One of Grimms’ Fairy Tales is called “The Cat and the Mouse in Partnership”. A cat convinces a mouse that she wants to be her friend. They decide to live together and, in anticipation of the oncoming winter, they buy a pot of fat, which they hide in a church. However, on the pretext of attending a baptism, the cat goes again and again to the church and eats all the fat a little at a time. After each occasion she amuses herself by responding to the mouse’s questions with ambiguous answers. When they finally go together to the church to eat the pot of fat, the mouse discovers the trick, and the cat’s only response is to eat the mouse. The last sentence of the fable proclaims the moral: “Verily, that is the way of the world”. The relationship between culture and the economy may very well come to resemble this tale and it is not difficult to guess which one out of culture and the economy plays the role of the cat and which one the role of the mouse, especially today in the era of fully developed, globalised and neoliberal capitalism. What place does culture have in a market society where everything is subject to supply and demand, competition and purchasing power? This characteristically general question becomes concrete when, for example, it comes to determining who should finance cultural institutions and what expectations on behalf of what kind of public they are meant to satisfy. In order to try to answer these questions it is necessary to start from further afield, indeed a great deal further.
Besides the production by means of which a society seeks to satisfy the physical and vital needs of its members, it also creates many symbolic constructs. Society uses these to elaborate a representation of itself and of the world in which it finds itself situated, and it proposes, or imposes, identities and behaviours on its members. The production of meaning can, in certain circumstances, play a role that is as great, if not even greater, than that played by the satisfaction of basic needs. Religion and mythology, the customs and forms of everyday life—above all those relating to the family and reproduction—and what has, since the Renaissance, been called “art”, figure in the category of the symbolic. In many respects, these symbolic codes were not separated from each other in ancient societies as evidenced in the fact that art has largely been a religious affair for most of its history. In any case, what did not exist was a separation between an economic sphere and a cultural, symbolic sphere. An object could simultaneously satisfy a basic need and possess an aesthetic aspect.1
Industrial capitalist society was the first in history to separate “work” from other activities, and to make work and its products, now designated the “economy”, the sovereign centre of social life. At the same time, the cultural and aesthetic dimension, which in pre-industrial societies might be intermingled with all aspects of life, was concentrated in a separate sphere. This sphere is not a priori subject to the laws that characterise the economy; it could be permitted to be “useless” and not contribute to increasing the power and wealth of those who created or “consumed” it. Within it a real critique could emerge, one that was normally repressed or suppressed, a critique of social life and its subjection to the increasingly inhuman demands of economic competition. However, culture paid a high price for its freedom: its marginalisation, its reduction to a “game” which, because it did not participate in the cycle of labour and capital accumulation, always remains in a position subordinate to the economic sphere and those who govern it. This “artistic independence” reached its zenith in the nineteenth century. It should be stated that even then art was nothing more than a protected garden or like Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, a simple escape valve, where one can freely express oneself provided that nothing comes of it. It was the appearance of an idea of something different but never its realisation.
