Abstract
Responding to Max Weber’s dour predictions, we enlist Antonio Gramsci’s optimism to suggest how culture can spike development. Weber’s sociological focus took culture to mean shared beliefs and practices. As a culture that derives from the Protestant Ethic, capitalism waged a “war on pleasure.” Weber warned that this unfeeling rationality would generate an “iron cage” to trap our humanity, but his book has been read, paradoxically, as a manual for the lock down. Gramsci, on the contrary, understood culture in its humanistic sense, as a field of aesthetic pleasure, innovation, and debate. For him, a precondition for transformational social change was the broad engagement of masses as empowered collectives (Weber favored charismatic leaders); and pleasure in idiosyncratic forms of artistic as well as rooted expression was the fuel for participating in personal and shared advances. This pleasure in art and collective interpretation contrasts with the exclusionary rituals of commodified pleasure typical of capitalist consumerism. Gramsci’s confidence in the transformational role of creative culture provides a framework for understanding a new wave of inclusive artistic practices that originate in the Global South and that revive the arts as vehicles for active citizenship. Participatory art can re-enchant today’s sorely disenchanted socio-cultural world of mature capitalism.
Highlights
When José Antonio Abreu launched a project in 1975 that would become world-renowned as El sistema, it seemed incredibly ambitious and to some skeptics out of tune with the times
Through Gramsci’s selective parsing of Weber, we propose to rethink the role and potential of creative culture as a transformational platform for contemporary policy
In some of the deep pockets at the margins of North Atlantic capitalism, there is no need for re-enchantment because the spirits have not yet been banished nor has joy lost its political meaning [240]
Summary
When José Antonio Abreu launched a project in 1975 that would become world-renowned as El sistema, it seemed incredibly ambitious and to some skeptics out of tune with the times. Some of the major social challenges faced today by the Global North may be traced back to the socio-cultural consequences of living in a disenchanted world, and to the consequent commodification of all aspects of human existence: Intimacy [50]; security [51]; nature [52]; and life itself [53] It is time for a new synthesis, where both parties can learn from the other, and an appeal to Gramscian praxis to restore a more balanced discourse, through the rediscovery of the public dimension of pleasure in shared, inclusive forms of cultural expression and empowerment as a key societal resource [54], is, in our view, the move to make. The purpose of this paper is to explain why, how, and what for
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