The idea of culture as a critical social ideal asks the question about the moral values under modern conditions. The basic question is, ‘ Can there be a society, such as liberal commercial and consumer society, based on formal rationality and utilitarian individualism. But, first we examine how ‘consumer culture’ is an oxymoron.

For liberals, enlightened men and heroic consumers has emerged in the modern, consumer culture. Yet, critics of modernity argue that social bonds and value have been dissolved. Consumer culture is an artificial, mass-manufactured and poor substitute for the lost traditional world.

Post-traditional, commercial world produces unrelenting dissatisfaction (or false satisfactions), as well as a tyranny of ‘false’ society (in the form of fashion, envy, conformism, mass culture) over depthless ‘free’ individuals.

The concept of ‘culture’ is the pursuit of values that arise within the way of life of people that give them solidarity and identity and that authoritatively judge what is good or bad, real or false, not only in art but everyday life. It is a culture that should provide substantive values. ‘Culture’ in this respect is profoundly anti-modern concept and specifically an attack on the formal rationality of enlightenment and liberalism.

In liberal modernity, reason is unable to say anything socially or morally authoritative about what interests should be pursued, unable to distinguish between good and bad social values. Yet, the idea of ‘culture’ articulates beliefs of solidarity and of a framework of meaning and morals that stands above the individual. Indeed, a tension emerges between culture and commerce in modern society; coordination through moral-cultural regulations (lifeworlds) versus coordination through impersonal mechanisms (systems):

The ideal of culture is not just a stand taken by romantic thinkers. It can also be a defence of popular rights and popular culture against the invasion of liberal deregulation and bourgeois power – captured by the notion of ‘moral economy’.

Culture comes to be defined as precisely that which money cannot buy: birth, breeding, authenticity, legitimacy. Culture is defined increasingly by its distance from commerce and industry (cp. Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital).

Consumer culture represents the domination of economic value over society, the spread of purchasing power to lower sectors of the population, the deregulation of all traditional constraints over consumption and the centrality of democracy and equality.

The complaints are that modern consumer culture reorients cultural production and social values around the base and common. Mass-culture theorists suggest that the decline of culture occurs because culture is now industrially mass produced, involving standardisation and pseudo-individuality. Here, culture is absent in the sense that there is a lack of moral order, being restricted into ever confined and rarefied aesthetic spaces (e.g. art galleries, museums, concert halls).

In practice, the liberal, modern world leaves the individual open to manipulation and the unsubtle forms of unfreedom. Modernity throws up new forms of collective and corporate control (e.g. Weber’s rationalisation process and McDonaldisation of society).

Durkheim argues that if needs are not limited by moral order, then nothing can satisfy them. However affluent the economy, it will always produce frustration, unhappiness and dissatisfaction. Indeed, consumers are constantly search for authenticity and the real (for instance, shopping for cultural tours and real ethnic food & drink)

Whereas liberals identify happiness with prosperity, its critics see it as a ‘joyless economy’, as ‘crises of prosperity’. Consumers lack a coherent cultural framework to map out for the individual a legitimated and limited agenda of needs and values. In addition, there are ecological limits to insatiable need.

For liberals, needs are naturally insatiable. However, Rousseau argues that insatiable needs are a product of society, above all of social inequality institutionalised through property rights.

Liberalism promised autonomy, but actually delivers heteronomy – needs determined by fashions, opinions and scrutiny of society.

All forms of culture are inauthentic and alienating based on artificial refinement and social emulation. Emulation replaces authenticity with mere appearances – ‘to be’ and ‘to appear’ become fused, giving rise to conspicuous display and so on.

The idea of ‘the consumer’ conjoins the ideas of ‘freedom’ and ‘desire’. Yet, desire makes slaves out of people because passion destroys reason. Individual freedom, as well as national and civic freedom, can only be guaranteed by the good government, and provided by people free form material want or greed.

By making individuals aware of their common interests and lifting their minds above their petty personal worries, Tocqueville hopes to encourage individuals to think of themselves belonging to a welfare community.

Social failure is bound up with modernity. Modernity dismantles a stable social order, and reduces the social to the individual. In these conditions, the individual’s sources of meaning, social relations and needs become blurred and uncertain, leading to frustration, inauthenticity and political constraints.

Assignments: Test – Saturday 28 April ?

Examination – Wednesday 16 May 4-6pm

Essay – Wednesday 16 May – A Russian translation of a seminar reading;

an English critique (strengths and limits of the seminar reading, using

references). Both a printed copy and a disk copy.