The end of high culture and the Anthropocene

Art and science

According to Márkus, the modern sphere of ‘high’ culture emerges in the 18th century. It encompasses a range of activities in the arts and sciences, all of which are structured around a triad. There is (1) an author, (2) a work (as opposed to an artifact of use) and (3) a recipient (the anonymous public). The modern character of this triadic conception becomes apparent in its basic assumption: ‘high’ culture presupposes that the way we live in the world is not natural but re-makeable. The legacy of the past loses the meaning of tradition: an eternally binding claim of the dead upon the living. It becomes a storehouse of ‘works’ accomplished by earlier generations, which are open to selective use by contemporaries. Seen in this light, the mark of modern culture is not a return to pre-established knowledge but a clarion call for originality. In Márkus’s own hands, the concept of culture is no anthropological fixity, something humans pursue in distinction to natural entities (for instance, a capacity for self-refection made durable in objects). It is rather a historical outgrowth of bourgeois, capitalist societies. Only with the breakdown of the patronage relations of feudalism and the emergence of concentrated urban masses, mass literacy, and the commodification of cultural forms is a sphere of culture addressed to anonymous recipients yet separate from other productive relations at all conceivable. Across a number of essays in Culture, Science, Society, Márkus provides both a genealogy and a topography of ‘high’ culture. He draws a conceptual map of its integral unity and internal strains. Regions of cultural activity with their own criteria of value are distinct silos: there is a realm of art and one of science. Still, the whole project is united by a shared ambition, namely, to create original works of significance for the public. Such works are not meant only for the public’s edification but are open to their interpretation.

A brief aside is necessary regarding that troubling modifier: ‘high’ culture in its ‘highest’ vocation. The concept of ‘high’ culture was first formulated in relation to a supposedly degraded low culture with its roots in folk traditions. Márkus argues that the emergence of mass culture in the 19th century, which shares the same media of communication and even the same addressees as ‘high’ culture, complicates the old hierarchical distinction. That said, there is no point denying that it is still common to utilize a distinction between ‘high’ and ‘mass’ cultural works. Márkus holds that we recognize a difference between ‘high’ and ‘mass’ works largely through their normative postures of reception. Mass culture typically sells pleasure in entertainment and is oriented to working and reworking familiar symbolic structures and genres. By contrast, the recipients of ‘high’ culture look for the unexpected, or at least the substantively different and specifically individual. Given that Márkus contends that both ‘high’ and ‘low’ works serve as commodities on the market and the division is porous (many works and genres have at one time or another belonged to either or both camps), this is not a boundary that, for the purposes of this essay, it is useful to police. The blockbuster film and ‘serious’ art alike have enjoyed reception stances open to the shock of the new. They both claim the attentions of a wide public either in the sheer numbers of direct recipients or in the forcefield of their influence.

It is plain that the realms of activity that Márkus designates ‘high’ culture are also artefacts of the Anthropocene. After all, ‘high’ culture emerges with industrialization and its essential premise is that the way we live in the world is not natural but re-makeable. Despite this historical co-implication, the activities of ‘high’ culture appear as likely candidates to explore and contest the conditions and processes of ecological world-remaking. To respond and adapt to the Anthropocene will require the collaboration of scholars from many different disciplines addressing both scale and value. For though it necessary to measure the ozone and the acidification of the oceans, it is also essential to reconsider the ecological soundness of our political and economic practices, to establish alternative understandings of the collective entanglements of human and other forms of life, and to educate each other about common responsibilities. In the model that Márkus reconstructs, the arts and sciences are not two estranged cultures (as C.P. Snow famously put it) but function as complementary organs of innovative communication to claim the attention of a lively public. His historical analysis of the cohesion of cultural spheres chimes with the ambitions of many scholars, scientists and artists working at the interstices of earth systems science, the arts and environmental humanities.

We could not define socially-induced planetary climate change without the help of earth systems science. However, scholars in the environmental humanities and social sciences have pointed to the immobilizing effects of just knowing ‘the facts’ about climate change. Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that the questions of justice that follow from climate-change science – indeed, the implication of social forces within natural processes – require us to ‘possess an ability that the humanities can foster: the ability to see something from another person’s point of view. The ability, in other words, to imagine sympathetically the predicament of another person’ (Chakrabarty, 2016: 378). Deborah Bird Rose similarly stresses the roles of stories in understanding and communicating the significance of natural science for our times. Art, she writes, with its imaginative play of sensuous particulars, has the ‘capacity to reach beyond abstractions and move us to concern and action’ (Gibson, Bird Rose, Fincher, 2015: 17). To move a mass, anonymous public to concern and action, it seems that the natural sciences and arts should work hand in glove. The former is a set of diverse and instructive enquiries into the changing state of planetary systems and multispecies webs of life, while the latter brings million-year bio-geological processes near and expresses the intimate stories and global stakes of the ecological changes wrought by social forces.

