Culture, Class, and Critical Theory

Between Bourdieu and the Frankfurt School

David Gartman

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781138920583
• eBook ISBN: 9781136169762
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Culture, Class, and Critical Theory develops a theory of culture that explains how ideas create and legitimate class inequalities in modern society. This theory is developed through a critique and comparison of the powerful ideas on culture offered by Pierre Bourdieu and the Frankfurt School thinkers, especially Theodor Adorno. These ideas are illuminated and criticized through the development of two empirical cases on which Gartman has published extensively, automobile design and architecture.

Bourdieu and the Frankfurt School postulate opposite theories of the cultural legitimation of class inequalities. Bourdieu argues that the culture of modern society is a class culture, a ranked diversity of beliefs and tastes corresponding to different classes. The cultural beliefs and practices of the dominant class are arbitrarily defined as superior, thus legitimating its greater share of social resources. By contrast, the thinkers of the Frankfurt School conceive of modern culture as a mass culture, a leveled homogeneity in which the ideas and tastes shared by all classes disguises real class inequalities. This creates the illusion of an egalitarian democracy that prevents inequalities from being contested.

Through an empirical assessment of the theories against the cases, Gartman reveals that both are correct, but for different parts of modern culture. These parts combine to provide a strong legitimation of class inequalities.

1 Modern Culture as Mass Unity or Ranked Diversity

For critical sociologists, two of the foremost theories informing the debate on how culture legitimates inequality in modern society are those of Pierre Bourdieu and the Frankfurt School. Each theory has its separate advocates, but seldom do they address one another, preferring instead to ignore the challenge posed by the other theoretical tradition. This is also true of the founders of these theories. Of course, by 1979, when Bourdieu's Distinction was published, all of the founding members of the Frankfurt School were dead, depriving them of the opportunity to respond to this major work on culture. Bourdieu, on the other hand, had ample opportunity in his lifetime to address the work of the Frankfurt School, but generally chose to ignore it, beyond some cheeky dismissals such as characterizing Theodor Adorno as “an arrogant theoretician who refuses to sully his hands with empirical trivia and who remains too viscerally attached to the values and profi ts of Culture to be able to make it an object of science” (Bourdieu 1984: 511).

The mutual and willful ignorance of these important theoretical traditions is unfortunate, for it has prevented them from clearly formulating and researching the issues that both unite and divide them. Both Bourdieu and the Frankfurt School share a critical perspective on modern culture, arguing that ideas, beliefs, art, and artifacts reproduce and legitimate the inequalities of wealth and power in capitalist society. But what divides them is not, as some have suggested, Bourdieu's empirical research versus the Frankfurt School's theoretical focus, or even Bourdieu's structuralism versus the Frankfurt School's Marxism. The real division between these similarly critical sociological theories is not on research methods or theoretical foundations, but on the concrete issue of diversity in the culture of modern society. Bourdieu argues that modern society is characterized by a ranked diversity of cultural objects, which distinguishes diff erent classes and simultaneously makes some seem superior to others. This hierarchical culture legitimates the unequal distribution of power and wealth by making the dominant class seem more deserving because it consumes the “right” culture, and the dominated class less deserving because it consumes the “wrong” one. The Frankfurt School, by contrast, argues that modern society is characterized by a leveled unity or similarity of cultural objects, which hides the real class divisions of capitalist society. This mass culture, consumed by all, legitimates inequality by creating the illusion that all members of society are basically equal, with some just having more of what all desire because they work harder in the market and receive more income. Ultimately, then, the diff erence between these two great theories of modern culture is reduced to this question: Does modern society possess a mass culture shared by all, or a ranked diversity of class cultures?

MARX: CULTURE AS MASS UNITY

These two theories of culture ultimately owe their origins to two great founders of sociology—Karl Marx and Max Weber. To understand these contemporary theories and their diff erences, it is fi rst necessary to review their classical origins. The Frankfurt School derives its theory of a mass culture as obscuring the class diff erences of capitalist society from Marx's concept of commodity fetishism, which he develops in the fi rst volume of Capital. Marx derives this concept of fetishism from the general theory of ideology developed in his earlier work. In he German Ideology Marx and Engels argue that most societies are unifi ed by a common set of beliefs and values that originate in the economy. Even though the material interests of the ruling or owning class, and the laboring class of each society are opposed, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas” and are widely shared by all (Marx and Engels 1976a: 59). Why? Marx and Engels give two answers.

