Page 52 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

COMMON CULTURE

slouch’ and loud music. Likewise, Adorno’s concept of the ‘culture industry’ is
deployed to argue that highly standardized commodities that encourage
authoritarianism and conformism dominate Western capitalist culture.
In a more contemporary vein, Habermas argues that the increased 29
commodification of life by giant corporations transforms people from rational
citizens to ‘non-rational’ consumers in a way that subordinates social-existential
questions to money. Thus, one of the central criticisms of the commodification of
culture is that it not only shapes and disciplines cultural meanings but also turns
people into commodities. For example, the promotion of the ‘slender body’ as a
disciplinary cultural norm for women centres on diet as a commodity as well as self-
monitoring. Paradoxically, commodity culture offers us images of desirable foods
while proposing that we eat low calorie items and buy exercise equipment. In the
face of this contradiction the capacity for self-control and the containment of fat
is posed in moral as well as physical terms.
Traditionally, within Marxist theory commodities are said to have both ‘use-
value’ and ‘exchange-value’. Thus, while a spade may be sold, that is, exchanged
for money, it also has uses, such as digging a hole. However, the postmodern
theorist Baudrillard argues that sign-value has replaced both the use-value and
exchange-value of commodities in contemporary culture. Here, it is argued, is a
culture in which value is determined through the exchange of symbolic meanings
rather than through usefulness. Thus a commodity is not an object with use-value
but a commodity-sign. In this view, all spheres of life are penetrated by
commodification so that external validation ‘authenticated’ by formal canons or
socially formed cultural authority collapses and choice between values and
lifestyles becomes a matter of taste and style operating within a self-referential
world of commodities.
For much of its life then cultural studies and its forebears have been critical of
the commodification of culture. However, with the growing interest in active
audiences and the processes of consumption it has been argued by some writers that
the meanings generated by consumers are not necessarily those that critics identify
as being embedded in commodities. Further, with the wholesale commodification
of Western culture there is no longer a very strong case for looking to an authentic
non-commodified culture of the people. Rather, the crucial questions surround
what consumers do with commodities and what meanings are created in the
interplay of commodity and customer. Hence an increasing interest in the processes
of creative consumption.
Links Authenticity, capitalism, common culture, consumption, culture industry, Marxism

Common culture There is an ambiguity about the notion of a ‘common culture’. On
the one hand a common culture constitutes the collective or community (for
example, nation, youth group, class etc.). On the other hand a shared democratic
and participative common culture is that which is yet to be built since numerous
lines of difference also mark out culture.
In the first sense the idea of common culture is connected to notions of