[lbo-talk] death of a discussion list

Chuck Grimes c123grimes at att.net
Fri Apr 20 13:24:44 PDT 2012


``In the first phase, as mentioned above, culture itself was relatively small and local; unrecorded folk and avant-garde elite; a source of resistance and pleasure in a society where needs and desires were increasingly fulfilled by commodities. Michael Denning argues that this material circumstance explains the modern meaning of the word "culture:"

`Culture, one might say, emerges only under capitalism. Though there appears [in the works of 19th century writers] to be a culture in precapitalist societies, the concept is invented by Tylorians and Arnoldians alike to name those places where the commodity does not yet rule: the arts, leisure, and unproductive luxury consumption of revenues by the accumulators; and the ways of life of so-called primitive peoples. The world dominated by capital - the working day, the labor process, the factory and office, machines and technology and science itself - is thus outside of culture.' [10]

The seemingly local or suddenly, mercurial, transnational culture complemented an equally precarious employment situation (due to the scientific labor management of the second industrial revolution in the US)...'' Sean Andrews

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Don't know how to approach this passage. I'd reconfigure it and make some missing distinctions. There was culture in the anthropology meaning of the word long before capitalism. The distinction of `local' also suffers. After all there was nothing local about ancient empires, or the great imperial cultural periods of China. One of the hallmarks of empires is the spread of a transnational or international style as they say in art history and enforced interregional and international language regimes.

In terms of capital and culture the central distinction I'd make is the difference between production by hand as in craft and reproduction by machine as in the printed books. The first contrete entrance into the mass production of culture was exactly that transistion to moveable type---as in the machine precision necessary for interchangible parts. Practically all of later industrial methods followed from the earlier printing industries.

Over just a few decades mass culture, mass reproduction, capitalist systems and a transnational culture developed together in the 1600s. These material production systems practically invented (founded) the intellectual world from the Reformation to the Enlightenment as cultural artifacts. The bureaucratization or institutionalization of the cultural artifacts of philosophy, sciences, mathematics, humanities, literature and arts follow suit within the vast emperial monarchies and their Royal and Learned Societies and the rise of National Libraries and Museums...

I understand your goal isn't historical technological origins. I'd just be careful about the implication that our era was the first, because it wasn't.

CG

ps. Before I forget. I had to wiki Birmingham School to contextualize what Sean Andrews was writing about. The Center for Comtemporary Cultural Studies aka the Birmingham School, was founded by Hogarth and others. Here is the wiki and is more than worth the time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_Contemporary_Cultural_Studies

Note the closing and overhaul in 2002. I have no doubt at all this was a reactionary political move by the administration to stop the production of leftwing critiques of the neoliberal order....closing the pomo-culture wars and seemingly endless moves of the UC system to stop leftwingism from breaking out across the humanties and social sciences is a familiar story out here.

CG



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