The question of political power and cultural power

How should we assess the idea, featured in the ongoing debates about Islamism, that "holding political power is not sufficient for the production of 'Cultural Power'"? Is it really so? Are Islamists, or conservatives in general, failing in cultural production?

We need to consider carefully who is making these assessments and according to what criteria. For one thing, the field of culture is not one that can immediately answer the claim to power of a particular political or religious ideology. We cannot of course say that Islamists are very ambitious about their cultural production and its address to the world. Moreover, the power of the Islamists has now turned into a legend, but they are not in power. That they are influential in many fields, even that they govern, does not mean that they are in power.

Besides, the concept of power perhaps needs to be looked at differently by resorting to contemporary philosophical approaches. For example, the power spoken of by the famous French philosopher Michel Foucault is not a force imposed from above, capable of being forced upon others. On the contrary, there are deeper cultural, mental, discursive powers to which even those who think they have come to power must submit. A force that works from underneath and permeates the one at the top as well. The processes that determine these powers are very different and much more fundamental.

You may wish to develop some strategies to change that too, but it is not that easy. When you enter this field, you also see what an empty thing the person in search of power is chasing. Seen from here, power is an impossible goal, for any person, any party or group.

Society actually has a power of its own, and this power produces its own culture, expresses itself through that culture, reflects its power and somehow gets the one at the top to accept it. Perhaps everyone, the Islamists first of all, needs to put forward a reflection on the concept of power in this sense.

To think about power is also, in part, to think about the human being. Because, as Friedrich Nietzsche put it very well, the "will, desire or drive to power" is of the essential nature of the human being. If you ignore all these powers and try to impose only your own, you will not succeed anyway, and if you insist, something else comes out.

I do not think Muslims have sufficiently discussed what horizon and goal they will have at this point. But I must say that I still find it excessively superficial to look at this picture under the heading of the failure of the Islamists. Muslims too, or, to use a more specific term, Islamists, do produce their own culture, but whether this culture gains hegemony is a matter of whether the call of Islam is accepted.

One should not be that optimistic. In very few periods of history has Islam been established in the hearts of all people with all its principles and values. The masses mostly prefer to follow daily pleasures, entertainment, the cheap occupations that lead people into heedlessness. Popular culture analyses have today made serious progress in showing the gap between political ideals and actual reality.

We very often hear those who make such comparisons speak of the cultural hegemony of the left. Yet it is not the left that is hegemonic. It is hedonism. It can truly be noted besides that the left, in Turkey and in many parts of the world, can articulate with a hedonistic culture much more easily. In the end, the actual helplessness shown in reaching Marx's utopias of radical revolution ties the left, in theory, to a kind of fatalism and, in practice, to a radical hedonism.

Hedonism has more resilience and chance against all ideologies. Today in Turkey too, the way the left expresses itself rests in no way on an emphasis, theory or discourse regarding theory, class struggle or national independence. The left expresses itself through popular culture and hedonistic practices and politicizes pleasures. Whatever is left of the left now.

In the field of cultural productions appealing to pleasures, the Islamists have no chance of competing anyway, nor does a left worthy of its own claims. The left's addiction to hedonism destroys it too, in effect, as a drug addict. There should be no worry over the lack of a cultural power identified with hedonism, and there is no need at all for the Islamists to covet such a power.

On the other hand, even amid these paradoxes, a culture of their own is forming and developing among contemporary Muslims as well. It has aspects, positive and negative, that are subjects of discomfort or satisfaction within itself.

The discomforts and dissatisfactions we hear also have to do with people's positions and stances. They are, of course, also a sign that a serious pluralism has formed within the Islamist community. Not everyone sees, perceives and feels everything in the same way.

NOTE: This subject is addressed more broadly in our interview in the latest issue of Yetkin Düşünce Dergisi.