The anthropologist Ruth Finnegan coined the expression “pathways of urban life” to describe the musical practices of a small British town. These pathways are constituted by the web of social acts of those who take part in this musical life, and they remain in force to the extent that those relationships, and the resulting habits, sustain their force and continuity. It is a suggestive way of understanding what we call “popular culture,” custom, or tradition. It speaks of what we do and how we organise ourselves (“either we organise ourselves or they will organise us,” as Jordi Claramonte, the supervisor of my doctoral thesis, used to say). What does not appear anywhere is what certain ideologies on one side or the other believe they find beneath social and historical events: essences in the form of homelands or peoples. It is also a good way of understanding the uniformity of cultural facts — or, if you prefer, their style, their distinctive workmanship. And we can apply this not only to the folkloric niches. As early as the late nineteenth century, the sociologist Gabriel Tarde declared himself fascinated by
that unprecedented spectacle of vast and populous nations feeling at once, and in almost the same way, the beautiful and the deformed, good and evil — admiring or rejecting the same paintings, the same novels, the same plays, the same operas.
And if this was so in his time, it remains so in ours, however much we may claim to be the heirs of an age in which novelty and diversity are manufactured prodigiously. Blinded by all that pyrotechnics, we fail to see the uniformity hiding beneath the appearance of the new. And yet, if one walks attentively, one is forced to recognise the powerful homogenising — globalising, some will say — force that has shaped the streets of the Western world, all colonised by the same kinds of shops and the same designs, and increasingly so across the rest of the world too. Even the variety supposedly belonging to ethnic cultures has been reduced by the standardising operations of the dynasties of “guardians of tradition” who have managed them.
Where here are the practices? Who are the homogenising agents? If we could attribute to Ruth Finnegan’s urban musicians something like a (self-)organisation in which all of them, to a greater or lesser degree, took part, who organises the musical life of “mass culture”? Who produces it? A commentator on Marxism once said that supermarket shoppers wander down the aisles like hunter-gatherers in search of good fruits. This lucid image leaves us with the question raised by the difference between the prehistoric and the modern: the wild fruit is there without anyone’s involvement; the products of commerce, however, are the apex of an extraordinarily complex web of human relations — economic, scientific, technological, political, and so on — to which the consumer is indifferent, or to which they pay attention only when their consumption becomes problematic. It is not the buyer who has put the fruits there, even if they participate, directly or indirectly, in their production. This distinction between consumer and producer allows us to suggest another: between the modern world — urban, national, capitalist, and mercantile — and the popular — local, participatory, and free of charge. Two worlds that obviously do not exist in isolation, but rather the second dissolved into the first, even if only homeopathically.
If a path is formed by the erosion of footsteps, a channel requires currents of water; it takes longer to form and is more persistent. Paths that are not walked are erased, though the occasional walker can still cross the grass if they need to. A boatman, by contrast, plays no part in laying out their waterways. Rivers are there for whoever cares to use them, and canals — except for some modest route — are works requiring organisations of a higher order: states, engineers, merchants. The channel, if anything, can be likened to the road, the railway, the racing track, or the air route. All of them are paths placed at the traveller’s disposal without that traveller having had any part in building them; for their movements, they must choose among an offering of lines designed and equipped with everything necessary for the movement of vehicles.
Culture, understood in the ordinary sense as the production of consumer goods for leisure, does not travel along pathways but along channels, canals, or roads: institutional channels laid out by organisations that use it as a prestige label for their business. These organisations are public and private — not one or the other, but both amalgamated in a mutualistic relationship. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas proposed an interesting theory which we shall only sketch here: the “systemic colonisation of the lifeworld,” in which institutional agents — political entities such as parties, governments, and ministries, alongside private companies — operate by ordering and regulating the everyday reality made up of our habits, relationships, productions, and various spontaneities, and turn it into the terrain from which to extract their profits, whether economic or political in the form of votes (the two being interchangeable). In this explanatory context, the militant slogan “either we organise ourselves or they will organise us” makes perfect sense, as does the view of the history of capitalism that sees it entering a post-Fordist phase in which it is no longer merely a matter of producing material consumer goods, but consumer goods for leisure and entertainment, and in which culture becomes, from top to bottom, a potential commodity. In this way, Marx’s “all that is solid melts into air” connects with the disquiet of the first generation of the Frankfurt School and Theodor Adorno’s “to be amused means to agree.” Agree with what? With the barbarism that has culminated in this commodification of existence down to the very marrow of our pleasures, and which conceals the path of exploitation that, according to the Marxists, has brought us here. And so — and I shall stop with the famous quotations — Walter Benjamin could say that “there is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
Here we have the modern subject — that of our triumphant modernity — thrown into the world as a being condemned to be free. How could one not be free, faced with the plethora of offerings that saturate one’s existence? But how to be free in such circumstances? Which renunciant has needed greater strength: the archaic Christian who possessed nothing, who lived among plagues and lepers, who dwelt in a mud house and only had to tear off his rags to become an anchorite in the desert? Or the Buddha, who was born a prince and had to tear himself away from palaces and harems?
