A philosophy of cultural modernity: Márkus’s contribution to the philosophy of culture

Philosophy of culture contra philosophy of art/aesthetics

As remarked, one way that the philosophy of culture might be framed is as a central or overarching topic within aesthetics or philosophy of art. Is there any such ‘aesthetics’ or conventional ‘philosophy of art’ in Márkus’s work? The short answer is ‘no’: there is neither an aesthetics – in the Kantian sense of an inquiry into aesthetic experience and/or aesthetic judgment or evaluation of art – nor a philosophy of art centred on the ontology of the work of art, a hermeneutics of meaning, or cultural–historical role of art as a means of world-disclosure (although the latter, I suggest, gets closer to Márkus’s project). ⁴ Rather, both aesthetics/philosophy of art are subsumed (one is tempted to say ‘aufgehoben’) into Márkus’s philosophy of cultural modernity. ‘Aesthetics’ is taken, according to this broadly Hegelian account, as the theoretical discourse on the nature, meaning, and validity of (high) art practices within cultural modernity. Indeed, we could call Márkus’s hermeneutic approach to (high) culture/mass culture an historicist ‘metaphilosophy of art’ that at the same time incorporates other ‘high cultural’ practices in modernity typically regarded as opposed to, or independent of, art, not only popular forms of culture but also scientific knowledge, practices, and institutions (Márkus, 2013: 141ff). From this point of view, philosophy of culture, as a key element of the philosophical discourse of modernity, offers an historically grounded meta-theoretical perspective on the constitution of cultural modernity that encompasses cultural practices and institutions of art, including discourses of aesthetics and art theory, but also the ‘hard’ sciences, encompassing particular canons of scientific inquiry and the social ramifications of scientific discourse more generally.

A philosophy of cultural modernity

Given the historical breadth and scope of Márkus’s approach, what of the concept of culture at the centre of this inquiry? Márkus describes at length the fact that the concept of culture ‘interrelates and unites two concepts that seem to be utterly different’: the anthropological conception of culture and the ‘high’ conception of culture (Márkus, 2011: 18–20, 285ff). As a first pass we might think of Hegel’s conception of Geist – that realm of shared meanings embodied and communicated via sensuous forms of representation, although Márkus extends the concept of (higher) culture to include the natural sciences. Nonetheless, despite Márkus drawing on the Hegelian conception of Geist for theorizing the concept of culture, he eschews any questionable metaphysical commitments or teleological philosophy of history. In Márkus’s hands the concept of culture is shorn of metaphysical foundations and stripped of any teleological historical destiny. Instead, Márkus adopts the more philosophically modest path of an historical-conceptual reconstruction of the hermeneutic functioning of historically changing conceptions of culture, which organise the relationship between the arts and the sciences, between humanistic and scientific knowledge, and between elite as well as popular practices of interpretation within cultural modernity.

The next point to stress is that Márkus focuses on what he calls the ‘value concept’ of culture (culture as related to artistic or meaning-generating practices with socially recognized aesthetic value) rather than the ‘anthropological’ conception of culture (pertaining to shared practices and social institutions comprising a communal ‘way of life’) (Márkus, 2011: 18–20). He rejects the elevation of the latter to an all-encompassing notion of ‘culture’ (as found in contemporary cultural studies) that subsumes, or indeed collapses, the value-concept of culture into the anthropological/communal ‘way of life’ concept. Márkus offers instead what we could call an ‘historical semantics’ of culture, one that analyses the shifts and tensions in the articulations of meaning pertaining to the value concept of ‘culture’ (in Western modernity) across different historical contexts. At the same time, he proposes a schematic historico-conceptual reconstruction of the ‘path of culture’ from the opposition between ‘refined’ versus ‘popular culture’ (in the early modern period) to ‘high’ versus ‘mass culture’ (from the 19th century to the later 20th century) (Márkus, 2013: 128ff). In this respect, the philosophical dimensions of Márkus’s reconstruction of the concept of culture become clear: by focusing on the value concept of culture, while avoiding both anthropological as well as strictly Marxist conceptions of culture, he opens the way to a philosophical conception of culture that would provide a hermeneutic framework for theorizing cultural modernity in our contemporary historical constellation.