Márkus proceeds to explain that communication between the two regions of cultural practice is a tricky endeavor. The unity of the natural sciences and art is based upon the fact that they are normatively conceived as polar opposites which rarely overlap. It is helpful to give a brief overview of the differences he perceives in their respective structures. Returning to his triad, Márkus begins with the question of the author. In the case of art, Márkus admits that the intentions of the author are never transparent (to others or even to the self) such that authorial intention is non-identical with the meaning of the work. Nonetheless, recipients do retrospectively impute various intentions to the creator of a work. This situates art within the realm of subjectivity. An emphasis on subjective style and sentiment flows on to the work, which through its coherence of content and form sets the stage for some kind of imaginative experience. Subjectivity is also manifest in the reception context, where recipients engage in a highly personal and interested judgment. They ask themselves: do I like it and why? By contrast, in Márkus’s account of science, Popper’s criterion of the falsifiability of experiments is key. Although there is an author or set of authors who report their findings, scientific norms require that an experiment must be replicable under similar circumstances. This engenders a depersonalized scientific voice. Following the correct procedure and equipped with appropriate expertise, anyone should arrive at the same conclusion (recall that Márkus is here outlining the norms of the scientific enterprise, not what always happens). Style and sentiment are less important in a research community that conceives itself as advancing toward objective truth. As opposed to the musealization of prior artistic accomplishments, the tradition of science is a story of cumulative gains. Relevant new discoveries render prior knowledge claims obsolete.

Márkus underlines that the unity of ‘high’ culture is maintained through the polar opposition of its moments. The implication is that art and science work on registers of experience that rarely overlap. On the one hand, subjective imagination; on the other, objective experiment. This is why the dual projects forge an opposed yet complementary unity. They address the same public but rarely have the same conversations. Hence Márkus asks: do the sciences and the arts talk about the same thing when they talk about ‘nature’? He answers in the negative. Art approaches a form of experience that Kant calls die Gunst der Natur. According to Márkus, artistic works addressed to nature ask: How does the environing world relate to us, does it meet us with favor? Works of art look for threads of connectivity within organic and inorganic worlds and also attend to breaks in the weave. By contrast, Márkus suggests that science refers to nature as an objective field of enquiry, as ‘all possible objects of experience’. When they speak of nature, the sciences and arts appear to talk at cross-purposes.

Julia Adeney Thomas has raised a similar concern with regard to the concept of the species (Adeney Thomas, 2014: 1592). The Anthropocene seems to announce a new aggregate figure of the human species, the ‘anthropos’: an immense entity now undermining the earth’s life-support systems. Yet in both arts and sciences, species is a controversial concept. There are many and varied anthropological accounts of our species essence: reflection, language, tool use, combustion etc. In post-colonial theory, the concept of species is often scorned (Chakrabarty, 2012: 25–8). Any attempt to lasso the plurality of social arrangements within a shared human condition is suspect as a new form of epistemic imperialism. Meanwhile, in the natural sciences, the question of whether the term species is useful varies depending on scale. Paleobiologists who compare fossil records use the term. Yet ‘species’ is nonsensical to microbiologists who point out that each human is composed as a reef of species life. In one’s body, micro-organisms outnumber human cells ten to one. ⁷ The instability of common referents is undoubtedly a problem for theorists who call for a bridge between the findings of sciences and the expressive and reflective capabilities of art and the social sciences.

Márkus examines issues of translation between the arts and sciences but suggests that they need not be ruinous. When there is no corresponding word in one language for a term used in another, we do not give up the effort to communicate across difference. We approximate the foreign context of meaning and in doing so contribute our own semantic horizon. Fraught and fallible efforts of translation actually belong to the promise of ‘high’ culture as Márkus conceives it. Works of art and science emit a universal claim for attention addressed to an anonymous yet plural public that does not simply receive the transmission but works to interpret it. Márkus’s conceptual map of culture locates the dilemmas of cultural transmission not in the incompatibility of the two enterprises but in their shared recent fate. As I will now detail, he argues that ‘high’ culture might have once presented as a differentiated unity, but the entire project has foundered. The classical conception of autonomous spheres of culture is ‘inapplicable as a description of these practices, and untenable as an ideal of what they can and should become’ (Márkus, 2011: 33).