This plethora of goods we are speaking of — is it one of quantity or of variety? Any seasoned folklorist knows, for instance, that one of the legacies of the modern “guardians of tradition” — figures who were always outside the practices on which they operated — has been to flatten out the troublesome ethnic and local diversities. With what interest? The same interest with which linguistic policies have flattened dialectal variations into national languages. For water, left to its own devices on a plain, creates pools, rivulets, and lagoons without order. But an engineer of the nation, of its identity and its destiny, builds wide, sharply defined channels that erase the product of the rain and harness every last drop to feed civilisation. And the canals of one homeland connect with those of the homeland on the other side of the non-physical lines of the maps. Sometimes the gauges differ, but agreements can be reached. When we speak of globalisation, we do not usually realise that its most solid and clear-cut form is represented by the International Organization for Standardization, the body behind the ISO norms, whose work makes it possible to manufacture millions of bolts and nuts compatible with any contraption anywhere on the planet. This technological harmony allows the ancient lines of commerce to extend their fertility to everything: communications, transport, standards, melodies, languages, and so on. Beneath this abundance, cultural diversities are condensed into continental civilisational areas, and what remains for select tourism and anthropology is antiquities. This is how the modern Buddhas and Christs flow together, the churches, synagogues, and mosques — all of them built from the same plastic, the same steel framing, and the same concrete.
Even contemporary art takes advantage of this universal supply of materials and technologies: the same resins and adhesives sustain installations and performances; the same digital optics produce the images, the same pixels reproduce them. As if that were not enough, artificial intelligence has come along to supply us with even more homogenising power, and a greater capacity to flood the world with content. Because now anyone can be a “content creator,” like God himself, who created the contents of the world out of nothing. The difference is that God, when creating, also created the container, according to the myth. Here the container, the channel, was already created, and the divine emulators wander down it, dazzled by its fertility. And yet, if you take your eyes off the screen and let them stroll across reality, when you come back you realise that this artificial intelligence is, basically, a sumptuous gummy-sweets factory. Its consumption causes an indigestion that only children can stand — hence the success of that aesthetic of 3D animation blockbusters made in USA: gummy characters, sickeningly hyper-expressive, drifting about and reproducing all the clichés of a hypnotic, easily digestible mawkishness. Then we are pummelled with the mantra that reason — that perfidious positivism cooked up by sinister, inhuman rationalists, dogmatic Enlighteners, and foolish scientistic types — has killed imagination and sensitivity. No: what is happening is precisely the opposite. The imposition of a prefabricated, succulent sentimentalism is massacring rationality (the media stuff themselves with weeping footballers who have lost a final), and along the way it is massacring any glimmer of generative emotionality, and therefore the capacity to imagine and to tell. Michael Ende intuited this fifty years ago in his novels Momo and The Neverending Story — works which were nevertheless interpreted according to the paradigm of technocratic reason against imagination and fantasy. The real conflict is between profitable imagination and free intelligence. And before him, Walter Benjamin saw it in Experience and Poverty: because the capacity to narrate comes out of experience, and if experience is reduced to the ceaseless vomit of a gummy-sweets factory, what is there left for us to say? The one who did not see it was Lewis Mumford in Art and Technics, where he reproduces the clichés of the myth of humanist art against dehumanising technique — as though art were not, before anything else, technique; as though we had to identify technique with machine in order to manufacture some cinematic dialectic between humans and robots.
