Explain the historical specificity and contemporary relevance of culture

Résumé du document

Today, we can buy a book from a vending machine, like soft drinks and snacks. Germinal and an Ice-Tea have the same value. Culture, in a wider sense, has been taken over by the "spectacular-merchandizing-society", for which everything, from a book to an iPod, has a trade value. The recent evolution of capitalism has changed our perception of the world. The society of consumption has reified our relationship to the world; we perceive the world as a market and we thing-ificate our social relations. Culture has been absorbed too by the spectacularization of every value that was outside the market. The proletarian culture has been replaced by mass culture subjected to the market.

For these reasons, it is interesting to question the contemporary significance of culture, particularly in our capitalist societies, in the era of mass consumption. Is culture different from other mass market products and what can we do to find our primeval relation to culture?

Extraits

[...] Explain the historical specificity and contemporary relevance of culture Today, we can buy a book in a vending machine, like soft drinks and snacks. Germinal and an Ice-Tea have the same value. Culture, in a wider sense, has been taken over by the “spectacular-merchandising-society”, for which everything, from a book to an iPod, has a trade value. The recent evolution of capitalism has changed our perception of the world. The society of consumption has reified our relationship to the world; we perceive the world as a market and we thing-ificate our social relations. [...]

[...] The Proletkult and the socialist realism is a way to make a culture for the people but a uniform type of culture. The Stalinist culture was a failure because it served a political institution to preserve it, to perpetuate a dictatorship in the name of the People. If there is a dichotomy between a culture of class for the bourgeois and the aim for a popular culture, can we say that in democratic societies the problem has been resolved, because in democratic societies, culture has to be accessible to everyone? [...]

[...] For Lukács, the primal relation of men in the world is an act. It recalls Heidegger's care as the first way of knowledge. Axel Honneth, in his book Reification: A Recognition-Theoritical View (2005), emphasizes the importance of acting: before knowledge, there is recognition. That means we first act before knowing. Honneth takes a neuro-psychological example: a kid first mimics his parents before thinking by himself. Our first relation to the world is due to mimesis, an action that occurs in the world, not a passive reception. [...]

[...] Ce qui caractérise cette instruction, c'est la misère de la culture concédée au peuple ( ) Le pire ennemi de l'intelligence, le pire ennemi de la révolution, aujourd'hui, ce n'est plus l'ignorance, mais l'instruction, tronquée, truquée, telle que la société bourgeoise la donne au peuple”[7]. We can see that, a hundred years later, Pelloutier's analyses are still interesting. Unfortunately for Pelloutier and the Labor Council, the CGT became communist and pledged to the Third International. The communists destroyed the work accomplished by Pelloutier and the anarcho-syndicalists by compromising with bourgeois governments. The SFIO and the PCF afterwards are responsible for the disappearing of proletarian culture, its massification and its reification. Nowadays, is a new counter-culture possible? [...]

[...] All over the world, the squat movement has done the same. Re-appropriation of culture, acting on the world, requires the denial of capitalist society by self-managing the struggle. Consumption societies have reified our relation to other subjects, to the world, to culture. The only way that is left to us is to create islands outside capitalism to re-create culture. Every attempt to create culture within the coordinates of capitalism is dedicated to failure, because the market will use it and transform it into good. [...]