I am often accused of being an optimist. I write “accused” because I take it as a mistaken characterization. I think it suggests that I am naïve and unrealistic. And as it happens, I don’t think I am naïve or unrealistic, and don’t feel particularly optimistic. I actually have a rather dark view of the human prospect, one of the reasons I am more conservative than many of my friends and colleagues. That said, I do know why people think I am an optimist. It is because I understand my intellectual challenge to be to find the silver lining within the clouds, to try to find ways in which it may be possible (even if unlikely) to avoid the worst. Thus, my study of the politics of small things, which started with the proposition that after 9/11 “it hurts to think,” and also thus, my investigation in my new book of the possibility of “reinventing political culture,” showing that political culture is not only an inheritance that constrains possibility, but also one that provides resources for creativity and change.

In Reinventing Political Culture, I make two moves: I reinvent the concept of political culture and I study the practical project of reinventing political culture in different locations: Central Europe, the Middle East and North America. I plan to use the book to structure a deliberately considered debate early in the new year.  At this year’s end, I thought I would highlight some past posts which examine the power of culture and the way I understand it pitted against the culture of power, which also exemplify the course we have taken this year at Deliberately Considered and a road we will explore next year.

First, there is the link between small things and the power of culture. In a small corner of Damascus we observed people creating an autonomous world for poetry. Clearly the present revolution there is not the result of such activity, though it did anticipate change. But I think such cultural work makes it more likely that the post authoritarian situation will be democratic and liberal.

I am convinced that art as art, rather than art as propaganda is crucial to the power of culture. Quality rather than political purpose, conveying a partisan message, is the fundamental basis of the power of culture. The independent value of cultural work makes it most politically powerful, informing our understanding of the world, helping us see alternatives. This is the case near and far, now and then.

Yet, I know that the instrumental use of cultural quality, wit for example, can be powerful, most clearly revealed in satire. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have helped me survive our maddening times. I became a Daily Show – Colbert Report junkie as a way to maintain my sanity after the re-election of George W. Bush. But Colbert and Stewart’s shows are so powerful because of the excellence of their work itself. Thus a cultural highpoint in television history was Stephen Colbert’s White House Press Corps roast of President George W. Bush (video below). He speaks truth to power, on the cultural grounds of humor. A big surprise is how this humor still is so important during the Obama years.

I think when it comes to the power of culture text is more important than context. But context still can matter. Much of what we say makes sense only when we consider where we say it and with whom. Thus I appreciate the posts by Vince Carducci on Detroit, its art scene and its meaning.

Vince and I disagree about the role of propaganda in art. He thinks, drawing upon his readings of the Situationists, and other radical cultural theorists that all art is one kind of propaganda or another. I think, drawing upon such imaginative writers as Czeslaw Milosz and Milan Kundera, that art, when it is art, is not propaganda. I know that I am shaped in my judgment by my intensive experience in the culture of Central Europe, while he is shaped as he is by his experience in his home town, as its troubles intensely reveal  the crisis of global capitalism and its culture. I think that neither of us knows the truth, that our debate opens deliberate consideration of the power of culture, as an alternative to the culture of the powers.

This has been an ongoing debate this year at Deliberately Considered in the posts linked here but in many others. I hope we will continue in the New Year. Do have a happy one. I am not particularly optimistic, but, as Leszek Kolakowski once put it, I “hope against hopelessness.”

There was an interesting article in The New York Times last Sunday about a poetry salon in Damascus, Syria.  It reminded me of the theater movement I studied in Poland in the 1970s.  Both the theater movement and the poetry salon are examples of constituted free zones in repressive societies.  I think they demonstrate the possibility of re-inventing political culture, the possibility of reformulating the relationship between the culture of power and the power of culture.

The secret police are present at Bayt al-Qasid, the House of Poetry, in Damascus today, The Times reports, but it is also a place where innovative poetry is read, including by poets in exile, politically daring ideas are discussed, a world of alternative sensibility is created.  Not the star poets of the sixties, but young unknowns predominate.  The point is not political agitation nor to showcase celebrity, but the creation of a special place for reading, performance and discussion of the new and challenging.  The article quotes a patron about a recent reading.  “‘In a culture that loathes dialogue,’ the evening represented something different, said Mr. Sawah, the editor of a poetry Web site. ‘What is tackled here,’ he said, ‘would never be approached elsewhere.’”

Cynics would say that the Polish theater and the Syrian salon are safety valve mechanism, through which the young and the marginal can let off steam, as a repressive political culture prevails.  But in Poland, the safety valve overturned the official culture, even before the collapse of the Communist regime, as I explained in my book Beyond Glasnost: the Post Totalitarian Mind.

I don’t want to assert that this happy ending is always the result of such cultural work.  Clearly, it’s not.  But I do want to underscore that the very existence of an alternative sensibility in a repressive context changes the nature of the social order.  Poland was not simply a repressive country then, and Syria is not simply repressive now.  They are places where the possibility for dialogue was established, places where poetry can prevail, and because of this, political culture can be reinvented – in Syria, at least for a discrete number of people in a particular location at a particular time.  But the limits of today may be very different tomorrow.  This I learned as I observed my Polish friends.