Márkus’s focus on high culture places an emphasis on the periods spanning the 19th to the 20th centuries. What of the 20th to 21st centuries? As I shall suggest, we could think of Márkus’s dialectic of high and mass culture, with its underlying dynamic opposition between enlightenment and romanticism, as pointing to what we might call the ‘end of culture’ (a latter-day variation on Hegel’s ‘end of art’ thesis). Central to this notion is the overcoming or dissolution of the high culture/mass culture dichotomy – which is tantamount to a questioning or rejection of the value-concept of culture itself – in favour of a pluralization of cultural spheres of meaning (Márkus, 2011: 30–35). This dissolution of the high culture/mass culture dichotomy is clearly related to the pervasive commodification of culture within modernity; but we could add that it is also related to the shift from a Eurocentric conception of cultural modernity towards more pluralistic, decentred, hybrid conceptions of ‘multiple modernities’. ⁵ This dialectical shift reflects a movement beyond the traditional philosophical discourse of modernity. It becomes more important within an increasingly globalized, post-historical, technologically mediated set of cultural systems, which are no longer principally defined with reference to Western/European cultural modernity but articulated in a pluralistic manner in relation to multiple overlapping historical centres of reference.

From refined versus popular to high versus mass culture

Another way of expressing this project is as a conceptual ‘topography’ – or historico-hermeneutic cognitive mapping – of the value-concept of culture within Western cultural modernity. There are three phases in Márkus’s historico-conceptual reconstruction (2013: 128ff): (1) the emergence of ‘refined’ culture (in the early modern period, roughly from the Renaissance through to the 17th and 18th centuries) as opposed to a ‘popular’ culture (encompassing both folk and lower class urban culture). This constellation of refined versus popular culture was embedded within a relatively stable or static social ordering that comprised an elite class enabled to pursue refined cultural activities (music, painting, literature, and so on) contrasted with their popular (folk and lower urban) cultural counterparts. ⁶ (2) The shift from refined towards (bourgeois) forms of ‘high culture’ with its opposing pole now defined as ‘mass culture’ (rather than popular culture). This shift from ‘refined versus popular’ to ‘high versus mass culture’ reflected a transformation of the early modern social order into an highly industrialized, ‘massified’, dynamic social-economic order (capitalism) marked by a commodification of cultural forms mediated via technologized forms of production, distribution, and reception. The value concept of high culture retained its air of autonomy and aesthetic value as distinct from the ‘massified’ forms of cultural practice that served the increasingly urbanized masses.

High culture, moreover, as distinct from ‘refined’ culture, was marked by a ‘universalizing’ impetus, developing into the familiar cultural ‘system of the arts’ (Kristeller), namely the modern sphere of autonomous arts (the beaux arts or die schöne Kunste) – architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry – appearing from the late 18th century until the late 19th century (with the advent of photography and cinema) (Márkus, 2011: 31ff). This was accompanied by the emergence of philosophical aesthetics as a distinctive discipline – with Baumgarten, Kant, and post-Kantian idealism/romanticism – that focused almost exclusively on high culture, ignoring mass culture until the early to mid-20th century (with Simmel, Benjamin, Adorno, and so on). The consolidation of high culture was linked with the dynamic social-economic ordering defining capitalist societies: the concomitant processes of industrialization, urbanization, development of mass literacy, commodification of cultural forms, and birth of industrialized cultural systems (‘culture industries’) for the production and reception of both high cultural and mass cultural products.

The counterpart to high culture was mass culture – ‘massified’ in relation to various social institutions and pertaining to the masses socially – encompassing all manner of culturally commodified, industrially produced, communally meaningful artefacts as distinct from the residually unique or artisanal modes of production pertaining to high cultural forms and works. Both high culture and mass culture have ‘universalizing’ tendencies, the one as an expression of a supposedly ‘universal’ cultural-aesthetic as well as humanistic moral values, the other as pervading the everyday lifeworld of an increasingly ‘globalized’ mass of people sharing common cultural forms and sources of meaning. The universalizing impetus of ‘humanistic’ high cultural values was opposed to the utopian potential for a ‘democratization’ of (mass) culture as a challenge to elite cultural hegemony with its monopolization of aesthetic value (the so-called ‘ideology of the aesthetic’).

