernmentand FreedomHistory and Prospects-we organized for the UK’s ESRC.My particular concerns in this broader context have focused on how the social deployment of specific forms of cultural knowledge and expertise have come to form parts of what might perhaps best be called liberal cultural technologies which operateessentiallyas a means of getting people to become actively and freely involved in the process of monitoringregulating and changing their own behaviour in ways that accord with the requirements of particular governmental rationalities.Ifin Foucault’s conception of liberal governmentfreedom comes to be a key axis of government-a mechanism of governingwhat role does culture play in producing the distinctive cogs and machineries through which freedom is organized as a particular set of techniques？This is notof coursethe freedom that liberal philosophers talk aboutit is freedom as a set of social and material techniques and conditions.

It is from this perspective that I and others drawing on Foucault’s work now approach aesthetics.There isof coursenothing new in equating aesthetics and freedom with one anotherKant did it.My concernhoweveris to understand how such equations operate as parts of a distinct historical formation of materialinstitutional and discursive techniques which so equip works of arttheir producers and their users as to make up certain kinds of freedom which function as distinctive kinds of governmentality.Thisthoughneeds to be situated as part of a broader concern with howas a distinctive form of expertiseaesthetics operates alongsidebut differently fromthe ways in which other forms of cultural expertise-the discipline of historyfor exampleor that of anthropology-also produce and distribute distinctive forms of self rule that operate through mechanisms of freedom.These are all forms of cultural knowledge that generate distinctive ways of training conductand that are put to work in and on the social to change social behaviour in various ways through what are quite complicated institutional mechanismsmuseumsheritage organizationscommunity arts practicesetc.In suggesting that the analysis of the aesthetic should be placed in this contextI amof coursetalking about aesthetics as a way of thinking about and equipping the relations between works of artart producers and art consumers associated with Western aesthetic theoryespecially in its postKantian forms.

WangYes.But your analysis is based on the western context.As I mentioned yesterday at the seminarthe Chinese context is very different.Take museums for example.Both China and Britain have large numbers of war museums.But the ideas reflected through these museums are quite different in those in Chinathe dominant idea contained in war museums is mainly heroismbut British war museumsit seems to usmostly reflect the idea that war is destructive in all aspects.

BennettThis is a very interesting issue.Your suggestion that British war museumunlike their Chinese counterpartsare perhaps more objective in representing the mercilessness and destructiveness of war is true of their contemporary practices.But this is a relatively recent development.If you were to takefor examplethe Imperial War Museumyou would have found thatwhen this was first establishedit was strongly committed to jingoistic and imperialist celebrations of British heroism and military power.And a good deal of this remains in the midst of more recent and less celebratory depictions of war.It’s only really since the 1960s that museums in Britainand in many other Western countrieshave become less stridently nationalistic and more open to looking critically at the relations between warnationalism and colonialism.This has been part of a much more general opening up of museums to criticism from a range of perspectives-the politics of racefor example.If you had gone to a British or an American or an Australian anthropology museum in the 1950s or even the 1960sthe likelihood is that you would have found their exhibitions conveyingquite unselfconsciouslythe view that white Western people are inherently superior to other ethnic groups.If this is not so now it is partly because of the subsequent development of what is called thenew museology”which questioned the assumptions underlying earlier museum practices in the light of the critical developmentsevident across a range of intellectual disciplinesin which earlier hierarchical conceptions of the relations between racesbetween gendersand so on were called into question.

Thenew museology”wasin these respectsvery much a response to the widened political repertoire of the New Left-broadened out from a primary focus on class to attach equal importance to the politics of racegenderand ethnicity.It was in this context that museums became targets of political activists.Feminists staged campaigns in front of and inside museums criticizing their depictions of women as subordinate to menas only mothers and homemakersand so on.In both America and in Britain museums were explicitly targeted for political criticism on the part of AfroAmericanson the grounds of their neglect of AfroAmerican culturetheir continuing depiction of AfroAmericans as an inferior raceand so on.This has generated an ongoing politics of museums whichquite apart from its influence on thenew museology”has had an impact on the concerns of a much wider range of disciplineson cultural studiesfor exampleand on sociologyboth of which have contributed a good deal of new and really important work to our understanding of the relations between museums and broader social and political processes.Andof coursethis work now plays a part in the university courses through which museum curator and other kinds of museum workers are trained so that pretty much the whole museum profession in Western countries is now familiar with and sensitive to these issues.