Their simplistic and instrumental answer holds that the class that owns the means of material production also controls the means of cultural production— e.g. newspapers, publishing houses, television networks—and consciously uses them to disseminate ideas that serve its material interests. Directly following this, however, Marx and Engels off er an alternative answer that is more complex and structuralist. “The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations, the dominant material relations grasped as ideas; hence of the relations which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance” (Marx and Engels 1976a: 59). This version implies that class position does not directly determine ideas, but that both the dominant class and the dominant ideas are determined by the overall structure of production relations in a society. This social structure determines ideas largely through molding the cognitive limits of human consciousness. For example, in capitalism the division of society into diff erent occupations and diff erent classes prevents people from consciously coordinating their own economic activity, and turns the allocation of labor over to the chance workings of the market. Consequently, these relations of production make people's own labor appear in their consciousness as an alien or estranged entity, governed by laws of nature they cannot control. “The social power … which arises through the cooperation of diff erent individuals as it is caused by the division of labor appears to these individuals, since their cooperation is not voluntary but has come about naturally, not as their own united power, but as an alien force existing outside them, of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant, which they thus are no longer able to control” (Marx and Engels 1976a: 48).

In Capital, Marx (1967a: 71–83) calls this fallacious consciousness “commodity fetishism” and sees it as an ideology that unites all classes and obscures the inequalities between them. Because all commodities, including labor power, sell for a value equal to the labor time expended in their production, the exploitative wage relation between labor and capital appears to be a fair exchange between equal parties. The relations between conscious humans hence take on the appearance of relations between things, which are governed by objective laws of the market beyond human control. Capitalism thus creates in the consciousness of people a world turned upside down, a fantasy world in which humans are reduced to mere things, and things (commodities) are endowed with the human traits of consciousness and will. But Marx argues that the rise of new forces of production breaks the spell of commodity fetishism. Competition forces capitalists to replace small workshops with a few workers by giant factories, in which the eff orts of thousands are coordinated and commanded like an army. Modern industry thus impresses on the consciousness of everyone the social character of labor, and the possibility that the conscious, collective allocation of society's labor can replace the market's unplanned chaos of individual exchanges (Marx 1967b: 262–66; Marx and Engels 1976b: 489–93).

MARX'S LEGACY: LUKÁCS, THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL, AND REIFIED CULTURE

Half a century after Marx introduced his concept of commodity fetishism the Marxist philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukács renames it “reifi — cation,” and argues that this fallacy of seeing human relations as things is the unifying structure of all capitalist culture. In his 1923 History and Class Consciousness, however, Lukács argues that the industrial proletariat is in a structural position to break the spell of reifi cation. Members of the bourgeoisie are structurally incapable of penetrating the ideology of reifi — cation, for they experience themselves as both subjects and objects. They make subjective decisions about their businesses, but in doing so simultaneously experience the objective limits of the laws of the market. Proletarians, on the other hand, experience themselves only as objects, for the capitalist labor process strips from them all subjective actions and turns them into the commodity of labor power dominated by the market. Consequently, these workers are able to see the human, subjective core behind the reifi ed façade of the commodity, for they are that core. They are the physical, mental, and moral beings behind the false “thingness” of the commodity of labor power, and are thus able see that all commodities are products of human creation (Lukács 1971a: 159–81).

Lukács's work on reifi cation sets the agenda for the subsequent analysis of culture by the Frankfurt School. When he was writing in the early 1920s, his notion of a revolutionary proletariat that could penetrate the myth of reifi cation to become class conscious seemed to be validated by historical events—the Russian revolution of 1917 and the German revolution of 1918. But throughout the later 1920s and early 1930s, both the Soviet Union and the Weimar Republic increasingly replaced the goal of revolutionary social change with that of rapid industrialization, and relied on authoritarian rule to accomplish this. Support for these reactionary policies by substantial fractions of the working class seemed to contradict Lukács's idea of the structural capacity of the proletariat to cut through reifi ed consciousness. But a group of Marxist intellectuals at the University of Frankfurt's Institute for Social Research inventively use Lukács's concept of reifi cation to explain these developments.

Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and others, who collectively became known as the Frankfurt School, develop an argument that the consciousness and personality of all classes living under capitalism, including workers, are distorted by the structure of this system. The new structure of monopoly capitalism, which is dominated by large-scale, mass-production corporations, generates authoritarian personalities that crave domineering leaders and tolerate no dissent. And the cultural products of this economy are necessarily homogenized and uncritical commodities, off ering to all people the same superfi cial escape from alienated reality that make them content with the system. In other words, culture also becomes a reifi ed commodity, which obscures the oppressive production relations between people behind a façade of things that seem inevitable (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972).