Mass culture and the popularization of science

For Márkus, however, mass culture includes not only ‘art’ (in its mass forms) but ‘science’ (both natural and human) as well. This might seem a perplexing claim, given the traditional opposition between the natural sciences and the humanistic arts established since the Enlightenment (C.P. Snow’s famous ‘two cultures’ problem). The strongly hermeneutic character of Márkus’s philosophy of culture comes to the fore here: the question concerning the existence of a ‘mass science’ as a counterpart to ‘mass art’ arises because of the embedding of science with art as the dynamic poles of high culture, which suggests that there ought to be a mass science counterpart corresponding to mass art/mass culture (in the sense of culture industry artefacts) (Márkus, 2013: 141ff). Márkus deftly identifies the strain of popular science/popularization of science apparent within contemporary culture and going back to the 19th century, a tendency that includes diverse cultural practices (journalism, popular books, documentaries, academic ‘science studies’, etc.) that seek to mediate between the expert culture of the natural sciences (and, to some extent, the ‘human’ sciences) and the non-expert cultural lifeworld encompassing everyday contexts of social practice and personal self-fashioning.

The latter (scientific popularization) can certainly be understood as belonging to ‘culture’, but it is hard to see why the former (the specialized autonomous spheres of scientific knowledge and institutionalized practices) should be understood as ‘cultural’ in the value-conceptual sense. Both the natural and social or human sciences retain a considerable degree of autonomy from what we would ordinarily describe as the cultural spheres of meaning or value-generating practices (that is presumably the motivation for the emergence of both science popularization and ‘pop science’ or pseudo-science but also the impetus behind the rise of ‘popular’ forms of psychology, self-help, and ‘new age’ metaphysical or esoteric literature in the humanistic sphere). Márkus acknowledges that there is no ‘mass science’ but instead a popularization of science coupled with various strains of pop-science with a culturally mediating as well as a critical function (Márkus, 2013: 144–6).

Nonetheless, it remains unclear why we should describe the sciences in general as subsumed by the value-concept of culture, rather than marking an alternative mode of institutionalized knowledge with autonomous forms of validity, verification, and knowledge accumulation. Márkus does so, I suggest, because he remains committed to the hermeneutic model that subsumes the sciences within the value-concept of culture (which, on alternative accounts, they would precisely challenge). C.P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’ problem, in other words, remains unresolved: Márkus’s historical genealogy of culture demonstrates the unresolved split between value and functional aspects of culture that mark both humanistic and scientific knowledges and practices.

Enlightenment and romanticism

The most innovative aspect of Márkus’s model, to my mind, lies in the emphasis he gives to the dynamics of cultural modernity (Márkus, 2011: 24 ff). Western modernity – and this is an unapologetically ‘Eurocentric’ theory of culture – is constituted, maintained, and reproduced thanks to the dynamic ‘antinomy’ between enlightenment and romanticist poles of cultural self-understanding (Márkus, 2011: 24–30). Roughly speaking, ‘enlightenment’ refers to valorization of reason or varieties of rationality as the foundation and normative principle organizing social institutions, political structures, and cultural spheres of meaning. This is countered and contested by the movements associated with ‘romanticism’: the pervasive ‘counter-enlightenment’ critique and alternative valorization of the so-called non-rational, giving compensatory emphasis to precisely those elements of art, culture, society, and subjectivity that are subordinated or devalued by enlightenment discourses of rationality. To list some relevant traits, romanticism valorizes art against science; the particular, the sensuous, affective-emotional, and embodied forms of experience against disembodied instrumentalized or universalist conceptions of rationality; ‘nature’, whether understood as external or internal, as opposed to ‘culture’; the exotic, the ‘primitive’, the non-Western, and pre-modern as opposed to the mundane, the ‘civilized’, Western and modern-progressivist vision of a rationally organized form of life grounded in the autonomous reason, and so on. The enlightenment valorization of reason and idealist vision of a rationally organized society has always been accompanied by its critical counterpart: the romanticist critique of the alienating, dehumanizing, destructive effects of the teleological historical vision of unilateralist moral and social progress grounded in the universality of reason (Márkus, 2013: 30ff) (but at the same time in the violence, dispossession, and injustices wrought by colonialism).

Art in modernity, on the one hand, became a relatively autonomous sphere of value and creative expression, while taking on the cultural normative role of providing a countermovement to enlightenment rationalism, offering a ‘bridge’ between the realm of necessity (nature) and the realm of freedom (morality). Márkus’s fundamental insight concerns this ongoing dialectic between enlightenment and romanticism: an unresolvable dynamic between mutually dependent poles providing the impetus that both sustains and reproduces cultural modernity. Indeed, the diremptive opposition or tension between the universalizing impetus of high culture and the ambiguous democratizing potentials of mass culture, one could say, is itself an expression of this dialectic between enlightenment and romanticist impulses within cultural modernity. It may well have its ‘spiritual-intellectual’ (geistige) corollary in the contrasting and competing philosophical accounts of cultural modernity, from teleological ‘end of history’ philosophical narratives (from Hegel and Heidegger to Kojève and Fukuyama) to ‘post-historical’, anti-teleological, and pluralist/relativist critiques of historical ‘progress’ and the ‘master narratives’ of Western modernity (postmodernist and postcolonialist critiques, for example).