All this is to say that museums are now places in which new forms of cultural knowledge and expertise are put to work with a view to acting upon society to change it in various ways.Of coursethere are remnants of earlier histories.The arguments marshaled by institutions like the British Museum and the Louvre that their role as universal survey museums justifies their resistingas a matter of principledemands for the repatriation of cultural materials that are of an evidently greater symbolic value to other countries-the Elgin Marblesfor example-are clearly opportunistic.Howeverto come back to your questionit will be interesting to see how far China’s openness to the critical perspectives of disciplines like cultural studies and to the perspectives of the“new museology”will give rise to similar political debates around the role of museums in China.These are the kinds of processes through which knowledgepower relationships can be changed through the efforts of intellectuals sidebyside with the role of social movement activists.

WangIn the past three or four decades in Chinathe aesthetic has played a very important role in the process of modernization.Because no religion in China has become as central to people’s life as Christianity has been to western peoplesome maintain that aesthetics in actuality has taken the place of religion in China.The year of 2009 is of vital importance to China in that it isfirst of allthe 30th anniversary of the beginning of economic reforms in this countryand secondlyit is the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.A large number of academic meetings and seminars are held to recall and reflect on the changes that have taken place in the past 30 and 60 years.In these discussions of the development of the aestheticthere is one thing noticed different from the western tradition in doing aesthetic studies.That is to saywe are doing the aesthetic studies more often from idea to idea and from book to book.In other wordswe are lacking empirical studies in this field.

BennettI am very interested in your remark that the aesthetic might be taking the place of religion in contemporary China.I am interested because the origins of contemporary Western aesthetic discourse in the late seventeenthand earlyeighteenthcentury Britain were partly connected to a sense of its potential to provide an alternative to religion as a means of social ordering.This was in the context of the radically curtailed and weakened power of the monarchy in the aftermath of the English Civil War andperhaps more importantthis was also the period of the first rapid development of a market society in Britain.This led to aesthetics also being invoked as a new way of ordering the relations between the governing and the governed classes in the wake of the dissolution of many earlier forms of social ordering and distinction under the impact of market forces.At this timeaesthetic discourses and practices formed a partas an alternative to the authority of both priests and kingsof a new way of organizing the social authority of the landed gentrylinking their claim to the exclusive exercise of political power to their capacity for refined aesthetic judgment and discrimination.This connection to unequal power relations has been an important aspect of the continuing history of the social inscription of aesthetic discourses and practices in the West.Yet there has also been anotherand a contraryaspect to this historyone in which the aesthetic is claimed as a source of resistance to poweras a form of and resource for emancipation.I have already indicated why I think such claims need to be handled carefully in suggesting that the kinds of freedom that aesthetics helps to make up have to be understood as distinctive forms of self ruleas parts of a historically specific form of governing through freedom.

Nonethelessthese remarks might suggest some interesting ways in which the function of aesthetics in contemporary China might usefully be examined.I don’t know nearly enough about the histories of ConfucianismTaoismor Buddhism in Chinaabout the differences between their roles in processes of social ordering compared to that of Christianity in the Westor about their connections with the imperial system and its legacies through into the nationalist and communist periods.But two key questions to put concerning the social role of aesthetics in contemporary China might befirstwhat are its relations to what Foucault called the party form of governmentality exercised by the Communist Party in China？”and secondwhat role does it play in relation to the increasingly rapid development of market relations in China following on its opening up to globalization？”These are questions that really do need empirical work for scholars to be able to answer them and engage with them effectively.

Foucault’s work provides one route into these questions.I am thinking of his remarks on the aesthetics of existence whichalthough he doesn’t limit it to artdoes include questions concerning the role that artistic practices might play in organizing everyday life as a space of freedom in the sense of providing a set of practices of self shaping that are not subject to the guidance of moral or epistemological authorities.In what waysthenare new spaces for creative practices being opened up by the commercialization of culture in Chinaand in what ways do these provide alternatives to the governmentality of the Party？