Nevertheless, not even this limited autonomy could resist the dynamic of capitalism, devoted as it is to absorbing everything and leaving nothing outside its logic of valorisation. First, autonomous artworks—the paintings, for example, of historical avant-gardes—entered the market, becoming just another commodity. Next, the production of “cultural goods” was itself commodified; that is to say, profit, rather than intrinsic artistic quality, was the aim from the start. This is the stage of the “culture industry”, first described by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and Günther Anders during the 1940s when they lived in the United States.2 Soon after, in the latter phase of the same development, a kind of perverse reintegration of culture into life took place, but only in the ornamental sense of commodity production, that is to say, in the form of design, advertising and fashion. Since then, artists have rarely been more than the new court jesters and bards who have to fight over the crumbs that their new patrons, now dubbed “sponsors”, throw them. Of course, many feel a certain unease in the face of this “commodification of culture” and would prefer that “quality” culture—which, according to taste, can be “cinéma d’auteur”, opera or local craft production—be treated differently from the making of shoes, video games or package holidays, i.e. by going solely down the investment and profit route. They then evoke what in France is called “the cultural exception”: the argument put forward is that capitalist logic—competition and the market—is all very well in virtually every sector (especially where “we” come out on top as instanced in the export industry), but it is asked to be good enough to leave culture out of its clutches. This hope is very naïve. Indeed, whoever accepts the principle of capitalist competition will soon see themselves also forced to accept all of its consequences. If one accepts that it is right for a shoe or a package holiday to be valued exclusively on the basis of the quantity of labour that it represents and in the form of money, it is somewhat illogical to be surprised when this same logic is then applied to cultural “products”. Here the same principle applies: one cannot, as so many people now do, oppose the so-called “liberal” “excesses” of commodification without questioning its foundations, something that almost no one does. As anyone who watches television knows, from the moment that a small profit can be made from landmines, the global dynamic of the commodity does not refrain from shredding children’s bodies to pieces. It will certainly not be intimidated by respectful protests made by French filmmakers or museum directors exasperated at having to kowtow to the managers of Coca-Cola or to the petrochemical industry to get them to finance an exhibition. The unconditional surrender of culture in the face of economic imperatives is only one part of the ever more totalising commodification of every aspect of life. This blanket phenomenon cannot be discussed only in relation to culture without envisaging a break, on every level, with the dictatorship of the economy. There is no good reason why culture alone should be able to preserve its autonomy from the stark logic of profit, if no other sphere can manage to do so.
Thus the necessity for capital to find ever more spheres of valorisation or, put plainly, to turn in a profit, places culture on no kind of pedestal. It is even obvious that within culture, in the broadest sense of the term, the “entertainment industry” constitutes its main object of investment. Already in the 1970s the Swedish pop group ABBA was Sweden’s leading exporter, ahead of the military supplies group Saab, and in 1965 the Queen knighted The Beatles for their contribution to the British economy. Furthermore, the entertainment industry—from television to rock music, tourism to the tabloids—plays an important role in social pacification and consensus creation. This fact finds its most succinct expression in the notion of “tittytainment”. What exactly does it mean? The “State of the World Forum”, held in San Francisco in 1995, attended by around five hundred of the most powerful people on earth (among others, Gorbachev, Bush, Thatcher, Bill Gates…), was convened in order to discuss the following question: what to do with the 80% of the world’s population that will no longer be necessary for production? Zbigniew Brzezinski, ex-advisor to Jimmy Carter, is reported to have proposed what he called “tittytainment” as a solution: “superfluous” populations, potentially dangerous due to their frustration, would receive a combination of basic nutrition and amusement, mind-numbing entertainment, in order to attain a state of lethargic contentment similar to that of a breast (“tit”, in English slang) -fed newborn.3 In other words, the central role traditionally carried out by the repressive clampdown, in order to pre-empt social unrest, is now amply served by infantilisation4 (but, contrary to what some may think, without replacing it completely). The relationship between the economy and culture is not therefore limited to the economy exploiting culture. It goes far beyond the irritation of seeing the logos of sponsors at every kind of artistic event; sponsors who, incidentally, also financed culture forty years ago, albeit via the taxes they paid and who were therefore unable to brag about it or influence artistic decisions. The relationship, however, between the current phase of capitalism and that of “cultural production” is even closer. There is a profound isomorphism between the entertainment industry and the drift of capitalism towards infantilisation and narcissism. The material economy has close ties to the new forms of “psychological and libidinal economy”.
In a society that is not only based on the production of money but also where work and its products are the principal social bond, it is inevitable, in the long run, that narcissism becomes the most typical form of psyche.5 The enormous development of the entertainment industry is both the cause and consequence of the proliferation of narcissism. Thus, this industry is one of the leading causes of the veritable “anthropological regression” towards which capitalism is now leading us. Indeed, narcissism constitutes this regression as much on the collective level as it does on an individual one.