Is it possible to speak of something like an ISO of art, one that channels it through prefabricated conduits? In the first place, one would have to untangle the knot of the very idea of art, because what is ordinarily understood by the term is confused and not very presentable outside its pragmatic contexts. It would be better to speak of the “myth of art” and, in order to bring it into the analysis of the concrete, to confine it to an institutional perimeter. This is what institutional theories do — theories to which I am taking provisional refuge here, even if in other contexts they must be ground to powder. These theories work well to explain the world of the Artworld, an expression coined by Arthur Danto: a contemporary art world defined not by its contents but by its containers — fairs, museums, galleries, cultural-policy institutions, specialist publications, academies, and so on. A microcosm so peculiar and so closed, especially for those inside it, that the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu interpreted it as a community of the faithful, devotees of the guru-artist. This Artworld presents itself to us as the sacred space free of all the deformations of any other cultural or artistic sphere. There, tradition does not reign — only creative freedom does. Nor do the commercial demands of the leisure industry, however much its works may have as their highest social aspiration a luxury market that uses them as if they were gold reserves or bitcoins. A factual confirmation of this argument is the example of Salvatore Garau, the Italian artist who put up for sale, and sold, an invisible sculpture. Despite his efforts, his work was not entirely invisible — there was still something quite plainly on view, an indelible essence of this art of our days: the price. What he sold is, if you will, a non-digital NFT, or a hypostasis of conceptual art: let the spectator imagine whatever they please. At this limit, the expression “anything goes” is revealed as “any old thing will do,” and to justify it there are the contemporary art catalogues with their pseudo-philosophical verbiage, whose function resembles that of the esoteric texts of alchemical “wisdoms”: one must drive away the fools and conceal one’s science in the thicket of an unintelligible discourse. The trap of snobbery is so obvious that idiots have never been so snobbish, and snobs so idiotic.
But let us return to the pristine, sacred space of the contemporary artist, that free subject who has so much to tell us. His image is saturated with theological and metaphysical references (genius, talent, creativity, and so on), even though many of the more sophisticated and educated among them reject the very references that have shaped, and continue to shape, their world. Is that artist really so free? If we walk through a museum of European Baroque art, for instance, we will see a style and a family resemblance that gives it coherence. Were the Baroque artists free? Yes and no — or perhaps the question of freedom makes no sense here. They belonged to an age with its technologies and its ideologies, with its customs, fashions, and ways of doing things, with its repertoires and its academies, with its institutions, its commerce, and its social channels. That is to say, exactly the same as the artist of today. Because if one walks through the museums of contemporary art, one will see the same family resemblance so characteristic of other eras — unless one is bedazzled by the ideology of the Artworld. In this family air converge the technological and the economic, both heavily globalised forces that shape local institutions. In this way, contemporary art works from one place are interchangeable with those from any other; local references are colours stripped of any meaning, a varnish that at most allows us to distinguish broad civilisational areas in the rough: East, West, or Africa.
This art has its own channels — channels as global, institutionalised, and artificial as those of any other sphere of our age. But we cannot point to it as a “systemically colonised” art, as we could to the formless jumble usually thrown together under the label of “traditional.” Contemporary art is not a self-standing product generated by the sensibility and genius of its historical heroes; it is not the culmination or the degeneration of the myth of the “autonomy of art.” It is, rather, the very product of those systematising forces that have shaped modernity. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe is the title of a book by the historian Peter Burke in which he tells us how, from the year 1500 onwards, the distinction between “popular culture” and “elite culture” has been progressively configured and accentuated — a complex dialectic that is largely artificial, and which today, thanks to the embedding within it of the leisure industry and its “mass culture,” has become more tangled still. The dates coincide with another investigation — Larry Shiner’s The Invention of Art: A Cultural History, which traces the emergence of the great institutions in which we still today preserve the essences of the loftiest culture (academies, museums, conservatories, theatres, and so on), and which have served as the framework for the configuration of the myth of art: a myth that began its career in the pretensions to greatness of Renaissance artists, which then passed through the exaltation of beauty in classicism and the new label of “Fine Arts,” and which was finally completed in the impassioned hands of the Romantics, for the benefit of the financiers who organise us today.
