The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms
Olivier Roy, translated by Cynthia Schoch and Trista Selous
Hurst, £20

IN 1992 when the New Right’s neoliberal revolution was still in full flood, the Marxist thinker Terry Eagleton wrote an essay in which, with great prescience, he foretold a crisis of contemporary culture.

Taking the English literary canon as an example, he argued that right-wing intellectuals were turning literary theory — and by extension the canons of high culture — into an arena of intensive political contestation.

Eagleton wrote: “It is no doubt for this reason that the infighting over something as apparently abstruse as literary theory has been so symptomatically virulent; for what we are really speaking of here is the death of civilisation as we know it. 

“What is at stake in these contentions is nothing less than the devastating historical irony by which the advanced capitalist system has come steadily to undermine its own metaphysical rationales.”

What was happening, Eagleton argued, is that culture was increasingly less able to fulfil its classical role of social reconciliation and was “now palpably part of the problem rather than the solution... the very medium in which battle is engaged.”

He attributed this squarely to the New Right, while berating postmodernism for seeking to undo the lifeline of any remaining shared metaphysical framework in the spurious service of opposition to elitism.

With 30 years of hindsight and the experience of a world turned on its head, Olivier Roy consummates this prophecy with his observation that today’s political conflicts are focused more on values and identity than the economy and social questions. 

It is a climate we will all instantly recognise, characterised by ferocious polarisation in every arena “from feminism and the crisis of masculinity to racism and intersectionality, gender versus biological sex, identity versus universalism, cultural appropriation, ‘wokeism’, cancel culture, ‘dumbing down’, censorship and the purging of artworks and literary classics.”

Roy asks whether we are merely living through a transition between two cultural models: traditional/conservative/sovereigntist/patriarchal versus liberal/internet/cosmopolitan/feminist — or witnessing a crisis in the very notion of culture itself.

Either way, this has two related symptoms, he says, the crisis of utopias and, beyond the challenge to ideas, a ubiquitous effort to impose norms and the extension of normativity itself into every realm of what remains of our social life in a world of hyper-individualism. 

The great universalist utopias of the past are either dead or surviving in extreme enclaves, and what is filling the void is an expanding codification of social practices — in all human communication and relationships — which imposes regulations, prescriptions and bureaucratic rules to calibrate behaviours and promote conformism.

Roy situates the origins of this crisis within four radical changes since the 1960s: the transformation of values according to the individualist and hedonist “youth” revolution; the internet; neoliberal financial globalisation; and “deterritorialisation” through the globalisation of space.

He argues that the suffocating control exerted by norms is making redundant the traditional needs of power to employ clumsy mechanisms of propaganda in order to guarantee “governmentality,” because the “private” realm has been shrivelled to the condition of a prune. 

He writes: “If my intuition is correct, nothing now is private. The reason we are caught in expanding systems of explicit normativity is that the control of souls, minds, the unconscious, the ego and the self has stopped functioning.

“And this is not, at least not yet, because individuals are rebelling, but because their private worlds have already been taken over and flattened by norms.”

If the neoliberal turn is only one of the four historical processes in which Roy has situated his premise — the author is not a Marxist and his work as a political scientist has focused on political Islam — we can still read The Crisis of Culture with one eye on Eagleton’s famous essay as an affirmation of its visionary preoccupations about a devastated social landscape. 

And underlying the work of both writers is the instinctive understanding that the solutions reside in our collective existence. 

Eagleton warned that a “virulent brand of humanism... strives to disseminate a version of the human which is culpably blind to all the most powerful determinants of our common life.”

Roy concludes by asking how we make culture, reconstruct a social bond grounded in a shared imaginary, and rediscover being part of a community.

“There is a clear demand for sociability,” he suggests, “... things change when individuals seek to regain social connection in their real lives, in whatever remains of the social fabric.”