The child, in the first stage of its psychological development, must overcome the stage of reassuring bonding with the mother that characterises the first year of life (this is what Freud called “primary narcissism” and is a necessary step). It must pass through the pain of the Oedipus complex in order to reach a realistic evaluation of its abilities and limits, and to give up the infantile dream of omnipotence. Only in this way can a psychologically balanced person develop. Traditional education tried, with varying degrees of success, to replace the pleasure principle with the reality principle but without killing it off completely. The stages of an individual’s psychological development that have not been satisfactorily resolved give way to neurosis and even to psychosis. The child does not then come into the world originally perfect, nor does it spontaneously abandon its initial narcissism. It needs to be guided in order to be able to fully realise its humanity. The symbolic constructs developed by different cultures obviously play an essential role in this process (even if all of these traditional constructs do not appear to be equally capable of nurturing a fully realised human life; but this is another question).
At the other extreme lies capitalism in its most recent phase that essentially began in the 1970s: consumption and seduction seem to have replaced production and repression as the principal motor and mode of development. This postmodern capitalism is the only society in history to have fostered massive infantilisation of its members and desymbolisation on a large scale. Everything in this day and age contributes to infantilising human beings: from comic books to TV, techniques for restoring ancient works of art to advertising, video games to school syllabuses, sports to mind-altering drugs, Second Life to museum exhibitions, everything leads to the creation of a docile and narcissistic consumer who sees the entire world as an extension of himself, governed by a click of the mouse. The continual pressure of the mass media and contemporary elimination of reality as much as the imagination in favour of a lifeless reproduction of what exists, the “flexibility” permanently imposed on people and the disappearance of traditional notions of meaning, the simultaneous devalorisation of what once constituted personal maturity and the charm of childhood, replaced by an eternal, degraded adolescence: all of this has produced a veritable human regression on a large scale that might well be termed everyday barbarity. Criticisms, which can on occasion be scathing, of these phenomena are voiced by some people; but the remedies proposed are ineffectual or else plainly reactionary (whenever a mere restoration of traditional forms of authority is proposed).
It could be wondered why such strengthening of regressive social tendencies has excited so little opposition. Quite the opposite even obtains in that everyone has contributed to this state of acquiescence: the right because it still believes in the market, at least since it underwent a wholesale conversion to liberalism, the left because it believes in the equality of citizens. The role that the left has played in this cultural adaptation to the demands of neo-capitalism has to be the most curious aspect of the whole business. It has often been at the forefront of the commodification of culture, notwithstanding the retention of the magic words “democratisation” and “equality” in its lexicon. Culture must be available to all! Who would deny the eminent nobility of such a sentiment? Much quicker on the uptake than the right, the left—be it “moderate” or “radical”—has, particularly since 1968, abandoned the very notion that there might be a qualitative difference between different forms of cultural expression. Try telling anyone on the cultural left that Beethoven is better than rap music or that children would do better to learn some poetry by heart rather than play on a PlayStation, and you are automatically called a “reactionary” and an “elitist”. Nearly everywhere the left has made peace with hierarchies of money and power, and found them ineluctable, even agreeable, regardless of the damage they are producing right before everyone’s eyes. On the other hand, this left has sought to abolish hierarchies precisely where they might make sense, as long as they are not permanently ingrained and open to change: those of intelligence, taste, sensibility, talent. The existence of a hierarchy of values is precisely that which has the power to negate and challenge the hierarchy of power and money, which, on the contrary, reigns supreme at a time when all cultural hierarchy is negated.
