From criticism to confirmation of power

In a recent article in the Stockholm daily Dagens Nyheter, Ernst Brunner’s new novel Hornsgatan was dismissed by Dan Jönsson as “culturally conservative vomit in a corner already covered in so much vomit that you barely react” (7 August). And in the Malmö daily Sydsvenskan, Eva Ström writes (25 July) that visitors to the art exhibit Figurationer (‘Figuratives’) at the Edsvik Art Gallery “cannot avoid associating it with the art approved by the Nazi regime in Munich in 1937.” At about the same time, Åsa Linderborg in the tabloid Aftonbladet (11 August) compared Minister for Health and Social Affairs Göran Hägglund’s change of course toward a more culturally conservative profile to “Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi leader in Berlin in 1928, (who) assailed against modern art.”

What these phenomena condemned by Swedish reviewers all have in common is that they focus criticism on what can be described as a kind of fetishism with contemporariness: the idea that novelty, rupture and change are necessary criteria for quality – as is the drive to break the bonds with the past and (at least implicitly) grapple with the ideas of past eras.

From a Swedish perspective, this fetishism with contemporariness is perhaps the most characteristic and culturally all-absorbing concept of our time, and as such highly chauvinistic. It shows contempt for all those, in the past or in other cultures, who do not share our present Western view, for instance, that everything from sex to diseases is a cultural construct and that we have nothing to learn from the past. In any case, as long as those values and perceptions risk standing in the way of our self-actualisation. Which they almost always turn out to do, when you take a closer look.

Cultural radicalism can be described, to borrow a Marxist term, as the ideological superstructure of this fetishism with contemporariness. Cultural radicalism developed largely during the second half of the 19th century and was most effective as a critical tool about a hundred years ago, when older conceptual forms in our culture really had a constraining effect on the individual. That was the case in an Ibsen world, where the bourgeoisie preferred to listen to the conservative holier-than-thou pastor than the enlightened doctor. The same is true in Hjalmar Söderberg’s middle-class settings, where the prevailing double standard could condemn 30-year-old spinsters to a life of loneliness and poverty. In that era, cultural radicalism was a potent weapon in the struggle to overcome the kinds of conventions that had such a paralysing, inhibitive effect on the individual and on social development. The extraordinary potential of cultural radicalism at that time, as well during parts of the 20th century, was thus due to this critical eye continuously focusing on problematic aspects of attitudes from previous eras that lived on.

Hence, cultural radicalism by its very nature looks back in time. It aims to break with repressive norms and structures that in fact often grew strong in that 19th century: heteronormativity, patriarchy, colonialism, Christianity, the concept of art and so forth.

However, in an era that can be described as contemporary-fetishist, cultural radicalism has taken on what is in many ways a new function. From having been critical, it has now become confirmative, which entails a depletion of its energy and inherent power. What, on the surface, might have been seen in recent years as the paramount victory of cultural radicalism is, on closer inspection, instead a sign of weakness and a symptom of its illness. The consolidation of what is called the pop right which took place in Sweden a few years ago and which meant that cultural radicalism had now moved onto the editorial pages and cultural sections of the right-wing press illustrated this very transformation of cultural radicalism from criticism to confirmation of power.

The criticism of cultural radicalism that has been described in both Norway and Denmark as a cultural clash is more likely a consequence of the growing powerlessness of cultural radicalism than a gathering of forces on the opposing side. In Sweden, we are currently witnessing a similar development, which may be the ultimate explanation for the more aggressive tone among advocates of cultural radicalism. But painting their opponents as political extremists in order to exclude them from the public discourse simply tends to further expose the weaknesses of cultural radicalism.

With cultural radicalism confirming power and with every view that deviates from cultural radicalism being defined as political extremism, as Ström, Jönsson and Linderborg do, a situation is created in which it becomes impossible to criticise from either the right or the left in cases where this criticism is aimed at the most characteristic phenomenon of our time – the fetishism with contemporariness. As a result, the conditions for truly penetrating criticism of our era are eliminated. Thus criticism is impeded that might reach further and more incisively into our contemporary era than cultural radicalism’s intellectual blows against an open door.