Page 23 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

UTILITARIANISM

intellectual prestige which attaches, for example, to the economics
departments of our universities owes almost nothing to that discipline’s
supposed “scientificity”, and almost everything to its effectivity as a
form of political and social propaganda. As the German sociologist
Max Horkheimer observed, the consonance between “theory” and
“fact”, in intellectual thought as much as in commonsense, is
“conditioned by the fact that the world of objects to be judged is in
large measure produced by an activity that is itself determined by the
very ideas which help the individual to recognize that world and to
39
grasp it conceptually”. Utilitarianism remains chronically incapable
of a theory of culture even remotely adequate to the explanation of
systems of value. For such a theory we are obliged to look elsewhere.
Utilitarianism will figure in what follows, then, not as an alternative
solution to the cultural problems of capitalism, but rather as importantly
constitutive of those very problems, as part of the socio-cultural context
against which other cultural theories have been obliged to define
themselves. This is not to suggest that utilitarianism is unimportant.
Quite the contrary: so influential has utilitarian ideology become that
it now powerfully shapes the very fabric of our collective common
sense. A utilitarian world would be one in which any commodity
could be produced for sale, no matter what the costs of its production,
so long as demand for that commodity could be proved to exist at a
level capable of rewarding those who would produce it. It would be
a world in which the ozone layer would be progressively destroyed in
the interests of the chemicals industry; in which child prostitution
and drug addiction would be rife; in which almost anything and anyone
could be bought and sold. It is, of course, the world in which we live,
here and now.
In Chapters 2 to 4, I will be concerned to chart the development of
four other types of cultural theory, both as general components in the
culture of the West and as specific elements in the British national
culture. These I will term respectively: culturalism, Marxism,
structuralism and feminism. I use the term culturalism here to denote
an intellectual tradition which deliberately counterposes the value of
culture to the claims of utility. This is a tradition which typically
conceives culture in radically anti-individualist fashion, as an organic
whole, and in radically anti-utilitarian fashion, as a repository of
values superior to those of material civilization. By Marxism I refer,
in the first place, to the work of Karl Marx himself, which combined

14