Dialectics of culture

The authors embark on an appraisal of the semantics of the culture industry.

OUR history extends over a critical and crucial period of adjustments when nothing in religion, politics, society or the life of the individual is absolute and any attempt to prove the contrary is doomed to failure. Life cannot be fixed and codified; the very nature of existence is that it is changing, and when one thing changes everything changes with it. Living at the crossroads of culture, one can feel the immediacy of a fluctuating, unstable, dualistic, exciting and creative life. Though it has connotations of aesthetic development pertaining to works and practices of intellectual and artistic activity, in recent literary-cultural debates the term culture has been employed to come to grips with the ideological representations behind things and the hegemony of capitalist structures. With the advent of postmodernism and the rapid and radical social change in its wake, the nature of those disciplines that both reflect our culture and help to shape it have inevitably undergone transformation. Modes and categories inherited in their conventional form no longer fit contemporary times as there is a visible erosion of the assumptions and presuppositions that supported disciplines in the past and their unambiguous fixity.

The conflict between cultures and ideologies is no longer a scuffle of characterisations, but a worldwide clash. It is a matter of tangible conflicts, not just academic ones. Culture and its value are relevant to a world in which the joint wealth of the three richest individuals is equal to the combined wealth of 600 millions of the poorest. It is just that culture wars that are of importance concern such questions as ethnic cleansing, not just the relative merits of Stendhal or the detective novel. The work itself is not what matters; it is the way it is construed or used to perpetuate the dominant ideology. The content of culture is not what is important; its relevance lies in what it signifies.

This makes the study of culture a postmodern discipline and a focal point in debates over the impact of postmodernism on global cultural industry, including academic, publishing and media industries. Though it often seemed in the last few years that the concept of postmodernism would fade away under the painful burden of its own incoherence, the attraction for it and the clamour of debates have multiplied. With its powerful configurations of new sentiments and thoughts it seemed, as David Harvey argues, set fair to play a crucial role in defining the trajectory of social and political development simply by virtue of the way it defined standards of social critique and political practice.

Culture, in the modern capitalist sense, thus begins to appear both fascinating and repellent, unabashedly complex and tantalising: out of it develop stereotypes of different kinds depending on one's ideology and world view. It is a landscape which is sometimes self-questioning, and at other times rushing blindly into an unkempt confusion of the supermarket and other commonly known features of popular culture.

Scott Lash and Celia Lury in their recent book Global Culture Industry focus on the different meanings of culture. The writers embark on an appraisal of post-Adorno semantics of the culture industry by employing the neo-Gramscian paradigm between the paranoid and the populist, between the belief that mass culture is an alien imposition on the people from above, and the euphoric view of it as a vital flourishing from below. Cultural meanings are seen in a permanent state of contestation, in which dominant values are indeed at work in popular culture but rarely without resistance to adaptation on the part of their audience, while meanings which emerge more organically from popular life are always at risk of being appropriated and reflected by the ruling cultural order.

In his essay Discourse and Discos, Terry Eagleton writes: Theory is radical and conservative together; and nowhere is this more obvious than in postmodern thought itself. It is a striking feature of advanced capitalist societies that they are at once libertarian and authoritarian, hedonist and repressive, multiple and monolithic. The reason for this is not hard to find. The logic of the marketplace is one of pleasure and plurality, of the ephemeral and discontinuous, of a great decentred network of desires of which individual consumers are the passing function. Capitalism is the most pluralist order history has ever known, restlessly transgressing boundaries and pitching diverse life-forms together.

Daring thesis

Scott Lash and Celia Lury, therefore, at a juncture when radical texts like Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment have seen their day and are no longer theoretically adequate to define the paradigmatic shifts in social theory, put forward a daring thesis that sets out to examine the altered view of the culture industry within the context of globalisation.

The rapid rate of global flow and change has brought in a state of urgency for the writers to look beyond the Frankfurt School and examine seven cultural objects in the present times: Euro '96; Young British Art; Pixar's animated movie Toy Story, Ardman Studio's claymation characters Wallace and Gromit; the movie Trainspotting; Nike, and Swatch. The trajectory of their metamorphosis from their production to distribution to marketing to consumption is analysed from various perspectives befitting the 21st century.

Emphasising different sets of conceptual tools, the authors feel that the dynamics of the global cultural industry vary enormously from the days of Fordist or national cultural industry underlined by Adorno and Horkheimer. Though the classical culture industry has not disappeared, it does not work entirely through representation. It is so ubiquitous that it seeps out of the superstructure, and then comes to infiltrate, and then take over, the infrastructure itself. Mediation in the classical culture industry was through representation, domination or hegemonic ideology. But in our emergent global culture industry, culture becomes thingified and starts to dominate both the economy and everyday life. This mediation of things has replaced the predominance of representation. Culture no longer works primarily as hegemonic ideology, as symbols, as representation but involves the emergence of things become media, of media become things.

From identity to difference

Scott Lash and Celia Lury give the reader seven main shifts from the classic model of culture industry to the global: from identity to difference or determinate objects with fixed meanings to indeterminate objects spinning out of control in heterogeneous encounters with the reflexive subjects of information capitalism; from commodity to brand or, in other words, standardised goods of the past to unique virtual entities which acquire value through particular event-experience; from representation to the thing or from culture that is interpreted to culture that is used; from the symbolic to the real; from mechanistic power to biopower; from extensity to intensity and from the actual to the virtual.

Far more than giving attention to the conditions governing the material production of the objects, it is the issues of distribution and consumption that underline the authors' concern. They do, however feel, that Adorno's fear of culture becoming a commodity has finally come true; material objects such as watches and sportswear, Nike shoes, global football and conceptual art have become powerful cultural symbols. Production of symbols in the form of brands across the globe have now become the central concern of capitalism. Things give shape to our imaginary and we carry out our communication through objects.

The argument therefore is that when culture was primarily superstructural, cultural entities were still exceptional and everyday life was the domain of material objects (goods). Now, on the other hand, cultural objects are said to be everywhere.

There is no denying that everyday life is now more saturated with images and cluttered with stuff' than in the 1940s and 1970s. Nevertheless, as Herbert Marcuse observed in One Dimensional Man, the products indoctrinate and manipulate, the thingi {filig}cation of culture necessarily operates through the continuing impact of ideology, symbols and representation. I am of the firm opinion that the classical culture industry and the global coalesce in their operation and cannot be demarcated in the age of capitalism and free market economy. The thesis, though theoretically well argued by the writers, is, therefore, inherently questionable.

The postmodern debate on culture is indeed a self-reflexive phenomenon whose nature and form themselves reflect the conditions of the postmodern and the institutional conditions along with intellectual regroupings which give shape to contemporary critical theory and critique. There is a possibility that openness and diversity in global culture, which this approach encourages, might usher in a cultural-political ethics in the postmodern era. The social and economic basis of this free-floating phenomenon as Terry Eagleton would call it of postmodernist culture is one important way of identifying contemporary experience with all its variants that affect individual values and social processes of the most fundamental kind.

I take this observation to illustrate the reality of something being utterly wrong with our society. The pursuit of wealth has become a virtue and we are blind to the forces of social change. We never ask if our future will turn out a better civil society.

Uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, the delusion of endless growth, the predatory organism of unregulated capitalism are only harbingers of a greater calamity just around the corner. The inexorable laws of economics take us by the scruff of the neck, manipulating our desires and wants.