The Cultural Contradictions of Daniel Bell

Abstract

In 'The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism," Daniel Bell has done an excellent job of defining and summarizing the attributes of the new sensibility, the postmodernist and antirationalist "psychedelic" culture that is actionist, anti-establishment, experimental, and obsessed with continuous change. Even better, he has elucidated the cultural and intellectual trends and movements which over the past two hundred years have led to the apparent dominance of the new culture. In fact he has done such an excellent job of proving the cumulative power of the trend that we fail to see, on the basis of his evidence, why the new culture did not predominate in the 1950s instead of in the late sixties, and why its impact was so sudden, shocking, and discontinuous. On the basis of the overwhelming evidence Bell cites, the growth in salience of the new culture ought to have been continuous and should have appeared in a slowly evolving way. Moreover, if all these factors have been operating for so long, the new culture should not have come as such a surprise to so many people. To come directly to the point, we suspect that Bell is guilty of providing an overdetermination of causation, of providing enough causes to explain half a dozen cultural revolutions but no specific causes for the one that did occur. Moreover, we will argue that his central theme, the freeing of culture from its socioeconomic base, is not a cause for the current cultural revolu tion, which in fact did not occur as Bell describes it. To state it differently, Bell's central argument that culture is now free from its socioeconomic base is, at best, only partially true. Indeed the major ways that culture still