In The Public Culture, Horne examines and analyses what he calls for the purposes of his argument the ‘public culture’, that is, the dominant systems of cultural control operating in all nations, east and west, although with regional variations. Horne’s ‘public culture’ might also be called the ‘dominant culture’ by other cultural critics or, by Gramsci, the ‘hegemony’. In using the term ‘public culture’, Horne draws attention to its being the most easily available to the ‘public’ or the ‘people’, as well as to its often being financed with the ‘public’s’ funds and, demonstrably, against their interests. The modern ‘public culture’ is connected irrevocably with the dominant economics of industrialism, a system which Horne sees as so entrenched that, forebodingly, the book is subtitled The triumph of industrialism. Horne suggests that, in its enthusiasts’ ideal images, ‘the industrial society can be seen itself as a factory, rationally organised, with communications (freeways, railways, natural gas pipelines, aircraft routes, electricity grids, teleprinters) linking its productive centres, with a constant concern with increasing rationality and efficiency, and with a constant pride in increasing figures of ‘economic growth’. The factory-nation is seen as an ‘economy’ that can be ‘managed’.

Horne has used images like these before. In Money Made Us, he suggested that a factory ‘is itself a machine. It is an attempt to arrange other machines together to make one big machine.’ He is, however, not interested principally in analysing the systems so much as their human effects: ‘Humans needed in factories also have to be arranged like machines’ (Money Made Us), a theme also explored in its Australian context by writers like David Ireland. But, in The Public Culture, the factory system has taken over. And in this context and from the perspective of cultural criticism, Horne looks at the public culture as a form or organisation and limitation of ‘realities’: ‘A public culture is simply a limited set of representations and enactments, of a limited number of “realities” over all others’. Worse still, ‘[n]ot only is a public culture not a representation of a society: it is not even a representation of all the principal actors in the power relationships of that society’.

By structuring his argument around analyses of the dominant, indeed, triumphant images and narratives of industrialism, Horne makes it difficult also to focus centrally on resistances to that system. This leads to a somewhat pessimistic tendency in his argument, to which I’ll return. At this point, it should be noted that what Horne achieves in The Public Culture is done in an interesting manner that compellingly engages the reader with his examples. As a cultural critic and a critic of political rhetoric, Horne has long been interested in ‘signs’: in a general sense, as in the habits of Australian suburbia (The Lucky Country, The Education of Young Donald); or more specifically, as in John Kerr’s black top hat (Death of the Lucky Country). In this book, such interests are extended and expanded as Horne negotiates the delicate tasks of analysing what may often seem the nebulous area of the immaterial in relation to material ‘reality’. He demonstrates that in modern societies ‘reality’ is not straightforward; and that humans can reclaim their alienated intellect to read cultural signs in a way that deconstructs that partial ‘reality’.

The book thus becomes an exemplary instance of cultural criticism. As well as its being fascinating for the general reader, students of cultural studies will find here a context for their general project and a helpful indication of ways to undertake more detailed studies. In this sense, Horne can be seen to have achieved one of his aims of making academic work accessible beyond the immediate institutional boundaries. Drawing on theorists like Barthes, Althusser, Gramsci, Berger, Marx, Freud, and Foucault, he makes their often specialised insights available in something approaching his desired ‘common literary language’ (The Public Culture). He is influenced by semiotics and poststructuralism, yet avoids the more obtuse excesses often found in the language of these theories’ more academicist disciples. He is also mindful of economics, again a welcome change from those academic accounts which insist on the separation of cultural, historical and political discourses.

The book is divided into three main sections: ‘The Public Culture’, ‘Myths of the Public Culture’, and ‘A Declaration of Cultural Rights for the Citizen.’ As the title of the third section indicates, Horne retains a liberal social­democratic, perhaps Whitlamesque approach to questions of citizens’ rights and democracy, although the sour bluntness of some of the connections he makes between cultural and economic politics surely is tinged by 1980s disillusionment.

In the first section, Horne proposes a general explanation or theory of the way the public culture operates to order our experience and to limit our ability to produce alternatives. Although the public culture separates notions of ‘art’ and ‘intellect’ from ordinary life, he suggests that ordinary people should use these very methods to read the various languages of the cultures in which they live, and to decipher the material and political realities masked by the dominant rhetorical practices. In the second section, Horne looks at specific cultural examples, especially those organised around concepts or ‘myths’ of gender, race, national identity, the ‘modern’ and ‘industrialism’, ‘rationality’ and ‘progress’. The place of particular groups in cultural processes is discussed: critics, labour, the churches, ethnic groups and others. Some attention is also paid to disputes taking place in the public culture arena.

