Page 25 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

UTILITARIANISM

origins are to be found in that central contradiction between capital
and organized labour which lies at the very heart of the Western
capitalist system. As the working classes organized themselves
industrially into trade unions and politically into socialist and labour
parties, so too they began to mount a developing critique of bourgeois
culture, a critique which found expression not only in institutions
and artefacts, but also in various types of Marxist and quasi-Marxist
oppositional cultural theory.
A somewhat analogous relationship pertains between feminism and
the women’s movement. Feminist opposition to patriarchy, whether or
not explicitly conjoined to a critique of capitalism, has typically produced
its own set of independent cultural demands and expectations, and
with them its own characteristic styles of cultural creation and cultural
theory. Moreover, there is a strong sense in which feminist cultural
politics have been unavoidably anti-utilitarian or at least non-utilitarian.
As we have already noted, utilitarianism typically measures value, or
“utility”, only in terms of monetary gain: if it sells, then it must be
valuable. But the sexual division of labour typical of modern (though
perhaps not “postmodern”) capitalism consigned women, and more
especially middle-class women, to a “private sphere” of domestic labour,
that is, to a world of invisible effort in which no money changes hands,
and which therefore becomes “without utility”. For 19th century feminists
in particular it thus became essential to argue for notions of worth
other than those provided by the capitalist market.
Culturalist and structuralist versions of cultural theory appear less
obviously the products of a specifically capitalist civilization because
they are indeed so obviously the creations of a professionalized
traditional intelligentsia, to revert to Gramsci’s term, and it is
characteristic of such intelligentsias to attribute a certain timelessness
to their own aspirations and interests. But, as I have already suggested,
the traditional intelligentsia is in fact a modern, rather than an archaic
or residual, social class: it is brought into being as a result of the
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combined effects of cultural commodification on the one hand, and
state sponsored education on the other. And its intellectual
preoccupations are normally very different from those prescribed by
utilitarianism. Thus, whatever the utilitarian cultural expectations of
business and political leaders, scholarship in the humanities has been
much more obviously concerned with problems of belief, and with
the various systems of religious, political, ethical and aesthetic value

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