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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

an aesthetic economy « Previous | |Next »
October 14, 2010

In Illusion Only is Sacred : From the Culture Industry to the Aesthetic Economy in Thesis Eleven No 73 2003 David Roberts says that he proposes a more open- ended account of the culture industry and its transformations with reference to the aesthetic economy and to the cultural heritage industry. He begins with a closed conception:

The concept of the culture industry needs to be seen in the larger context of the critique of modernity. From Rousseau and the romantics, from Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Wagner, and Nietzsche onwards, the normative critique of a market-based culture has seen it as symptomatic of the decadence of civilization, of the dialectic of enlightenment, of the advent of one- dimensional man and the end of history, art, the subject and experience. The completion of modernity thus envisaged is not apocalyptic but entropic: the progressive loss of critical distinctions whose vanishing point can be described as the convergence of utopia and dystopia. This is the fate of modernity qua modernism. The rest is silence, accompanied by the gesture to the wholly Other of a world trapped in materialism.

Heidegger, Adorno and Benjamin all present versions of the completion of modernity. Heidegger and Adorno converge in their view of the negative dialectic of progress: the entropic convergence of utopia and dystopia. Benjamin stresses the other side of the culture industry, not the logic of bureaucratic planning and rationalization but the dream time of capitalism.

He adds that the culture industry as analysed by Adorno is flourishing today, indeed that it embraces ever larger sectors of the economy. Thus we have:

the ever expanding scope of the entertainment industry in all its branches and multimedia forms in the leisure society; the arts and heritage industries, e.g. festivals, museums, galleries, exhibitions, heritage sites and theme parks, which are closely aligned with the tourism industry and its offshoot, museum building and heritage restoration as key means to urban revitalization; the lifestyle indus- tries, catering for body and soul, in the society of mass individualization; and of course design as the indispensable art and science of advertising from fashion to cosmetic surgery, from corporate images to shopping centres, the old/new universe of merchandizing, brand names and logocentrism in the society of the spectacle. The global reach of the culture industry is perhaps most obviously evident in the way the ideology of consumption is becoming the mass culture of economic globalization.

The Janus face of capitalist modernity is precisely that of the culture industry and its dream factory: the marriage of magic and technology, of aesthetic illusion and rationalization was born of the double spirit of capitalism: puritan and romantic.

An ‘aesthetic economy’m emerges from the new aesthetic culture being brought into being by the marriage of art and industry, which is overcoming the split between high art and the technical, decorative and applied arts.

Roberts says that:

What distinguishes Benjamin from Adorno is that he can be understood as extending the concept of the culture industry from the commodification of culture to the culturalization of the commodity through its investment with symbolic (dream) meaning (the mythology of modernity) and through the aestheticization of consumption and of everyday life. In this sense Debord’s society of the spectacle and Böhme’s aesthetic economy complement each other.

The aesthetic economy is premised on the ubiquity of the aestheticiz- ation of the real and rests accordingly on aesthetic labour and the produc- tion of aesthetic value, i.e. the creation of display and staging values as a new type of use value, centred around the manufacture of semblance, aura, atmosphere, illusion in relation to people and things, townscapes and land- scapes. The concept of aesthetic value is conceived by Böhme as a third value in addition to use and exchange value, arising from a new attitude to the pleasure principle which privileges desires and subverts the distinction between true and false needs.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:20 PM |