Horne provides several examples of the dominant public culture’s being challenged by groups who see their interests as not served by it. One example is of the very different ways North American Indian culture is constructed as such in museums run by the state or its agents, and in museums controlled by Indians themselves. In the ‘public’ museums, Indian culture often is presented in a restricted sense as just a collection of curious artefacts with no social function. In some Indian museums, however, Indian culture is shown as a working part of economic and social life. That culture is a battleground is an important message of this book. Horne elaborates in some detail the complications and contradictions of the dominant myths and the effort involved in producing them, but in his discussion of the public arena he also points to alternative voices, some almost entirely suppressed in public rhetoric, some battling to maintain a small space in it. A distinction is made between ‘culture’ as produced by marginalised groups for their own purposes, and ‘culture’ as produced to contain or absorb the threat posed to the public culture by these marginalised groups.

Analyses of the wrongs of the status quo are usually followed by blueprints for the way forward. This occurs here in the third section. In arguing for citizens’ cultural rights, Horne suggests that because the public culture of a nation-state is not that of the whole nation, we need to develop new myths to represent different, non-dominant ‘realities’. In order to learn to think about ourselves and our societies differently, we need to develop myths that cannot be contained in or co-exist with the present ideological structures. Horne proposes what amounts to a revolution of images as a method of overthrowing the dominant ‘industrialism’, and its influence over our mental frameworks and intellectual and cultural structures.

Horne is correct to identify struggles over culture as contributing to the broad processes of social change, but there are nevertheless some problems with his proposals. One difficulty with his analysis is that changes in myths and images do not occur in isolation; nor do they precede social change. The production of new images suggests that other changes also are taking place: indeed, if struggles around cultural politics are to have any real impact, they should occur together with struggles around social issues. The groups Horne cites, like the conservation and women’s movements, which have produced in recent years new myths and images, have in many cases done so as part of a broader material struggle, so that the new images and myths form a part of the means towards a final goal. Indeed, it can be shown that unless cultural and social struggles take place together, ‘myth-making’ retains its ‘public culture’ associations with right-wing ideology, due to its remaining isolated from progressive social strategies. Cultural politics practised alone result in small, elitist enclaves organised around ‘lifestyle’ politics and with little impact on the dominant economy, as has occurred in some small sections of the women’s and conservation movements.

Problems with Horne’s somewhat romantic emphasis on the liberatory potential of art begin to emerge at this point also. As Horne argues, art can indeed be liberatory; but not art alone or in all circumstances. There is little historical evidence that artists, critics and intellectuals will play automatically a vanguard role in the revolution. Given that many artists and intellectuals are made by the public culture and in its image, we should recognise that liberatory new images often also may come from the writing and speech of less educated groups.

Horne’s project of analysing the public culture and those resistant cultural activities which have had some impact in that area thus presents its own inbuilt structural difficulties: some resistant activities take place in other locations. For example, as I mentioned above, Horne discusses at some length the contents of museums and art galleries, including North American Indian collections. Even if some of these collections provide radical breaks with dominant notions of North American Indian culture, they still remain ‘art collections’, and thus may be read as essentially ‘frozen’ images, the results of arts administrators’ decisions, albeit progressive ones. We do not see much in this book of resistances at the level of sub-culture and ‘popular’ culture, where the dialectics of cultural practices often may be more dynamic. It is ironic that in addressing the public culture so incisively, Horne has failed to allow himself room to move beyond it. I suspect that this may also be connected with the curious semi-absence or perhaps, more accurately, shadowy presence of ‘class’ as a category in his analysis. The relationships between gender, race and culture, for example, are drawn in some detail, yet class, the principal organising category of industrialism, and with special consequences for analyses of race and gender, is not addressed in as centrally delineated a fashion.

In The Public Culture, Horne perhaps has fallen victim to his own practice for, even if his brand of cultural criticism is innovatory, he still shows us how to be good critics of the old rather than innovators of the new. Another myth of industrialism, that of the separation between the critic and the artist, between producer and consumer, remains standing. But it is no small measure of his achievement that after reading this book one can say that Horne has helped us understand the world, even if changing it is still at issue. It should also be noted that with this book Horne has attempted to avoid his own institutionalisation as a public figure, often the fate of erstwhile angry young men. Like ‘my brilliant career’, ‘the lucky country’ has become a catch-cry adopted often without irony in all manner of public parlance. By publishing The Public Culture with Pluto Press, Horne tells us that this book comes down on the side of change.