Page 27 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

UTILITARIANISM

motivation for individual actors without resort to some more traditional
form of religious belief, and that these latter were now becoming
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decreasingly effective; and second, that bourgeois art and aesthetics,
having become autonomous from both economics and politics and
having thereby collected together those human needs that cannot be
met by either, had thus become “explosive ingredients built into the
bourgeois ideology”. For Habermas, as for Bell, the cultural
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contradictions of capitalism had become increasingly explosive over
time; for Habermas, as for Gouldner, their source lay in the cultural
inadequacies of utilitarianism rather than in the socio-pathology of
the intelligentsia. All three were agreed, however, that modern
intellectual culture had become, in some deep structural sense,
significantly adversarial. As we shall see, both culturalism, of which
Gouldner’s (19th century) Romanticism is but one particular example,
and structuralism and post-structuralism, themselves examples of what
Bell means by modernism and postmodernism respectively, constitute
extremely important instances of this more general adversarial culture.
It is easy to quibble with particular aspects of each argument:
Psychedelic Romanticism had much less in common with its 19th
century “precursor” than Gouldner supposed; modernism has been
much less consistently anti-bourgeois and utilitarianism much less
consistently hedonistic (for utility can mean “use” as well as “happiness’)
than Bell supposed; and art and aesthetics seem much more easily
tamed by the political and economic systems than Habermas supposed.
With the benefit of hindsight, it becomes clear also that all three had
been radically over-impressed by the immediate impact of the sixties
“counter culture”, the New Left, and so on, so much so that they
each misinterpret this very specific outcome of a very particular crisis
of legitimation (occasioned as much as anything by the Vietnam War)
as evidence of some long-run secular trend. The greater visibility,
perhaps even near-dominance, of utilitarian and quasi-utilitarian
thematics in the public culture of the eighties and nineties is anticipated
neither by Gouldner nor by Bell nor by Habermas. The intellectual
culture of the past decade and a half has in fact been such as to suggest
even the possibility of a directly contrary long-run trend, by which
intellectual radicalism has become progressively incorporated into
and subservient to the driving imperatives of commodification and
bureaucratization (each in themselves equally utilitarian trends). Be
that as it may, there is nonetheless a considerable body of evidence,

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