Page 26 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 17

Cultural studies and cultural theory

is it one many utilitarian philosophers chose to embrace with any
great enthusiasm. Hume, for example, hurriedly proceeded to the
qualification that: ‘Whoever would assert an equality of genius
and elegance between Ogilby and Milton . . . it appears an extrav-
agant paradox, or rather a palpable absurdity, where objects so
disproportioned are compared together’ (Hume, 1965, p. 7). While
John Stuart Mill insisted that: ‘It is better to be... Socrates dis-
satisfied than a fool satisfied’ (Mill, 1962, pp. 258, 260). Williams’
asymmetry between capitalist production for profit and cultural
and social reproduction is clearly inscribed in both texts. Hume
and Mill sought to resolve the problem by an appeal to the notion
that particular individuals might not be properly fit to judge in
matters of ‘taste’. Proper judgement between two pleasures, Mill
concludes, can be made only ‘by those who are competently
acquainted with both’ (p. 259). Commendable though the
implied preference for poetry over push-pin might seem to those
who value poetry (or philosophy), it remains intellectually
incoherent. Qualitative definitions of experiential value, such
as those Mill experiments with, are quite fundamentally in-
compatible with the utilitarian schema’s initial starting point
in the so-called ‘felicific calculus’ (or calculation of happiness):
the utility maximisation principle remains workable only as long
as happiness is understood as providing a single, quantitative
measure of human well-being.
Which is not to suggest that Mill’s preferences are mistaken,
only that he cannot justify them in consistently utilitarian terms.
The case against utilitarianism itself, which Mill refuses to
make, is essentially sociological in character. The doyen of
mid-twentieth century American sociology, Professor Talcott
Parsons of Harvard, summarised the central argument as early
as 1937. The peculiarity of the utilitarian schema, he observed,
was that it proceeded as if people’s goals were random and their
ways of knowing the world, and so of identifying those goals,
essentially indistinguishable from those of rational-scientific
knowledge (Parsons, 1949, pp. 60–61). In reality, however, human
goals are very clearly structured or patterned. In reality,
moreover, human actors know the world in ways other than that
of positive science: their goals are patterned as much by systems

17