The Democratic Project of Culture

Over the past two semesters, I've been trying to think out ways that cultural objects can perform the kind of radical democratic work Laclau and Mouffe argue the Left should take up. This involves both the articulation and re-articulation of the common sense of the national popular determined by what Thomas Kuhn would call paradigm shifts in the history of social and economic organization--I'm thinking of the example that Laclau and Mouffe provide, the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, as one such instance of this. In other words, I've trying to determine how authors of cultural works, acting as Gramscian organic intellectuals, can both articulate national popular democratic impulses and transform them into new forms that extend equality--by equality I mean equal access to means of self-realization that do not impede upon the self-realization of others--and challenge our understanding of what democracy, equality, and/or liberty mean. This is a project I see many European and American modernists pursuing though in very different and sometimes reactionary ways. But James Joyce is perhaps an example of a modernist attempting to perform this function from a radical democratic--though not socialist--position, especially in a novel like Ulysses which attempts to incorporate a cacophony of voices without attempting to reduce each voice or group of voices into a static type. The result is a seemingly messy novel with no privileged narrative voice to provide it with a definitive sense of closure. In other words, it perhaps fulfills the function of what Lyotard calls the postmodern sublime: to destroy the fixed rules created and implemented by what he would call a hasty consensus by showing the limits of that consensus's totalizing social vision.

But in what ways might such an aesthetic cultural project be applied to popular culture? In other words, in what ways are (or could) creators of popular culture (be) engaged in creating radical works that extend our understanding of the democratic process and push it towards more egalitarian heights?