On Cultural Poverty

“Similarly, we should understand the notion of greater cultural wealth in connection with greater cultural equality.”

Reporting on the result of the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial, the BBC tells us that “Polls suggested many Americans were more interested in the legal drama than the war in Ukraine or a potentially historic ruling on abortion expected any day from the US Supreme Court.” What is the significance of this reality? One conclusion is that swathes of the American public are suffering from cultural poverty.

I began to think about the idea of cultural poverty after completing my new monograph on common culture, which is titled On a Common Culture. (1) (This piece, which appeared on my publisher’s blog, distills the essence of the book.) I do not use the phrase “cultural poverty” in the book, but it is implied in the argumentation. It is a provocative idea for reasons I will explain, but I think it would be a useful addition to our critical vocabulary. One can see how it is useful at times like these when, at the expense of other interests, a bizarre court case captures the hearts and minds of the public. I will try to define cultural poverty and explain how it sits at the center of a particular version of the so-called “cultural turn.”

1984 and Cultural Poverty

In my book, I use George Orwell’s 1949 book Nineteen Eighty-Four as a parable about the role played by culture in the lives of the poor. To begin with, we need to remind ourselves of the activities of the Ministry, where Winston Smith is compelled to make his contribution to the regime of Airstrip One: the Ministry of Truth. When we think of the Ministry, we think of the falsification of history, but rewriting history is not actually the main activity of the Ministry of Truth. Winston works at the “Records Department”; however, the Ministry also produces culture. Of special interest is the culture it produces for the proletariat or proles, handled by the departments of fiction, television programs and pornography (in Newspeak, Ficdep, Tele-dep and Pornosec respectively):

“…the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to reconstruct the past but to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels—with every conceivable kind of information, instruction, or entertainment, from a statue to a slogan, from a lyric poem to a biological treatise, and from a child’s spelling-book to a Newspeak dictionary. And the Ministry had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the party, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower level for the benefit of the proletariat. There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section—Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak—engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at.”