Even those who acknowledge that there is general cultural decline, in schools for example, inevitably follow up this acknowledgement with the assertion that in the past culture may have been of a higher standard but it was the privilege of a tiny minority, while the vast majority were condemned to ignorance, even illiteracy. Today, on the other hand, we are assured that everyone has access to knowledge. Is this really the case? It could nonetheless be said that the number of children growing up today reading Homer or Shakespeare or Rousseau represents an even smaller minority than in former times. The entertainment industry has only replaced one type of ignorance with another just as the marked increase in the number of people with higher education degrees or going to university—an endless source of pride for all education policies—does not seem to have greatly increased the number of cultured or merely informed people. In French universities today you can obtain a master’s degree with a level of understanding and in subjects that thirty years ago would not have been enough to get you a certificate from a technical college. Thus every year roughly half of young people have no great difficulty in obtaining a high-school diploma. What a great victory for the democratisation of culture!
The products of the entertainment industry cannot be called “mass culture” or “popular culture” as is suggested, for example, by the term “pop music” or as is asserted by those who denounce as “elitist” any critique of what in reality is nothing more than, to coin a telling contemporary phrase, the “formatting” of the masses. Generalised relativism and the rejection of any scale of cultural values have often passed themselves off, particularly in the “postmodern” era, as forms of emancipation and social critique in the name, for example, of “sub-”cultures. However, on closer inspection, they might better be described as cultural reflections of the rule of the commodity. In the face of commodification, which is incapable of making qualitative distinctions, all things are equal. Everything is merely grist to the ever identical process of the valorisation of value. This indifference of the commodity towards all content is realised in a cultural production that rejects any qualitative judgment and for which everything is the same; “culture now impresses the same stamp on everything”, as Adorno said in 1944.
Doubtless this argument is bound to be dismissed for its “authoritarianism” on the grounds that “people” themselves spontaneously seek out, request and covet the products of the cultural industry, even though they are in the presence of other cultural expressions that offer so many alternatives, just as millions of people willingly eat in fast food outlets even though they could eat elsewhere for the same price. This objection may be countered by recalling the basic fact that in the presence of a massive and continuous media bombardment in favour of certain lifestyles, “free choice” is somewhat conditioned. However, “manipulation” is not the only thing involved here. As we have seen, access to the fullness of human existence requires assistance from those who already, at least partially, possess this fullness. Allowing everything to run its “spontaneous” course of development does not create the conditions for freedom. The “invisible hand” of the market ends in absolute monopoly or the war of all against all, not in harmony. In the same way, not to help someone to develop his capacity for differentiation means to condemn him to an eternal infantilism.
This can be explained with reference to a particularly interesting fact that is not, moreover, drawn from psychoanalysis but from cooking. Our sense of taste has four basic flavours: sweet, salty, sour and bitter. The human palate is capable of perceiving a one-in-ten-thousandth part of a drop of a bitter substance in a glass of water, while for the other flavours an entire drop is required.6 As a result, no other flavour is so variable or characterised by an almost infinite multiplicity of taste-related sensations as bitterness. The cultivation of wine, tea and cheese, those great sources of pleasure for human existence, are based on these innumerable types and gradations of bitterness.