But Bourdieu’s work provides another route into the social and cultural significance of the growth of the Chinese economy and the ways in whichwithin Chinathis is linked to the development of new forms of inequalityparticularly ones connected to the massive increase in both the size and spending power of the Chinese middle classes whose consumption patterns now play a key role in China’s andindeedthe prospects of global economic growth.Many of these middleclass forms of consumption parallel Western onesthe demand for carsmediadomestic appliancesetc.And there is increased demand for cultural goods of all kinds.What role do new forms of cultural consumption play in relation to the emergence and development of the middle classes？Is their social position dependent on mechanisms for acquiring and transmitting cultural capital across generations along the lines suggested by Bourdieu’s analyses？You asked what kinds of empirical work Chinese scholars might do to take aesthetics beyond the study of ideas.WellI’d say that Bourdieu’s work provides a means of engaging with what looks likely to be an enduring social and political issue in Chinahow a growing middle class seeks to secure the conditions that are necessary for the consolidation and growth of its privileges.How are privileges and inequalities now being producedand reproducedin the complex relationship between the Chinese middle classesthe Partythe marketand the school system？That would be really tremendously important empirical work to do.

XuI think this is an important suggestion and Professor Wang may take it and do something about it.I hope you’re not overburdened with so many questions.But the next questions may again be very interesting.Professor Wang once led a team of his students to make some anthropological investigations into the life of the Blackdressed Zhuang ethnic groupwhich is a branch of the Zhuang minority in southwest China.From the photos we can see their primitive housestheir mode of productiontraditional weaving machinetheir cultural life(the superstitious ritual to scare away the ghosts and devils and so on).That is to say the people there still live a primitive life.To be specificthey are living in the Bronze and Stone age.But on the other handnot far away from this primitive villageis the modern city of Guilinwhere an annual international folksong festival is held to attract attention to the development of this area.Professor Wang has been obsessed with the question of how ethnic groups of this kind can be modernized and their habit be improved.For examplehe met a young girl singer at the festival who received very little education.A talented singershe got quite a few offers from big companies to finance her education until she finishes her university studies.But to his surpriseshe turned down all those offers and went to Guangzhou as a migrant worker.He really cannot understand the girl’s choice and is worried about how the habit of such ethnic groups can be improved and updated.Another example is that the governmentin order to improve the life of these local peoplegave them or invested a lot of money every year.But most of the money they received goes to eating and drinking instead of production.This again makes Professor Wang think what may be the driving force of habit improvement of the local people such as the Blackdressed Zhuang ethnic.

BennettWellthese are very difficult questions.Some of the difficulties here may lie in translation.

XuSorry for this.

BennettNoI didn’t mean your translation but the general difficulty of speaking across culturesand it has to do with the associations of the concept of‘primitive’.A fair amount of my recent work on museums has focused on the history of western anthropology and its relationship to the projects of colonialismand it’s very clear that calling the members of colonized culturesprimitive”and exhibiting them as such in museums formed a key aspect of colonial power.Starting with the early twentiethcentury criticisms of Franz Boasand developing momentum through the twentieth and into the twentyfirst centurythese earlier tendencies in Western anthropology have been very much criticized from within.It is thus only rarely-ifindeedever-that term“primitive”is now applied to other peoples.

XuYou mean this is an awkward word？

BennettYes.But it’s not only awkward.The very idea of speaking of other peoples as primitiveas if there were a single level of development running from the primitive to the civilizedhas been hotly contested.It’s now widely accepted that the relationships between different cultures cannot be calibrated along a single temporality of development.Different cultures develop in their own way according to their own dynamics and standardsand thisthe recognition of a plurality of cultures with different values rather than ranking them hierarchicallyis now the main signature of Western anthropology.I can perhaps best illustrate the point with a specific example.As you knowI lived and worked in Australia in the 1980s and 1990sand I will be returning to live and work in Australia in a few months time.There isof coursea long and sorry history of regarding the Aboriginal people in Australia as not only primitive but as the most primitive of all peoples.Yet if anyone now were to refer to Australian Aborigines as primitive peoplethey would be offended and shocked beyond belief.They have fought a longlonglong struggle to dispute the notion that they are primitivewhich they rightly interpret as the discourse of the coloniser.By and largeWestern anthropologists have accepted this because a people may have a low level of technological developmentbut this doesn’t mean that their belief systemstheir thought systemsor their knowledge systems are primitive.