The end of ‘high’ culture

To echo Hegel’s announcement of the end of art from the lectures on aesthetics is to court all the irritation that has descended upon this claim since the 1820s. Like Adorno before him, Márkus is misunderstood if we take his proclamation to be the handwringing complaint of a cultural conservative unable to enjoy mass culture. ‘High’ culture has not ended because mass culture has usurped it. Márkus freely admits that ‘high’ culture has always had a limited circle of direct recipients, even while it exerted a far greater force of influence. As with Hegel’s utterance, we should not take Márkus’s claim too literally. ‘High’ culture most certainly goes on and continues to present novel works and original findings. A distinction that Arthur Danto makes – between the chronicle and the narrative – is helpful in comprehending Márkus’s meaning (Danto, 1986: 111). A chronicle refers to a sequence of events, of works, but a narrative usually has an overarching driving purpose, akin to uncovering the killer in a murder mystery. Márkus proposes that the chronicle of ‘high’ culture continues but the narrative has ended. The vocation of ‘high’ culture has been reached and its project exhausted.

This demands further explanation. What is the classical vocation of ‘high’ culture that has run aground? Márkus is unambiguous: art and science partake in a movement towards autonomy. The fact that this conception of the autonomous work of culture emerges under capitalist bourgeois society (universal commodity exchange, an anonymous and educated public) has been a rich vein of internal dissent mined by the tradition of critical theory. The pivot for this tradition of critique lies with the paradoxical heteronomy of autonomous work. The sphere of culture is detached from the usual operations of society precisely due to a social division of labor. In Adorno’s famous formulation, this is the ‘double character of art – something that severs itself from empirical reality and thereby from society’s functional context, and yet is at the same time part of empirical reality and society’s functional context – [a double character that] is directly apparent in the aesthetic phenomena, which are both aesthetic and faits sociaux’ (Adorno, 2002: 252). Adorno argues that art’s doubleness, its distanced proximity to the usual forms of social rationality, allows authentic works to serve as arenas of immanent social criticism. Márkus’s diagnosis is perhaps darker. For him, it is precisely the fact that the project of autonomy was born in response to external social factors that now threatens it.

In ‘A Society of Culture’, Márkus describes three related moments of autonomy. A work is autonomous if:

It is autotelic. That is, it is valuable not in view of some external end but according to norms and standards immanent to its own practices.

Márkus indicates that all three conditions are imperiled yet it is this final condition that ‘high’ culture can no longer meet. Art and science may still constitute their own separate criteria of value and operate as specialized activities within a network of institutions, yet they cannot be said to steer their own course. Take the case of science. Highly specialized and costly contemporary research may ‘depend upon the financial and administrative decisions of bodies and organizations, that, from the viewpoint of science, are not competent to make such decisions rationally, since usually the majority of their members are not expert specialists working in the particular area of research’ (Márkus, 2011: 33). One might think, for instance, of extreme cases such as Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, BP, and other fossil fuel industries who fund MIT’s Energy Institute, Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project, and Berkeley’s Energy Biosciences Institute. For Márkus, this means that ‘the direction of scientific development is in fact underdetermined by the internal cognitive criteria of scientific rationality’ (Márkus, 2011: 33). Similar developments increasingly beset the art world, where neo-patronage relations and ‘high’ finance speculation intrude into the course of artistic innovation. For instance, filmmaker and theorist Hito Steyerl draws attention to a report widely shared on artnet where investor Stefan Simhowitz proposed that ‘art will effectively continue its structural function as an alternative currency that hedges against inflation and currency depression’ (Steyerl, 2017: 322). While Márkus did not use the term ‘neoliberalism’, he details a rampant economization of regions of social activity previously deemed to be subject to the functional claims of the market but largely shielded from its ethos. He argues that in the post-war period, commercial interests, always a motor for the movement of autonomy, have come to claim their own children.

In her review of Culture, Science and Society, Agnes Heller writes that ‘Márkus co-signs Adorno’s statement that we live in a world without hope’ (Heller, 2015: 94). This assessment fails to do justice to either thinker’s position. To hold open space for a more transformative version of hope, Adorno jettisons ‘any positive objects of hope’ (Jütten, 2019: 294). Positive objects of hope serve only as apologetic consolation, adjusting us to reified social relations (including the domination of external nature). ⁸ In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno explores art as a cipher of immanent resistance to late capitalist society: ‘only by its double character, which provokes permanent conflict, does art succeed at escaping the spell [of reified social reality] by even the slightest degree’ (Adorno, 2002: 138). He promotes the critical energies of the autonomous artwork as it stages this ‘permanent conflict’. By contrast, Márkus discerns social forces that intrude not only into the products of the culture industry but also into the inner sanctum of autonomous art and science. The inherited idea of a separate realm of ‘high’ culture – which was forged by the Enlightenment – is, he writes, ‘untenable’ (Márkus, 2011: 34). It is also ‘indispensable’. The promise of ‘high’ culture was that art and science could submit meaningful claims to the attentions of a robust democratic public. To give this up would ‘deprive our culture of the basic impulses of its critical vitality’ (Márkus, 2011: 35). Although it is bad faith to cling to a project that we know to be eclipsed, he recommends just this. My final reflections explore the resonance of Márkus’s conception of cultural production as an untenable yet indispensable remnant in a time of ecological danger.