It is hard to imagine an institution more aligned with capitalism than the world of the “circuits of contemporary art” — the fairs, the galleries, the emerging artists, those aspirant cubs of free and committed expression (or of expression with no commitment at all), of wealth or of both, who travel these circuits with their Germanophile CVs. The institutions select them; politicians and the occasional media celebrity present them to the public; the banks, with their “social initiatives,” shelter and sponsor them, give them a pristine space insulated from the noise of the world so that they may blaspheme as much as they like, so that they may probe the wounds of our world with their works of art. As if the rest of the public were oblivious, and they, with their conceptual art or their tormented brushstrokes, came to shout at us what anyone could say in two paragraphs without a trace of hermetic ritual. What they will never do, of course, is spit in the faces of those who shelter them — perhaps because they cannot see them, since they are hidden beneath the bustle of that world of curators, gallerists, agents, and buyers. Faced with these demands, many lose themselves in marketing and in the construction of their own persona. The stars of show business are exemplary in this: beneath their dazzling masks lies the corporate machinery that handles them. The “writers” follow them at a middle distance, eagerly drifting in search of book-fair stalls at which to sign and of YouTubers who will promote them. What matters is not the content but appearing as a creator, climbing onto the pulpits to receive applause and sign books. Like those programmes whose titles include words such as “triumph,” “star,” “success,” and the like — in which the contestants are applauded on cue before they have done anything; they are puppets placed there so that their flaws, perfectly made up and pointed out, may be the springboard from tears to ovation, by being contrasted with their supposed talents. It is like taking any old violin student out of the conservatory to dress him up as a buffoon performing circus pirouettes with the bow and earning the admiration of a flat audience playing the role of the doting grandmother (anyone with a minimum of experience in musical performance knows that what is good and valuable is almost never what is showy or spectacular).
The ridiculous expression “content creator” that so many people apply to themselves nowadays is precisely the confirmation of this hollowing-out. Anyone and anything fits in here; what matters is to fill our lucrative time. We are easily caught fish, and the addiction industry, with its famous dopamine, has crafted sophisticated algorithms to fill its nets. A reader forged at such watering-holes wants nothing that does not gratify them, that asks of them the slightest effort. The point is to fill leisure time with an easy, escapist product. Witness the opinions of the readers who flood the displays of online bookstores with their little rating-stars. Books are apps that are required to have easy handling (reads easily), good performance (hooks you from the start), and good design (good plot). For many, the mere fact of reading anything at all already elevates them culturally, in the same way that Christians are elevated by divine grace (the myth of culture is, according to Gustavo Bueno, a secularisation of the myth of grace). With such cosmetics for the intelligence, one can swallow anything, opine on everything and everywhere, and say nothing — as the canons of good canned ideologies prescribe. Or as the cultivators of esotericism do. In his History of Occult Philosophy, a certain Alexandrian promises to tell us the pearls of that arcane wisdom, and in the end what he offers us is a sampler of traditions, rites, characters, and picturesque poses that exhaust themselves in their mannerisms. Of philosophies, nothing whatsoever — only a cunning bait that keeps repeating that there exists a hidden and prodigious wisdom which is the essential and existential knowledge of the All, the ultimate knowledge, the Perennial Philosophy, the Golden Tradition, union with the totality, with God and with the imperishable light, but it is an ineffable knowledge, accessible only to those initiated into the trances of these bizarre esoteric currents. If it is ineffable, why speak so much about it? As Wittgenstein wrote: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” So much chatter is highly suspect.
In the end, philosophy becomes a clinical knowledge, but in a very vulgar sense. This is how “aesthetics” transitioned from its origins as an alleged inferior gnoseology, in the words of its inventor Alexander Baumgarten, to being the name of the commercial branch tasked with selling us products to make us bodily more beautiful. In the aesthetics clinics, no one talks about philosophy of art. And if there is an aesthetics applied in this way, why not an ethics? So far, no entrepreneur has found a way to gather under the heading “ethics clinic” the motley cohort of self-help and coaching professionals — perhaps because they concern themselves very little with the real ethical problems.
