Capitalizing on Culture: Critical Theory for Cultural Studies (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Capitalizing on Culture: Critical Theory for Cultural Studies Simon During (bio) Shane Gunster. Capitalizing on Culture: Critical Theory for Cultural Studies University of Toronto Press 2004. viii, 348. $50.00 Capitializing on Culture is an exceptionally good book: one of the very few that I would mark as required reading for anyone in cultural studies and cultural theory. I say this for two reasons: its exposition of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, the early Birmingham school, and Larry Grossberg as cultural theorists is superb: lucid, subtle, detailed. And it makes as strong a case as I can imagine for its own argument: that cultural studies should base itself upon Benjamin and Adorno, conceived as dialectically twinned dual figures, in riposte to the semiotics, ethnography, identity-politics, and poststructuralism that have inhabited cultural studies since its foundation in the 1950s. The reason we should return to the Frankfurt school, Gunster claims, is that contemporary culture is structured by one main force, commodification, and Adorno and Benjamin remain commodity culture's most attentive critics. Nonetheless, Capitalizing on Culture's argument is deeply flawed: cultural studies can't return to critical theory, whose central premises, anyway, were mistaken. A short review is not the place to spell this out, but let me make a couple of suggestions as to forms the case might take. I don't want to dwell on the fact that Gunster's emphasis on commodification means that in the end he distorts Adorno and Benjamin's critique. Just to take Adorno: he was not so much a critic of capitalism as of capitalism's [End Page 328] entwinement with an Enlightenment that Adorno himself ambiguously adhered to (not least in its devastation of transcendentalism) despite the Enlightenment being a nursery of social domination. Adorno, one might say, is first a theorist of immanence and then a critic of capitalism, while Benjamin was never as comfortable as his friend with reason's destruction of the transcendental. But Gunster avoids acknowledging that Adorno regards contemporary culture not simply in terms of commodification but in terms of the problems that it faces in breaking its constitutive grounding in transcendentalism. Leaving this aside, the categories of the commodity and commodification cannot do the work that critical theory and Gunster require of them. After all: what is a commodity? It's not a property of things or a kind of thing, but a formal position within a particular social structure – namely and roughly a market where money is used as a medium of exchange, for which some things are intentionally produced, and into which some things not so produced can also be placed. The extension of markets which set things into the commodity-position does not of itself lead to those features of modern capitalist culture that Gunster, following Adorno and Max Horkheimer, most complains of: pseudo-individuation, standardization, repetition, and mere distraction. What does produce such features (granted, for a moment, that they exist) is the social apparatus and technologies, or rather the assemblages of social apparatuses and technologies within which the constantly mutating market structure is organized, and which is more and more organized for the production of such objects. And this social apparatus includes, for instance, the realms of formal politics and policy formation which Adorno and Horkheimer ignore: market structures are dependent on institutions whose forms are determined politically and governmentally. If at the level of theory the commodity form (or the exchange value/use value distinction) can't do the work Gunster and Adorno and Horkheimer require of it, we also have to ask: did or does capitalist culture actually have the properties they assign to it? I take it that theirs is an empirical claim, although it does not look that way from a Frankfurt school perspective since critical theorists don't take what people say about their culture seriously on the grounds that commodification as reification distorts consciousness itself, preventing participants in capitalism from understanding the reality and value of their cultural life. But even if we accept this false-consciousness argument (which I don't) we can still hope that if Adorno and Horkheimer and Gunster grant themselves the capacity to see things as they...