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ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 79

Critical theory: from ideology critique to the sociology of culture

system, which threatens radically to reduce the possibilities for
collective, communicative action. This led him to a concern with
how late capitalist societies are legitimated and with the crisis
tendencies inherent within them. He argued that economic crises
were increasingly ‘resolved’ through politicisation and that this
process itself foregrounded problems of legitimacy and hence the
political effects of culture.
In this context, art became for Habermas merely one institu-
tional order among others. Following Weber, he viewed cultural
modernity as characterised by ‘the separation of the substantive
reason expressed in religion and metaphysics into three auto-
nomous spheres... science, morality and art’ (Habermas, 1985,
p. 9). Capitalist societies have never been able to provide adequate
motivation for their individual actors, he argued, without resort
to more traditional forms of religious belief, but these have
become decreasingly effective over time (Habermas, 1975,
pp. 77–8). Where religion had been largely system-supportive, art
and aesthetics are less obviously suited to this function. Increas-
ingly autonomous from both economics and politics, ‘bourgeois’
art collects together the human needs that cannot be met by
either, which thus become ‘explosive ingredients built into
the bourgeois ideology’ (p. 78). Avant-garde art in particular
‘strengthens the divergence between the values offered by the
socio-cultural system and those demanded by the political and
economic systems’ (p. 86). With the benefit of hindsight, it is
difficult to avoid the suspicion that Habermas was overimpressed
by the immediate impact of the counter-culture of the 1960s.
Returning to the problem in 1980, and rehearsing some of the
themes outlined in Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (Bürger,
1984), he would come to the rather different conclusion that the
historical avant-garde’s attempt to force a reconciliation between
art and life, by destroying the autonomy of art, had been doomed
to failure. ‘Areified everyday praxis can be cured’, he wrote, ‘only
by creating unconstrained interaction of the cognitive with the
moral-practical and the aesthetic-expressive elements. Reification
cannot be overcome by forcing just one of those highly stylized
cultural spheres to open up and become more accessible’
(Habermas, 1985, pp. 11–12). As with Bürger, Habermas’ final

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