Young children, however, spontaneously reject bitter flavours and only accept sweet ones, and later salty ones. They must be educated to appreciate bitterness, overcoming their initial resistance. In exchange, they will develop a capacity for enjoyment which otherwise would have remained forever inaccessible to them. But if nobody ever offers it to them, the child will never ask for anything besides salt and sugar, which have very few subtleties, only degrees of more or less. Thus is born the consumer of fast food—which, as we know, is based solely upon sweetness and saltiness—who is incapable of appreciating different flavours. And what you do not learn when you are young you will not learn when you grow up: if the child who has grown up with hamburgers and Coca-Cola becomes a nouveau riche and wants to show off culture and refinement, he might very well consume expensive wines and quality cheese but he will never truly be able to appreciate them.7
This argument concerning gastronomic “taste” may be applied to aesthetic taste as well. An education is required to appreciate the music of Bach or traditional Arab music, while the mere possession of a body is enough to “appreciate” the somatic stimuli of rock music. It is undeniably the case that in this day and age the majority of the population “spontaneously” asks for Coca-Cola and rock music, comic books and internet pornography. But this does not prove that capitalism, which offers all these marvels in abundance, is in harmony with “human nature”. Rather, it demonstrates that it has managed to confine this “nature” to its earliest phase. Indeed, even eating with a knife and fork is not done straightaway in human development…
Therefore, the success of the entertainment industries and the culture of “convenience”—an incredibly global success that transcends all cultural barriers—is not due solely to propaganda and manipulation, but also due to the fact that these industries meet the “natural” desire of the child not to abandon his narcissistic status. The alliance between the new forms of domination, the requirements of capital valorisation and marketing techniques is so effective because it relies on a pre-existing regressive tendency. The dematerialisation of the world, which is such a hot topic for discussion, is also a stimulation of the infantile desires for omnipotence. “No limits” is the chief exhortation accepted today, whether it concerns a professional career or the promise of eternal life made by medicine, the infinitely diverse existences that can be experienced in video games or the idea that unlimited “economic growth” is the solution to every evil. Capitalism is the first society in history that is based on the absence of any limits and is constantly broadcasting the fact. We are only now beginning to understand just what this means.
But if the culture industry is completely in phase with commodity society, is it for all that still possible to oppose it with “true” art as the realm of the human? Open or covert complicity with the powers that be and with the dominant way of life has always characterised a great part of cultural production, even of the most elevated kind. What is important is that the possibility of difference existed. The characteristic ability of the best works of art of the past to have an existential impact, to put the individual into a state of crisis rather than to console him or to reinforce his normal mode of existence,8 is visibly absent from the products of the entertainment industry. They aim at “experiences” and “events”. Whoever intends to sell something goes far beyond the desires of buyers and their search for instant gratification. He will confirm the high opinion that they have of themselves rather than frustrate them with works that are not immediately “accessible”. Until very recently, a person was judged on an aesthetic level by the works they could appreciate, and not the works on the basis of the number of people they attracted, the number of exhibition-goers or the number of downloads made. Those who could grasp the complexity and richness of a particularly good work of art were consequently considered further along the road to human realisation. What a contrast with the postmodern vision where each and every spectator is democratically free to see whatever he wants to in a work of art and therefore what he himself projects onto it! In this way the spectator certainly never has to confront anything really new and will enjoy the reassuring certainty of always staying the same as he is. This is precisely the narcissistic refusal to enter into a proper object relationship with a world distinct from the Ego.
From this point of view there is hardly any difference now between “great art” and “mass” art. Too often, contemporary art appears to be as incapable as the products of the entertainment industry of challenging the spectator, thereby partaking in the same general loss of a sense of reality. When art becomes a subspecies of design and advertising, it deserves its commercialisation. A good swathe of contemporary art has thrown itself into the arms of the culture industry and humbly asks for a place at its table. This is the late and unforeseen result of the expansion undertaken a century ago by artists themselves of both the sphere of “art” and the quest to turn life into an artistic sphere.
Additionally, historical works of art are being incorporated into the cultural machine, through spectacular exhibitions or through restorations that aim to make works more consumable for the general public (for example, by intensifying colours as in the case of the Sistine Chapel in Rome), or even through butchering classic literary or musical works in order to make them more “accessible” to the public. They are even lumped together with contemporary production, thereby taking away all historical specificity, as in the case of the pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre museum. The sting that historical works might still possess, if only because of their temporal distance, is thus neutralised through spectacularisation and commercialisation.
Nothing is more annoying, however, than those museums who flaunt their “educational mission” and who seek to make “culture accessible to the common people” with a plethora of explanations on the walls and earphones that tell everyone precisely what they should feel about the work, not forgetting the video displays, interactive games, t-shirts and museum shops. It is claimed that this makes it possible for culture and history to be enjoyed by the lower, non-bourgeois social strata (as if today’s bourgeoisie were still cultured!). In reality, this user-friendly approach is the height of a paternalistic attitude towards the popular strata (if they still exist): it supposes that “the people” are by definition insensitive to culture and that they can only appreciate it when it is presented in the most frivolous and infantile manner possible.
