One long-lasting war in Ukraine, more than eight months of war in the Middle East – and we are talking about “culture wars”? Are we in any way up to the seriousness of the situation if we give the – comparatively mild – skirmishes in the field of art the central stage? And must not every cultural aspiration inevitably fade when we think of the relentless real violence, regardless of who perpetrates it, and its unimaginable victims? What can art achieve in this context, apart from contributing to a kind of immunizing self-construction: we enlightened citizens of the world here, barbaric despisers of civilization elsewhere? Can or should culture even use a word like “war” or “struggle” when their semantics are experiencing a horrendous real-world overload?
There is nothing to gloss over here, and every artistic approach must currently ask itself how it should relate to this violence-infected situation. Take sides, reflectively weigh things up, consider larger contexts, or simply ignore them and carry on as before? The spectrum is broad and leads back to the aforementioned proxy phenomenon of “culture wars”, as this issue is titled. A legitimate reason for this choice of topic may be that attitudes to war and terror are inevitably marked by fault-lines that sometimes take on the dimensions of a cultural struggle. And even more: that the most diverse ideas of what civilization means, apart from more concrete political motives, are involved in these conflicts as well. The “culture wars” (as this form of dissent was referred to in the USA in the 1980s) extend deeply into the reactions to the armed conflicts of our time. And they ensure that all kinds of phenomena – climate, pandemic, etc. – immediately give rise to division and irreconcilability instead of triggering more profound reflections.
The superficial symptoms of separation and reflexive defense conceal what is actually at stake here, namely the viable maintenance of the democratic process. As much as the scenarios in individual countries and regions may differ, a stubborn front against liberal democracy has begun to emerge over the years – often deliberately played to the fore. This front cultivates many electoral affinities across geographical and cultural borders and is united around a central motif: that of an ethno-nationalist, illiberal authoritarianism that presumes to act in the name of a demarcated, autochthonous “people” against everything that deviates from it or does not meet the majority standards.
One tool reactivated for this purpose is the field of culture, or more precisely: a newly established cultural struggle that is currently appearing in a variety of guises. From the USA to South America to various European countries – not forgetting Austria – the rhetoric used for this purpose has begun to focus on an opposition whose alleged power is held responsible for all kinds of social maldevelopment: minoritarian groupings, irregular migration, sexuality patterns that deviate from the norm, “gender madness”, and not to forget: the specter of an omnipresent “wokeness terror”. All these “threats” are often brought into play when it comes to conjuring up the illusion of a healthy “common sense” or the common understanding of “normal average citizens”.
This issue examines the background and concrete motives behind this form of antagonization and looks at current forms of “culture wars” as well as the ideological motives for transferring political agendas into the field of art. For instance, Patricia Grzonka in her contribution recapitulates a series of cases in which attitudes towards the Middle East conflict have begun to have a paralyzing effect on contemporary art. Ana Teixeira Pinto sheds a focused light on how easily critical areas of art and science can come under a kind of general suspicion (that of anti-Semitism) – with the result that they are sometimes prophylactically canceled. In contrast, Süreyyya Evren examines which sensibilities are more valid than others in the Western-influenced art world, which imbalances prevail here that are rarely explicitly addressed.
The more general ideological backgrounds of current cultural struggles are illuminated by Fadi Toufiq, Joshua Simon and the group Total Refusal. Toufiq focuses on the continuous spread of ethnonationalist thinking, while cultural maneuvers are often merely distractions to divert attention from the true core of this mindset. Joshua Simon who identifies the danger of a new fascism above all in the wake of increasing digitalization, and Total Refusal who view cultural struggles as a consequence of unchecked capitalism, strike a similar chord. Finally, the philosophers Susan Neiman and Ewa Majewska explain how the much-vaunted wokeness syndrome can be countered with a more sustainable universality (Neiman) or to what extent – in the Polish context (Majewska) – feminist efforts can have concrete successes against far-right authoritarianism.
Hovering over all of this is the dark foreboding that the more advanced art of the present might be exposed to an even stronger neo-reactionary crossfire in the not too distant future. It is not possible to prescribe what effective means should be used to avoid succumbing completely to such anti-democratic machinations. Nonetheless, we hope that this issue will provide food for thought in this direction.