Cultural fundamentalisms and crisis of collective representativity
In the 1990s, a “new world order” is declared: the end of history, which implies a retreat from the collective to the private, putting technocrats in charge, and replacing political demands and collective organization for justice, for fragmented struggles in the context of the decline of collective institutions, the fight for human rights and apathy towards the party system.
With this new order, a new sensitive sphere emerges in which the culturalization of politics prevails. By this, I mean the positioning of counterculture as a way to challenge symbolic hegemonic forms in order to fight to give visibility and voice to the voiceless, paving the way for recognition and equality of rights. Debatably, these practices (exemplified by the struggles of communities seeking visibility and recognition based on cultural specificities) constitute a form of privatization of politics. Although they succeeded in making difference tolerated and diversity welcomed, this occurred within a system of cultural domestication, rather than as opposition to the system itself. In other words, antagonism was replaced by tolerance of cultural difference, which undergoes constant appropriation and integration, transforming cultural difference into political indifference.
A la par, en el nuevo orden la política se convirtió en simulacro y mercancía, escamoteando el hecho de que los tecnócratas terminaron por actuar en nombre de los intereses de la oligarquía. Hoy en día, protestas como Black Lives Matter o la marcha feminista, ambos movimientos centrados en demandas de resarcimiento dentro de una visión identitaria de la política o la identidad como campo del militantismo “woke”, existen como espectáculos masivos habiendo trasladado la política a los ámbitos culturales, académicos, simbólicos y digitales.
At the same time, in the new order, politics became a simulacrum and a commodity, hiding the fact that technocrats ended up acting on behalf of the interests of the oligarchy. Nowadays, protests like Black Lives Matter or the feminist march, both movements centered on demands for redress within an identitarian vision of politics or identity as a field of “woke” militantism, exist as mass spectacles, having moved politics into the cultural, academic, symbolic and digital realms.
In a certain sense, nowadays everything is political and politicized, but there is a prevailing denial of climate change and global warming, as the issue of the “environment” is relegated to spheres completely unrelated to the political demands rooted in identities and diversity.
If in past decades civil society became a political actor lobbying for specific private issues, today the sphere of political action is active in cultural and educational institutions, on social media and mass media, and it translates into populist speeches in the political, cultural, and academic spheres, to censorship and self-censorship, to “sensitivity readers”, to the cancellation and denunciation of professors or teaching considered “offensive”, to disqualifying attacks and cancellation of events or exhibitions to the detriment of dialogue.
Nowadays, everything is politicized but little is achieved, and an egocentric moralism prevails, incapable of thinking about politics in its collective dimension: the predominant figure is that of the victim who demands visibility and redress for their violated rights or offended sensibility. This is neither more nor less than the fate of the modern celebration of the individual, whose other is assimilated as an enemy denying their difference, obsessed with the body and self-image, affirming their own desire without guilt, in a depressive and narcissistic society where the cult of the inflated ego predominates. While ocean temperatures rise and microplastics invade our bodies, humanity sinks into perpetual hatred for the other.
We are facing a visceral individualist or right-wing polarization turned into a plural police of thought and freedom of expression. This applies not only to institutional and state authorities, but also to a mass of offended individuals who stalk spaces of debate, freedom of expression, places of creation and dissemination of thought and knowledge. Voices of authority or expertise, complex works of art, nuanced expression of thought, and pro-Palestinian mobilization are being canceled, accused of allegedly representing white supremacism or heteropatriarchy, for being offensive or for not being woke or awake enough.
Irmgard Emmelhainz