The Frankfurt School retains Marx's notion that culture is produced by the general form of social relations, and thus, unlike Lukács, does not believe that any particular class has privileged access to true consciousness. But they reject Marx's assertion that reifi ed consciousness can be broken by the increasingly socialized means of production. Although they recognize that capitalism creates giant bureaucratic organizations that consciously coordinate the labor of thousands, they argue that this socialized mechanism of production does not break but reinforces the aura of reifi cation. The bureaucracies of monopoly capitalism themselves become seen not as human creations but as the inevitable technical means for producing more commodities, more things for all.

The Frankfurt thinkers argue that these reifi ed production organizations also leave their marks on cultural products, helping to produce reifi ed consciousness. To cheaply mass produce culture for large markets, these bureaucracies rigidly standardize not merely work tasks but also the products themselves. Diversity and innovation are eliminated from products in order to achieve the effi ciencies required for profi table production. So, for example, to allow mass production of autos, the Ford Motor Company not only eliminated all models but the Model T, but also eliminated from it all beauty and embellishment that was superfl uous to the effi cient production of basic transportation. However, these cultural products molded by costcutting effi ciencies create an unanticipated consequence—they expose to consumers the oppressive social relations under which they are produced. The standardized, unchanging Model T, for example, testifi ed to a labor process that treats workers not as individuals but as standardized, unthinking things, rigidly controlled for the production of value for others.

This exposure by cultural products of the oppressive relations of monopoly capitalism is dangerous in a society in which workers are themselves consumers, and demand that their products provide an escape from the alienated conditions of their work. Under market pressure to meet this demand, capitalists are forced to off er consumers products with the diversity and change that are denied them at work. They do so not by changing production but merely by hiding the telltale signs of standardization and dehumanization in their products under diverse, changing, humanized surfaces. Consequently, the Frankfurt School argues, the culture industry's products themselves become reifi ed—their appearance as individuated, ever-changing, exciting things disguise the reality of the unchanging, alienated relations under which they are produced. Further, because consumers of all classes are off ered the same standardized products, which are diff erentiated only superfi cially, the real class divisions of capitalism are obscured. The diff erences between high and low culture that previously symbolized class inequality are thus eradicated, and this rigidly stratifi ed society takes on the appearance of a leveled democracy in which all are equally served by mass-produced abundance (Adorno 1993; Horkheimer and Adorno 1972).

WEBER: CULTURE AS RANKED DIVERSITY

This analysis of culture originated by Marx and developed by the Frankfurt School continues to be infl uential in sociology, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. But for many sociologists its assertions of direct causal connections between the structure of the economy and a pervasive, unifi ed consciousness that legitimates inequality are too simplistic to account for the variety of cultural struggles in modern society. Many skeptics look to the work of Max Weber for a more convincing conception of culture. Although Weber shares Marx's view of ideas and beliefs as a legitimation of social inequality, he diff ers on how this is accomplished. While Marx sees culture as a direct refl ection of economic organization, Weber recognizes culture as comprising a potentially independent status order, in which people with different beliefs and values struggle for honor or prestige. And while Marx sees culture as maintaining inequality by imposing on all a false unity of similar beliefs that hides real class diff erences, Weber believes that culture legitimates inequality by establishing a ranking of diff erent beliefs, which makes the holders of some seem superior to others.

Weber makes a general argument for the analytic independence of culture from the economy in Economy and Society (1968: 926–40). He defi nes classes as constituted by a common position in the economic market, where goods are produced. Classes are distinguished largely by the property possessed and services off ered in the market. By contrast, status (cultural) groups are constituted by a common style of life, determined by how goods are consumed (937). But Weber argues that while analytically the two types of groups are defi ned by diff erent resources, empirically and historically they are intertwined in complex ways. And nowhere does he better reveal the complex relation between economic class and cultural status group than in his sociology of religion.