Coda: Co-signing with Hegel

Daily practices of bourgeois existence have come to fundamentally test the boundary conditions for planetary life: a loss of biosphere integrity, the global hydrological cycle, land-system change, and altered bio-geochemical cycles. In these perilous times it might seem perverse to devote critical energies to ‘high’ culture. After all, this Enlightenment project sustains the anthropocentric conceit that everything once thought to be given by nature can (and should) be remade by social forces. Cultural works claim to address themselves to an anonymous public, yet there is a hierarchy implied by the term ‘high’ culture. Such works may narrowcast to the very social elites whose profiteering off ‘cheap’ environmental plunder and financialization of environmental risk have contributed to ecological disaster. As a historical outgrowth of industrialized capitalism, the realm of ‘high’ culture may appear to be both a distraction from the challenges of immediate practical action and part of the problem.

Yet what do we mean when we say ‘these perilous times’? To comprehend the very proposition that ‘the planet is in danger’ requires scholarship across the natural and human sciences and the arts. Earth systems science is called upon to disclose changes in nitrogen and phosphorus flows but the notion of endangerment is not a scientific idea alone. The planet has been through many other episodes of climate change – and five Great Extinctions of species – before. The notion of endangerment invites questions of perspective and value (see Adeney Thomas, 2014: 1588). To alert people to the danger, to respond and adapt to a changing environment, it is necessary to stage conversations across the branches of research and original work once designated ‘high’ culture. If such conversations do not take place, or fail to find traction with their intended addressees, neoliberal state and international governance bodies promise to relieve us of the task of concerted public response. To the extent that ecological catastrophe will be contained, neoliberal logic dictates that it will be managed at the expense of democratic will formation, through tactics familiar from corporate supply chains: risk management, trade in emissions permits, ‘cap and trade’, the farce of carbon capture and storage.

Márkus cautions against exorcising the vestiges of critical vitality that remain with the old Enlightenment project of autonomous cultural spheres. He acknowledges that this project is as untenable as it is indispensable. Following his thesis that ‘high’ culture has ended, it no longer makes sense to expect publics to rally around the self-directed projects of ‘science’ or ‘art’ as such. Widespread sentiments of suspicion (if not outright denial) towards scientific findings attest, at least in part, to a public recognition that these fields are no longer autonomous from prevailing social powers. In the laboratory and the art market, heterogenous interests increasingly dictate the course of research, investigation and innovation. In this context, Márkus’s prescription to tarry – ‘in bad faith’ – with the project of cultural transmission remains resonant (Márkus, 2011: 35). Against the depredations of neoliberal reason, cultural works still seek to engage in the difficult task of translation, to inform and engage publics about cascading ecological crises and express scientific facts in ways that capture their local relevance as well as their claims to justice across borders and beyond existing generations.

Márkus finally co-signs with Hegel. The 1820 lectures on aesthetics do not provide any explicit discussion of what happens to art after its end. Nonetheless, Hegel does offer a number of dispersed observations concerning contemporary art, ranging from the beautiful (Dutch landscape and opera) to works of ethical interest (Schiller’s historical dramas) and works of cosmopolitan instruction (Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan). Once art becomes autonomous from religion and patronage relations, ‘solely art and nothing more’, Hegel suggests there is no formally definable criterion as to whether a piece of art works. Art’s function becomes ‘ad hoc, accidental and heterogeneous’ (Márkus, 2011: 434). Hegel’s account of fully autonomous art is not the end of the historical story. According to Márkus, the socio-economic conditions that instigate the realm of autonomous, original works have shifted in the post-war period. Once independent value spheres, art and science are no longer able to direct their own course. Márkus therefore finds he also must attend to ‘eccentric works’ that persist after the inherited idea of a ‘high’ culture has become untenable. Particular scientific investigations and artistic creations still aspire to self-directed experimentation and public-oriented communication of findings. Certain cultural works will continue to reach out to the demos and may yet stir people to action in the face of the planetary endangerment. Still, there is neither false consolation nor ahistorical retrieval to be found in Márkus’s account of the afterlife of ‘high’ culture. Such works are ad hoc, fragile achievements.