What many find hard to understand is that philosophy is not a technique, even though it obviously depends on certain techniques, such as language or logic. That is why it cannot be incorporated into the systematic ends of economic or electoral profit. It is not that its critical component renders it useless; it is that it is essentially useless — it is not an instrument and cannot be turned into one. A company’s ethics department does not do philosophy: it designs strategies to maximise the goals of the organisation. If philosophy is not useful, why give it any importance? Precisely because it is not a “tool,” not an instrument, but rather functional — and utility is also confused with function. The functional is that without which an organism cannot do without endangering itself with disappearance or disfigurement. In our complex political societies, one cannot not philosophise. To renounce philosophy is just one more philosophical position: one which reduces it, for example, to scholasticism, and conceals itself under other names.
Is art also useless and functional? If so, how are we to regard all those artists who are servants of their industries? One way of understanding the evolution of contemporary art from the avant-gardes onwards is by not paying attention solely to formal developments. When Marcel Duchamp placed a urinal in an exhibition, he made the following questions plain: what is it that has value here? If the point is to break the rules, is the only thing that has value whatever the “artist” puts forward as art? This sacralising vocation is perhaps an inheritance of the shamanic aura with which so many creators have wrapped themselves. From our perspective, what is at stake is rather a struggle over the configuration of the institutions of art and their channels, conduits, and circuits. An economic and political struggle in which the Artworld, the product of that very struggle, has become a monster which, like Ungoliant, devours everything.
To take art out of the museums is impossible; what is really done is to musealise certain urban or rural spaces, fence them off, and rehearse within them practices of conceptual, contextual, ephemeral, communitarian, or whatever-other art, so that the artists running them can exclaim, like Joseph Beuys, “every human being is an artist” — when in reality what they are saying is: “Here, the only artist is me, and that’s that.” What is opposed to museum art is what has never been in museums and cannot be — what has no signature, what sails the oceans of the profane outside all channels. The profane that is not, and cannot be, sacred.
Finally, a note on the idea of capitalism. A much-praised political scientist maintains that prosperity is achieved through “capitalism, saving, and hard work.” This equation leaves out consumption, but the austerity of the capitalist is irrelevant to understanding how their activity produces economic growth. For that to happen, the cycle of work and saving must continue: saving must be turned into investment, and the efficiency of work must be multiplied. The result is an ever-growing production for which an outlet must be found, lest the system seize up. Consumption is therefore a constitutive element of this capitalism. By its own internal dynamic, the system cannot de-grow: it can only be stopped or moderated from outside. Taken as a whole, it constitutes an inertial machinery that operates by ploughing up ever more fields of our existence. The mass incorporation of the cultural into this dynamic is part of the capitalist equation. Artistic and literary goods have always been bought and sold, but today any other value foreign to their aura of “Works of Art” has been excised — a strategy to conceal the racket of an industry that produces them in unrestrained, serial fashion and reduces them to objects for sale.
From this perspective, capitalism would not be so much a clearly defined system opposed to others as a dominant note in the sociology of our age. It is the dominion of the function of profit, which demands that everything be turned into an article for the market, which side-steps any way of valuing other than the economic, and which advances to devour everything and to turn us into compulsive consumers. So, our craving for diversity is an imposture promoted by an enormous market that is constantly trying out novelties to stand out within ever narrower competitive spaces. Whether the principal agents of this process are private multinationals or states, totalitarian or democratic, is not entirely indifferent — but almost. Both globalising masses converge in their pretension to organise our lives, not for our good but for theirs. They are the colonising systems we have spoken of above.
In the face of this situation, a political theory remains pending — one that is not obsessed with power understood as the authority exercised by dominant groups, or by the factions struggling to be such. When ordinary people are asked about their political opinions, they normally talk about ideologies embodied in Parties. They are bedazzled by the game of elections and its media theatre. But the public life of every one of us, however much we may declare ourselves “apolitical,” is also political. Outside the temples of Sovereignty — the parliaments, the palaces, the ministries — lies the profane space of the anonymous user, of the consumer, of the neighbour, the worker, the passer-by, of all those who will never be “artists.” And here, once again, we can call for a form of organisation that is not apolitical but non-partisan, so that it is not the parties and their paymasters who organise us, so that we are not reduced to the suffrage, to electors-cum-voters, to consumers. Beneath the dialectic of the great empires beats this more modest dialectic between “elite politics” and “popular politics.”