This also signals the disappearance of that subdued atmosphere encountered in the rather dusty but nevertheless pleasant museums of the past; pleasant because seemingly offering admission to a separate world, where some respite could be had from the hurly-burly continually surrounding us, but also because these museums were not heaving with visitors. Now, the better a museum is “managed” and attracts visitors, the more it resembles a cross between a train station concourse at rush hour and a computer showroom. Why bother visiting them at all anymore? It would be a better idea to look at the same works on a CD because, in such museums, nothing is left of the “aura” of the original work anyway. This has been another perverse way of uniting art and life, of erasing their difference and eliminating any idea that there could be something different from the banal reality that surrounds us. The space of the old museum, with all its defects, had the potential to harbour something genuinely extraordinary for the spectator, precisely because it was so different from what we usually experience. Today, the groups of students dragged through exhibition halls are primarily receiving an effective vaccination against any risk of experiencing an existential message from art or history, or at least against the risk that they might seek them out on their own accord…
If there is the will to prevent culture from being completely absorbed by the economy—and this desire is still widely held—there needs first to be an acknowledgement that there is a qualitative difference between the products of the entertainment industry and a possible “real culture”, and therefore an acknowledgement that qualitative, and not purely relative or subjective, judgement is possible. There is a great difference between, on the one hand, the will to establish criteria for judgment, while recognising that these criteria do not just fall out of the sky but must be subject to discussion and change, and on the other, the outright rejection of the very possibility of establishing criteria in order to claim that everything is indistinguishable. If everything is the same, then there is no further need to bother with anything. This sameness and the resulting indifference shrouds life ruled by the market, the commodity, work and money. They undermine the human capacity to face up to the omnipresent threats of barbarisation. The challenges that await us in the times ahead must be confronted by people in full possession of their human faculties, not by adults who are still children in the worst sense of the word. It will be interesting to see what place art and cultural institutions will occupy in this epochal transformation.
1.In Bali, an island known for its profusion of wooden objects of all kinds, the inhabitants had great difficulty understanding an ethnologist of the early twentieth century who was interested in their “art”. In the end they told him: “We have no art. We try to make everything to the best of our ability.”
2.These authors viewed the term pejoratively, deeming it an oxymoron since “industry” and “culture” were considered to be diametrically opposed. However, the shock that the term once gave rise to has today disappeared: some French universities now offer master’s degrees in “cultural industry”…
3.Brzezinski has moreover denied coining the term. Be that as it may, the concept as such sums up very well what is actually happening. It should be borne in mind that the aim of excoriating this notion of “tittytainment” is not to argue that a conspiracy of evil men has imposed its diabolical master plan on the entire world. Rather, it is that this word summarises an objective tendency in the management of contemporary societies.
4.Cf., for example, Benjamin Barber, Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007).
5.See “Is There an Art after the End of Art?”, infra.
6.Christian Boudan, Géopolitique du goût [The Geopolitics of Taste] (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), p. 35 (Ch. 1, p. 7 “Le paradoxe de l’amer” [The Paradox of Bitterness]).
7.Those who think France is still shielded from these tendencies would do well to ponder on the recent effort of French wine makers to adapt—while infringing French law—their wine for the demands of the American consumer who is a stickler for the taste of sugar and vanilla, a taste that a number of French consumers have now ended up sharing (cf. the film Mondovino (2003) by Jonathan Nossiter). In Italy, the famous Barolo has become a topic of “war” between producers who wish to defend the traditional tannic taste and those who wish to adopt “international” standards by making it lighter and fruitier.
8.Some works, while we are looking at them, seem to watch us in turn and to be waiting for a response from us.