Weber does not conceive religion as a cultural refl ex of the economy, as does Marx in his infamous analysis of religion as the opium of the masses (Marx 1975: 175). Rather, he sees it as a realm of struggle in itself, with its own particular kind of status goods and organizations that dispense them. While Weber admits that the most primitive religions promise to magically infl uence economic outcomes, he argues that as religion develops the rewards off ered individuals shift from economic to spiritual ones, like redemption or salvation. Religions of salvation generally develop among the economically repressed strata, for they need deliverance from suff ering in another world more than privileged strata, which are favored in this one (Weber 1946b: 272–77). The price the repressed pay for this salvation increasingly becomes not economic, but cultural—i.e. adherence to a set of ethical norms, enforced by religious offi cials in separate organizations. Thus, religion produces a cultural economy, so to speak. Religious producers, such as churches, sects, and virtuosos, compete with one another to deliver spiritual goods to consumers, who must pay in ethical conformity. But religious organizations off er to adherents not merely the promise of salvation in another world but also the distinction in this world of being considered worthy of salvation, that is, charisma or personal giftedness. Thus, Weber (1946b: 287) argues, religion creates a cultural inequality, and becomes part of the status stratifi cation of society.

Having established religion as a separate realm of status confl ict, however, Weber shows that this realm is intertwined with class confl ict. He argues that diff erent classes have diff erent religious preferences, determined not directly by economic interest, but indirectly by the practical conduct demanded by economic position. Thus, members of diff erent classes have an “elective affi nity” to ideas that validate or glorify their way of being in the world, which is heavily infl uenced by their economic conduct (Weber 1946b: 284). For example, Weber argues that ethical salvation religions are usually created by privileged groups like intellectuals. But once in existence, petite bourgeois and artisans have an elective affinity to these religions, because they validate the rational, self-denying practices required by their occupations (Weber 1968: 486–87).

If religious beliefs do not originate directly from the economic interests of the followers, what ensures the production of beliefs that have an affinity to their practical conduct? Weber finds the answer to this question not on the demand side of the cultural economy, but on the supply side. It is the competition among religious entrepreneurs for followers that forces them to create religious goods that match the latter's status demands (Weber 1968: 456, 466). So, for example, Weber states that salvation religions are usually produced by intellectuals, who are motivated by their own metaphysical need to understand the world as a meaningful cosmos (1968: 499). But to attract a broader range of adherents, these religions are forced to alter their beliefs to accommodate the demand of the lower classes for compensation for suffering. So just like producers in the economic marketplace, the competition of producers in the cultural marketplace drives them to offer new and different status goods to maintain old consumers and attract new ones. This creates a dynamic of product differentiation similar to that which drives the economic market (Weber 1968:452–67).

For Weber, like Marx, the ideas and beliefs of culture often serve to legitimate inequalities of power and wealth. For example, he argues that the primary function of religion for the privileged classes is “legitimating their own life pattern and situation in the world” (1968: 491). By contrast, the economically unprivileged seek in religion not legitimation of their position in this world, but compensation for their suffering in another one. So for Weber, unlike Marx, culture is diverse, not unified. The cultural beliefs and practices of the privileged group are not shared by all, but they are somehow recognized by all to be superior. And he argues that the main determinant of the status ranking or relative recognition of different cultures is sheer power. “The development of status is essentially a question of stratification resting upon usurpation. Such usurpation is the normal origin of almost all status honor” (Weber 1946a: 188). Weber recognizes that the source of this power is sometimes economic wealth, but he also shows that political power may also influence cultural dominance, especially in religion (1968: 411–20).

WEBER'S LEGACY: BOURDIEU AND CULTURE AS CLASS-RANKED DIVERSITY

In modern sociology no one owes more to Weber's analysis of culture than Pierre Bourdieu, who explicitly acknowledges this debt (Bourdieu 1998c: 57–58). He argues, like Weber, that cultures generally contain a diversity of ideas and beliefs, which are influenced not directly by economic interests but indirectly by practical preferences molded by class position. For Bourdieu, the ideas of an economic class are shaped by its habitus, a set of unconscious dispositions that are in turn conditioned by class position. This seems compatible with Weber's concept of ele...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in Social and Political Thought
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Modern Culture as Mass Unity or Ranked Diversity
• 2 Reification of Consumer Products: A General History Illustrated by the American Automobile
• 3 Culture as Class Symbolization or Mass Reification? A Critique of Bourdieu's Distinction
• 4 Three Ages of the Automobile: The Cultural Logics of the Car
• 5 Why Modern Architecture Emerged in Europe, Not America: The New Class and the Aesthetics of Technocracy
• 6 Bourdieu’s Theory of Cultural Change: Explication, Application, Critique
• 7 Bourdieu and Adorno: Converging Theories of Culture and Inequality
• References
• Index