High art, mass art, and kitsch

Although eschewing a Marxist ideology-critical ‘culture industry’ account of modernity, Márkus acknowledges the importance of commodification, industrialization, and the technological mediation of art within mass culture. The advent of photography and cinema is key to this process, but Márkus also notes the rise of advertising, the emergence of educated publics and subcultural communities, as well as popular hybrid cultural forms such as comics, graphic design, and the increasing presence of audiovisual media.

The case of kitsch offers fascinating insights into the relationship between high culture and its ‘other’: on the one hand, it is decried as the vulgarization of the aesthetic promise of beauty or as a standing threat to the seriousness of modernist experimentation; on the other, it is championed as a subversive challenge to, or satirical deflation of, the ‘will to taste’ and cultural distinction definitive of high art and its modernist variants (Márkus, 2013: 147ff). It is most pertinent in the case of autographic arts (such as painting or sculpture) whose production history defines their uniqueness, and that retain the mark of artistic craft signaling originality and uniqueness. This stands in contrast to the allographic arts (music, dance, literature), that are not intrinsically defined by their production history, are reproducible or performable, and so do not bear the unique ‘mark of the artist’ in the same manner. Two aspects famously define kitsch itself: its imitative quality (typically inferior, derivative, or generic characteristics) and its sentimentality (its stereotypical, manipulative, or ‘unearned’ emotional qualities) (Márkus, 2013: 148). For Márkus, kitsch is most significant in relation to the autographic arts (such as painting and sculpture): such arts, as autographic, resist massification, but they can nonetheless become the subject of kitsch.

One could point out that there is no good reason to assume that allographic arts (such as music, dance, and literature) are somehow immune from kitsch (some popular musicals manage to combine all three!), which suggests that the autographic/allographic distinction does not really distinguish between artforms more susceptible to kitsch renderings and those that remain resistant to it. Moreover, I am not sure I agree that works of kitsch – ‘[t]he painting of a bare-breasted gipsy woman or that of the cute, fluffy little cats playing with a ball of wool’ (Márkus, 2013: 148) – are at once produced en masse and ‘have not been made using any kind of mass technology’ or that they retain an aesthetic uniqueness or autonomy for their owners without authenticity or originality. Jeff Koons’ works (e.g. his Michael Jackson and Bubbles sculpture or ‘Puppy’ floral public sculpture installations) might be more pertinent examples here since these works confound just these distinctions (being based upon ‘massified’ works or popular artists/kitsch forms while also bearing the ‘signature’ of the artist while also alluding, in a kitsch manner, to earlier traditions of sculpture, landscaping, and public art). ⁷

Whatever the case, Márkus’s discussion of the relationship between technical reproducibility and autographic visual art – the distinction between technical mediation such as visual reproduction of a painting in a book, and imitative reproduction of an image that assumes the role of kitsch (such as reproducing the painting on a t-shirt or coffee mug) – is highly illuminating as a way of defending the claim that there can be a mass culture of the visual arts. Márkus links the emergence of a mass culture of visual art with ‘minor’ genres and forms of reproducible visual and graphic work (etchings, engravings, lithographs) and later with art photography, advertising, and photographic imagery more generally (Márkus, 2013: 150ff). Indeed, as Márkus observes, the transition from popular to mass culture was in many ways made possible by ‘the enormous expansion and exploitation of the new media of visual representation, first of all the film, to be joined by television’ (Márkus, 2013: 151) and the concomitant emergence of comic, graphic art, and so on. Mass culture can be defended, Márkus argues, as the counterpart to high art, the two together constituting a coherent yet dynamic whole ‘defining the very meaning of culture for our times’ (Márkus, 2013: 152).

Cultural exceptions and the ‘end of culture’?

