Return to Table of Contents
I have suggested that the changed discursive coordinates governing nineteenth-century conceptions of the poor and the appropriate forms of their administration form a necessary aspect of any account concerned to trace the relations between emerging forms of liberal government and the role accorded culture as a resource that might be used to induct the population into new, more prudential forms of conduct. By the same token, however, it is also clear that the sphere of culture, far from being regarded as tailor-made for this purpose, was seen as in need of a degree of refashioning if it was to fulfill the function it was called on to perform. That function, moreover, was inextricably caught up with a particular patterning of gender relations. Finally, this governmental utilisation of culture entailed a contradictory set of relations to aesthetic conceptions of culture. On the one hand, such conceptions were essential to governmental programmes insofar as it was by virtue of its aesthetic properties that it was thought culture could serve as a civilizing agent. At the same time, the mechanisms through which culture was distributed entailed both its bureaucratisation and its subordination to a utilitarian calculus.
But what hinges on these arguments? What is their more general significance? A part of my concern has been to suggest how the history of culture might be written in ways that would see its modern constitution as inherently governmental, as a field of social managenment in which culture is deployed as a resource intended to help 'lift' the population by making it self-civilising. There are, of course, many moments in such a history: the French Revolution is one in the importance it accorded culture as an instrument for forming public morality. The mid-nineteenth-century period of utilitarian cultural reform is another such moment, distinct from that of the French Revolution in that its concern was less to fashion a new public morality or ethos of citizenship than to produce a new kind of self-reforming person. Two things happened in between: first, the history of romantic aesthetics had carved out an interior within the subject and programmed the work of art in such a way as to make the transaction between the two a process of self-civilising. Second, the new conceptions of the poor associated with Malthusianism and the notion of the prudential subject provided a discursive construction of the poor, and of the field of the social more generally, which made it intelligible to think of using culture as an instrument of social management. As a consequence, the multiplication of culture's utility extended governmental deployment of culture in two ways. First, it reached beyond the public surface of civic conduct and into the interior of the person in the expectation that culture would serve to fashion new forms of self-reflexiveness and reformed codes of personal conduct. Second, it developed new capillary systems for the distribution of culture that were calculated to extend its reach thoughout the social body without any impediment or restriction.