Soif the question is one of translationit is so in a deep senseand one that I needed to clarify so that the question might be posed in a different waywhich I’m sure was Professor Wang’s intention anyway.The way I’d put it ishow should questions of development be posed when they concern the relationships between minority peoples and majority peoples in contexts of domination？I don’t have a good general answer to this question except to suggest that it’s important to differentiate between different kinds of development.To go back to the position of Aboriginal peoples in Australiawhen we talk about development programs in this context we need to be very clear what’s being referred to.The material conditions of life for Aboriginesparticularly for those who live in the remote parts of Australia-the outbackas it is often called-are often quite shocking.Aborigines in such areas die up to twenty years younger than white people.Their material conditions of lifetheir housingtheir sanitationtheir education and so on are all at much lower levels than those for other Australians.So there are many very real problems here of material developmentbut they are problems which cannot be detached from the history andindeedthe continuing history of the domination of Aborigines by the Australian state.I don’t know what the history of he Zhuang people is or the nature of their relations to the Chinese state.But it’s important to remember that there are internal processes of colonization as well as those associated with the histories of imperialism.

XuBut Blackdressed Zhuang people as we mentioned just now are not colonized in the same sense as you talk about the Australian Aborigines.They are just isolated from the outside world.

BennettWellas I sayI don’t know the history so I can’t comment on the particular case.My more general pointthoughis that one needs to be wary of suggesting that the habits of particular group are backward and thatas suchthey need to be changed.Undoubtedlyand this is true for all social groupsparticular habits do need to be changed if particular government objectives are to be achievedlike managing waste or reducing global warmingfor example.But this is different from suggesting the need to change the entire set of habits of particular groups.Andas I know it is true of Professor Wang’s own relationships with the Zhuang people. Productive relationships cannot be developed without a deep knowledge of and respect for the beliefs of marginalized peoplesand their right to hold onto many aspects of their ways of lifetheir habits and customs if you like.Againbecause I know it betterthe cosmology and practices of what is often referred to as the dreamtime have proved to be of tremendous importance to Aborigines in maintaining a distinctive identity and culture in the midst of a long and bitter history of colonization.The dreamtime was initially dismissed by Western anthropologists as a primitive belief system that was not sophisticated enough to count as a religion.Since thenvery much as a result of Aboriginal political and cultural activismthe dreamtime has come to be accepted as a knowledge system that has its own sophistication and integrityas a cosmology that is as well developed as that of any Western religion.The Aboriginal response has been to sayYou come here and you tell us that our belief in the dreamtime and in our ancestors is a primitive belief system.Yet you also come here and you tell us that Jesus Christ was born through an Immaculate conception.Who’s being silly here？Why are our beliefs any more primitive or less credible than your ownto usincredible Christian beliefs？How is your story telling different to ours？”

So I don’t think there is much to be gained by arguing that the habits of any ethnic groups or generally are primitive or backwardand that they need to be changed en bloc if they are to be developed.Yetat the same timeI acceptas Professor Wang’s examples tell usthat the very real social and political task of improving material living conditions can sometimes come frustratingly to grief not because of habits as such but because of the defensive forms of resistance that marginalized peoples often develop as means of keeping external forces at bay.This often proves to be a source of frustration for many governments and the forms of aid they provide-monetary aid and material assistance-as these often fail to bring about real improvements precisely because they are still dogged by the very histories they are trying to overcome.

WangNow shall we come to the last question？In your lecture the day before yesterday and at the seminar yesterday you mentioned your different understanding of the ideology of aesthetics from Terry Eagleton.Could you elaborate your idea in more detail？

BennettYes.I think it’s a difference perhaps between a Marxist approach and a Foucauldian approachor at least the way I interpret a Foucauldian approach whichas I have already indicatedsometimes means being FoucaultcontraFoucault.I readbefore travelling to Nanjingthe very interesting interview you did with Terry Eagleton in a recent issue of Marxist Aestheticsand noticed that toward the end of that interview Terry Eagleton said that he still sees himself as a Marxist scholar.

XuBy the waywhat about you？Do you think you are also a Marxist scholar？

BennettNonoI don’t.It would be silly for me to say that I do as my work has been critical of too many aspects of Marxist thought for that to be credible.At the same timethoughI have been very influenced both by the work of Marx and the Marxist tradition more generally.But it no longer seems to me to hang together as a credible system of thought as a whole.Too many forms of contemporary social and cultural conflicts-questions of genderquestions of sexualityquestions of religionand so on and so forth-are ones that Marxist concepts have proved too inelastictoo bound to nineteenthcentury assumptionsto grapple with adequately.Marxism has been subjected to too many powerful intellectual critiquesby feminist scholarsby people or students of race and ethnicityby various intellectual currents like those associated with the names of FoucaultDeleuze and so on.It remains an important critical resource for the analysis of questions of class and the dynamics of capitalism.So it’s not a question of saying that Marxism gives us no intellectual purchase in the presentit just doesn’t give us enough.It doesn’t give us enough intellectual purchase on a whole series of questions that you cannot answer from a classcentered theoretical problematic.