There are of course exceptions to what Márkus defends as the oppositional high culture/mass culture model of cultural modernity. He refers here most notably to the existence of ‘middle-brow’ and ‘hybrid’ or dual-aspect works that aim to straddle the high culture/mass culture divide (certain genres of literature, movies, and visual art that incorporates kitsch elements into their context of presentation) (Márkus, 2013: 152ff). There are also attempts in Márkus’s account to show that, far from a dichotomy between high culture and mass culture, many works do not fall neatly within this dichotomy, suggesting the possibility of constructing a ‘continuum’ between these poles populated by all manner of diverse styles, genres, and forms.

Indeed, Márkus seems to acknowledge that the model of a dichotomous opposition between high culture and mass culture may prove both historically and conceptually untenable, a theoretical construct straining to accommodate the complexities of both historical formations and cultural-artistic exceptions. As many postmodernist theorists have argued, the high culture/mass culture dichotomy has been subsumed within the model of the culture industries, with ‘culture’ no longer understood in either its anthropological or its value-laden senses, but rather as denoting the myriad ‘variety of ways of consuming of free time, delivered by the culture industries’ (Márkus, 2013: 154). Such a conception, however, would demand an investigation of the concept of leisure, not to mention that of ‘culture industry’ that remains (sadly) a promissory note in Márkus’s remarkable body of work.

Nonetheless, I would venture a hypothesis here concerning Márkus’s apparent hesitation or ambiguous debunking of the high culture/mass culture model of cultural modernity. And that is that he is suggesting instead something like an ‘end of culture’ thesis analogous to Hegel’s famously controversial ‘end of art’ thesis in modernity. Márkus acknowledges that his conceptual topography mapping the shift from refined/popular to high/mass culture has come under pressure today (since the early 2000s). From this point of view, the ‘postmodern’ critique of high culture/mass culture dichotomy might be understood as a harbinger of the ‘end of culture’ as a sphere of autonomous value. The value concept of ‘high culture’ in its dynamic ‘unity of opposites’ with mass culture has given way to a pluralistic constellation of cultural forms – both high and mass and at times both at once – suggestive of a continuum or spectrum rather than a dichotomous hierarchy (Márkus, 2013: 151–2).

This overturning of the high culture/mass culture dichotomy, I suggest, is linked to a number of interrelated processes: (1) the increasingly ‘totalizing’ forms of cultural commodification that encompass not only works or products but subjectivity and experience more generally; (2) the ‘aestheticization of everyday life’ thanks to the ubiquity of advertising, marketing, and pervasive audiovisual forms of social communication; and (3) the accelerated technologization and virtual dissemination of information as the impersonal global cultural medium of exchange (the ‘digital revolution’); (4) the transformation of information (not only large-scale data sets but concerning the habits, tastes, and behaviour of social agents) into a valuable resource that has become intrinsic to the operations of what Zuboff (2019) has called ‘surveillance capitalism’.

These processes have also been accompanied by important theoretical interventions: notably, the critique and overturning of Western (European) cultural hegemony concerning the value concept of culture, whether high or mass, coupled with a globalized pluralization of cultural histories, traditions, and increasingly hybrid forms of cultural and artistic practice. Indeed, the idea of an ‘end of culture’ might be another way of articulating the ‘end of history’ thesis articulated from Hegel to postmodernism: the Eurocentric epoch of a hierarchical dichotomy of high versus mass culture is over, replaced by a pluralistic, non-teleological but also mass commodified, technologically mediated system of cultural entertainment functioning both as generator of personal meaning and as system of ideological manipulation and distraction.

Does this mean that the concept of culture is now obsolete? Not at all: it signals, rather, another twist or shift in the dialectical adventures of the concept of culture. It is now pluralized and complexified in relation to multiple modernities, with the polarized opposition between high culture and mass culture increasingly undermined or dialectically subsumed. At the same time, the concept of culture continues to play an ambivalent role as both source of subjective meaning-making and as marker of a manipulated system of commodified distraction. The increasing pressure directed towards the arts by a commercially-driven technoscientific culture is a contemporary development that would bear further reflection from a Márkusian perspective on the concept of culture. The scepticism directed at both forms of scientific as well as humanistic higher culture, coupled with scepticism towards expert culture more generally, is another phenomenon that ought to command our philosophical attention in trying to understand the vicissitudes of culture in a globalized modernity. In this respect, Márkus’s remarkable body of work on the philosophy of culture, which lays the foundations for a critical-historical theory of modernity adequate to its contemporary complexity, not only points the way towards a philosophical comprehension of our age but remains a pressing task for the next generation.