Major Themes in Industrialised Societies: Commerce and Culture
We shall examine Marxist and Bourdievian perspectives on the relationship between markets and cultures.
On the one hand, market forces appear as manipulating or corroding culture, making it a functional element of economic domination, whereas the ‘truth’ of culture seems to lie in its autonomy from material interests. On the other hand, market mechanisms seems to liberate culture: first, they provide a basis for a populist culture by undermining cultural elites and authorities; and brining culture closer to everyday life; and second, they provide a vastly expanded material culture that provides symbolic resources for meaningful social life.
- Don Slater and Fran Tonkiss
For Marxists, culture is best understood as material culture: the transformation of things through social practices, in relation to social values. Authentic culture is then identified with the ability of social agents consciously to enter into a dialectic of making and self-making, knowing that the world they inhabit is one that they have produced and can alter, and thereby becoming able both to command and to know themselves.
In this tradition, the problem of capitalist and rational modernity is that the objective world becomes split off from any sense of agency: people are unable to connect their own labour to the ever greater world of objects surrounding them – i.e., labour alienation and consequent commodity fetishism. The market appears as a central structural principle of mystification: it generates a view of the social order – a culture – which is false and which impedes the modern subject’s self-understanding and empowerment.
What we perceive and experience in a market society is the relation of exchange value between object and object: the value of the objects we desire appears in the form of relative quantities of money, rather than the quantities of labour that went into their production. Producers come into social contact only through exchanging their goods in the market. However, because it is only exchange that brings labour into a social relationship, it does so in a very abstract form, equating labour through the abstract common denominator of exchange value. There is nothing left but quantitative equivalences (prices), and a competitive drive to accumulate value that turns around to dominate use value. Everything is rendered equivalent as a commodity; everything is viewed in terms of quantities. Consequently, values are flattened, emptied of any substantive content, and become equal; i.e., there is no longer any hierarchy of values and needs, all are valued and assessed equally in relation to exchange value.
Importantly, Marx aims at a theory of socially necessary illusion. The false understandings of market society are to be explained neither as individual error and mistake, nor as self-interested conspiracy. They are structurally produced as a normal and inevitable aspect of market relations. Under these conditions, people cannot see the real forces (relations of production rather than exchange) determining their existence, and therefore cannot act effectively to pursue their interests politically or economically.
Theodor Adorno discusses how capitalist production is necessarily market-oriented, and hence is characterised by production for profit not use. It is unconcerned with particular human needs and desires, with the intrinsic properties of objects, and with the sensuous relation between human and things. The abstract logic of exchange value rules over the substantive culture and use.
Adorno’s central point is that all aspects of the production, distribution and consumption of culture are increasingly rationalised in relation to exchange value. Culture no longer has any intrinsic worth, instead it plays an integrative and functional – rather than critical and distanced – role within social order: culture is assimilated to advertising, sales, leisure and recreation. It is a means both to increase sales and profits, and to integrate modern citizens as consumers into the capitalist order through forms of escapism and amusement that keep them content and allow them to recuperate their mental and physical energies for more labour.
Despite the appearance of pluralism and diversity, the culture industries subsume cultural products under various kinds of generality. Adorno stresses the way in which ‘pseudo-individualism’ obscures the lack of any real individuality in the products of the culture industry: they are in fact standardised goods, but are given minor modifications to make them appear different. Culture industry products are in fact dominated by the ‘formula’, in which all particulars have the functional place in fulfilling generic expectations – the formulaic books, music, films and so on are all made for ease of consumption, and, therefore, maximisation of sales. However, it is essential to the culture industry that the illusion of use value and particularity is preserved in all these cases.
Adorno argues that autonomous and critical art is possible during the bourgeois era because cultural producers are able to support themselves through a market-mediated relationship with their audiences that contrasted with the direct dependence on the Church, the state or patrons. Yet, high art and autonomous art are not the same thing: high art is susceptible to commodification in depth, to functional integration, formulaic standardisation, and pseudo-individualisation. Autonomous art, in contrast, is represented by a very few works that manage to maintain a critical distance from commodification. However, even where autonomous art maintains its critical distance from the law of equivalence in a market society, it does so precisely on the basis of restrictive, unequal and limited access. In other words, a system of class structure enables the bourgeois to consume technically difficult art, resist easy consumption, and distance itself from everyday life.
- Don Slater and Fran Tonkiss
The relation between ‘commerce’ and ‘culture’ has been profoundly uncomfortable from the beginnings of market society. ‘Culture’ registers a wide range of fears that marketisation and democratic demands are destroying a traditional order in which people knew their place, in which values were inscribed in tradition and organic relations that evolved over time and experience, in which work and reproduction were in close touch with the natural order.
Culture, usually, points to a sphere in which the values that are lost from market society are either preserved from the past, or prefigured for non-alienated, post-capitalist future. An authentic and truthful culture is only to be found in a rarefied sphere of great art and literature, whereas everyday culture is dominated by instrumental calculation, individual self-interest and commerce manufacturing. Implicitly, there is an appeal for the autonomy (i.e., independent and freedom) of culture. This refers to:
· first, autonomy from economic values; i.e., free from profit motives;
· second, autonomy from the false and inauthentic ‘culture’ that arises in and through the marketplace.
Significantly, marketisation involves a cultural dialectic: at once the autonomisation of culture and its commercialisation. On one level, art, artists and artistic practices are legitimated as a way of safeguarding ‘genuine’ values from commercial ones (or from the popular, debased tastes empowered by the cultural spending power in the marketplace). On another level, autonomised culture was nevertheless made possible partly by the new cultural marketplaces of early modernity that released so many art forms from traditional contexts of religious and aristocratic patronage (and, therefore, the desires and wishes of the Church and nobility) by allowing them to engage with the new commodity-buying audiences (in particular, the industrial bourgeois families, which were sympathetic to less religious and courtly art forms).
Pierre Bourdieu discusses a particular form of this cultural dialectic. He argues that cultural producers (and their audience) struggle to legitimate their own social, cultural and economic capital in the social marketplace, i.e., to monopolise, regulate and control cultural production, to seek to place cultural production above economic production. Nevertheless, the cultural sphere is depicted as structured by competitive strategies in which the producers (and the audience) legitimate their own aesthetic capital by rational and strategic use of resources, with processes of valuation and de-valuation (deliberate mis-recognition and disavowal of the economic), with attempts to convert different forms of capital (e.g., economic, social, educational, political, aesthetical, and so on) into one another. At the same time, new cultural tastes, expertise and legitimations are means by which to advance their own market position and social status.
It is noted that the state helps to maintain the cultural autonomy of the cultural producers, and, indeed, maintain ‘quality’ culture against market forces (e.g., public service in broadcasting and ‘intellectual freedom’ in academia). State subsidies for the arts insulate the cultural producers from the market and sustain the ‘cultural heritage’.
To sum up, the cultural dialectic represents the desire to constitute culture as an autonomous and pure sphere, as an ideal defined against market society, yet the market emerges as a site of populist pleasures, cultural renewal and excitement, and democratic egalitarianism and anti-elitism.