3/21/2016

recent posts

The cat, the mouse, culture and the economy - Anselm Jappe
log in

libcom.org

register

blog

news

library

history

gallery

organise

search

forums

Hom e

The cat, the mouse, culture and the economy Anselm Jappe

Featured

Posted By
Alias Recluse
Jun 4 2011 19:31
Tags
Anselm Jappe, culture,
Karl Marx , commodity
fetishism
Share
Tw eet
Like

Share

Trump: anti-political or right wing? Matthew Lyons

Some leftists have declared recently that Donald
Trumps presidential campaign is fundamentally
anti-political rather than right wing. But the
evidence they offer actually highlights the...
Comments (4)

Related

Essay on the relation between culture and the economy in

contemporary capitalism, examining the role played by generalized
commodification in the advancing infantilization of the population, the
spread of narcissism and the decline of art, which has become a
"subspecies of design and advertising".
The Cat, the Mouse, Culture and the Economy Anselm Jappe
One of Grimms Fairy Tales is called The Cat and the Mouse in Partnership. A
cat convinces a mouse that she wants to be her friend, and they live together
and in anticipation of the oncoming winter they buy a pot of fat and hide it in a
church. On the pretext of attending one baptism after another the cat goes
again and again to the church and eats all the fat a little at a time, and after
each occasion amuses herself by responding to the mouses questions with
ambiguous answers. When they finally go together to the church to eat the pot
of fat, the mouse discovers the trick, and the cat simply eats the mouse. The
last sentence of the fable proclaims the moral: Verily, that is the way of the
world.
I would venture to say that the relation between culture and the economy is very
much the same as that between the cat and the mouse in the fable, and all that
remains is to guess which one plays the role of the mouse and which plays the
role of the cat. Especially today, during the era of fully developed, globalized
and neoliberal capitalism. The topics presented for discussion at this forum on
public art deal, among other things, with the question of who should finance
cultural institutions and what expectations, and what kind of public, should be
satisfied by the museum, also touch upon a more general problem: what is the
place of culture in contemporary capitalist society? In order to answer this
question I will approach the topic utilizing a broad-based focus.
Besides productionmaterial and immaterialwith which all of society must
satisfy the physical and vital needs of its members, it also creates a series of
symbolic constructs. Society uses these to elaborate a representation of itself
and of the world in which it inserts or proposes, or imposes, identities and
behaviors on its members. In addressing this issue I do not use the Marxist
term superstructure, as opposed to an alleged economic base, because the
production of meaning candepending on the society in questionplay a role
that is just as if not more important than the satisfaction of basic needs.
Religion and mythology, as well as everyday customs and habitsabove all
those relating to the family and reproductionand even what has since the
Renaissance been called art figures in the category of the symbolic. For many
reasons, these symbolic codes were not separate domains in ancient
societies; one need only consider the highly religious character of almost all
ancient art. But most significantly, there was no distinction between the
economic sphere and the symbolic and cultural sphere. An object could
simultaneously satisfy a basic need and possess an aesthetic aspect.
Historically, it was industrial capitalist modernity which separated labor from
the other activities, and which conferred upon labor and its products the name
of economy, the sovereign center of social life. Furthermore, the cultural and

https://libcom.org/library/cat-mouse-culture-economy-anselm-jappe

The avatars of culture

as commodity- Miguel
Amoros
The Closed Window
Onto Another Lifeendangeredphoenix
Credit unto DeathAnselm Jappe
The Revolution of
Modern Art and the
Modern Art of
Revolution (Clark, Gray,
Nicholson-Smith,
Radcliffe & others,
1967)
Dialectic of
Enlightenment

Attached files

Fletcher, Ben, 1890-1949

A short sketch of life on the Philadelphia ports of
black IWW member and dock worker, Ben
Fletcher.

Chomsky on anarchism
This book is a collection of essays by and
interviews on anarchism. The bulk of the items
have been published elsewhere but some are
presented here for the first time.

libcom.org
Like Page
Follow @libcomorg

31k likes

17.7K follow ers

Info
The libcom library contains nearly 20,000
articles. If it's your first time on the site, or you're
looking for something specific, it can be difficult
to know where to start. Luckily, there's a range
of ways you can filter the library content to suit
your needs, from casual browsing to researching
a particular topic. Click here for the guide.
If you have an ebook reader or a Kindle, check
out our guide to using ebook readers with
libcom.org.
If you'd like to upload content to the library which
is in line with the aims of the site or will
otherwise be of interest to libcom users, please
check out our guides to submitting library/history
articles and tagging articles. If you're not sure if