Terry Eagletonas you rightly saylocates his works within the framework of Marxism.This is clear in his approach to aesthetics as a form of ideology.His discussion of some of the key moments in the development of Western aesthetics isin placesinsightful and provocative.There is a good deal to learn from his work on the subject.My reservations concern his angle of theoretical approach.There are two main aspects to his conception of theideology of the aesthetic”.First of allhe wants to say that the aesthetic is an ideology.That means he wants to say that it’s a form of intellectual practice whichin one way or anotherdissimulates or disguises by seeking to universalize a particular set of bourgeois values and practices of self formation.Like all ideologyit produces a particular kind of subjectone which misrecognises its relationship to the real history-ultimately rooted in the relations of production-which produces in it a falsely universalizing set of values.That’s on the debit side.Howeveron the other handhe also wants to say that the aesthetic is a contradictory ideology which contains within itself the promise of liberation.From this point of viewhe sets out to write the history of the aesthetic as something that ison the one handa mechanism for transmitting and at the same time disguising particular forms of class and gendered powerwhile on the other handhe sees the values it embodies-the values of humanity in the making-as ones that can be taken up by oppositional social movements in their critiques of existing forms of domination.There is a good deal of truth in this.PostKantian formulations of the aesthetic undoubtedly informed Marx’s conception of the historical process as one of the progressive fulfillment of human potentialand similar ideas informed the cultural practices of significant sections of the British working classes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Howeverthis was less because of the influence of Marx’s work than because of the more general influence of postKantian conceptions of the relations between art and freedom on the aesthetics of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movementfor example.An interest in art and literature was connected to struggles for freedom in everyday life as a counterpoint to the servitude of the factory system.Jonathan Rose has written very movingly about this aspect of the intellectual life of the British working classes.But I don’t think you can use the same set of oppositions-aesthetics as bourgeois valuesaesthetics as the promise of emancipation-to discuss the role of aesthetic discourses in modulating the effects of cultural and artistic practices in all circumstances.

ThisI thinkis the central weakness of Eagleton’s argument.For it means that he has to repeat virtually the same kind of argument revolving around this central contradiction no matter which particular moment in the history of aesthetics he is concerned with.An analysis which says that the aesthetic is governed by a centralconstitutive contradiction means that everywhere you look you have to find the same contradiction at workand this becomesultimatelya nonhistorical form of analysis.The result is that Eagleton’shistorical materialism”is not particularly historical and only rhetorically materialist.Thisfor meis the major shortcoming of Eagleton’s The Ideology of The Aesthetic.In tracing how the contours of a general ideological contradiction work out in a succession of different historical contextshis eye is too much on the general aspects of this contradiction at the expense of looking closely at the different ways in which the discourses of aesthetics connect with particular social and material apparatuses in particular historical contexts.

In shortI think that Eagleton’s approach lends itself too much to a history of the aesthetic governed by a general formula.And it operates too much at the level of ideas.Eagleton rarely stoops beneath the general level of what is perhaps best called a philosophical history of ideas to look closely at the economicsocialcultural or political relationships with which aesthetics has become materially enmeshed in different circumstances.If you look at the work of literary historians who approach the early history of aesthetics from a Foucauldian perspective-the work of Mary Pooveyfor example-you will find a much sharpermore historically nuanced and concrete account of the relations between aestheticsthe development of market societyand the development of early forms of liberal government than Eagleton offers.The attraction of Foucault’s work is that of allowingindeed enjoiningone to ask new questions of history.His concern to redefine historical practice as a genealogical project-so to produce and mobilize the past as a resource for cutting into the presentopening up its problems and options in new ways-rather than seeing history as a process unfolding from an origin is relevant here.For Eagleton’s account of the aesthetic as an ideology is precisely one governed by the logic of tracing the unfolding of a contradiction arising from the moment of its origins.

WangThank you very much for your very profound and informative analysis.

BennettIt’s also my pleasure to discuss with you so many interesting questions.