1/8

3/21/2016

The cat, the mouse, culture and the economy - Anselm Jappe

aesthetic dimension, which in preindustrial societies was inherent in all

domains of life, was concentrated in a separate sphere in capitalist modernity.
This latter sphere was in appearance independent of the constructs of the
economic sphere, and within it a real critique could flourish, one that was
otherwise repressed or eliminated, a critique of social life and its growing
subjection to the increasingly inhuman demands of economic competition.
Culture therefore paid for its freedom by its marginalization, by its reduction to a
game which, because it did not directly participate in the cycle of labor and
capital accumulation, always remained in a subordinate position with respect to
the economic sphere and those who ran it. But not even this autonomy of art,
which attained its apogee in the 19th century, was capable of resisting the
dynamic of capitalism, devoted as the latter is to absorbing everything and
leaving nothing outside its logic of valorization. First, the works of autonomous
artpaintings, for exampleentered the market, and became commodities.
Later, the actual production of cultural goods was commodified, emphasizing
from the beginning only the profit and not the intrinsic artistic quality. This is the
stage of the culture industry, first described by Theodore Adorno, Max
Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and Gnther Anders in the early 1940s. Soon
thereafter, a kind of perverse reintegration of culture into life took place, but only
in the ornamental sense of commodity production, that is, in the form of design,
advertising, fashion, etc. The almost total disappearance of public cultural
institutions finally eliminated the remnants of the artists independence from
money; at last, artists are rarely anything but the new court jesters and
minstrels, who must scramble for the crumbs thrown to them by their new
patrons, who now go by the name of sponsors.

something is appropriate for the library, please

ask in the feedback and content forum. If you
don't have permissions to post content yet, just
request it here.

Log in for more features

Click here to register now. Logged in users:
Can comment on articles and discussions
Get 'recent posts' refreshed more regularly
Bookmark articles to your own reading list
Use the site private messaging system
Start forum discussions, submit articles, and
more...

This is the situation we face today. Many people experience a vague discomfort
when confronted by this commodification of culture, and would prefer that the
culture of qualityaccording to ones tastes, perhaps avant-garde film, or a
work of poetry or indigenous craftsmanshipwould not be treated exactly like
the production of shoes, video games or tourism, that is, according to the
exclusive logic of investment and profit. They then evoke what is in France
called the cultural exception: the merciless capitalist logic is accepted in all
domains (all the more so if we gain from it) but it should politely leave culture
outside the grip of its claws. In reality, this hope seems nave to me, and does
not make much sense. In fact, by accepting the basic logic of capitalist
competition, one also accepts all its consequences. If it is right for a shoe or a
vacation package to be valued exclusively on the basis of the quantity of money
that it represents, it is somewhat illogical to expect that this same logic should
not apply to cultural products. Here the same principle applies: we cannot, as
so many people do, oppose the liberal excesses of commodification without
discussing the basics, something which almost no one does. In any event, the
hope is vain, because the global logic of the commodity does not refuse to tear
the bodies of children to shreds, if it can make a small profit from landmines;
surely it will not be afraid of the respectful protests of French filmmakers or
museum directors tired of having to bow and scrape before the directives of
Coca-Cola or the petrochemical industry in order to finance a showing or an
exhibit. The unconditional capitalization of art by economic imperatives forms
only one part of the tendency towards the total commodification of all aspects
of life, and cannot be discussed solely with regard to art without opposing the
dictatorship of the economy on all levels. There is no good reason why art
should be able to preserve its autonomy from the logic of profit, if no other
sphere can manage to do so.
Capitals need to constantly seek out new areas for valorization therefore does
not exempt culture, and it is obvious that within capitalism the entertainment
industry constitutes its primary investment in this regard. Already in the 1970s
the Swedish pop group Abba was Swedens leading exporter, ahead of Saab,
an automobile manufacturer; the Beatles were awarded the MBE (Members of
the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in 1965 due to their enormous
contribution to the British economy. Furthermore, the entertainment industry,
from television to rock music, from tourism to the tabloids, plays an important
role in social pacification and consensus creation, reaching its pinnacle in the
concept of tittytainment. The State of the World Forum, held in San
Francisco in 1995, attended by more than 500 of the most powerful people on
earth (among others, Gorbachev, Bush, Thatcher, Bill Gates. . .), was convened
in order to discuss the question of what to do with the 80% of the worlds
population that is no longer necessary for production. Tittytainment was
proposed as a solution: the superfluous and potentially dangerous population
would be subjected to a combination of basic nutrition and entertainment,
brutalizing entertainment, in order to obtain a state of lethargic contentment
similar to that of a baby that has had its fill of mothers milk. In other words, the
central role that traditionally devolved upon repression to prevent social
uprisings is now accompanied by infantilization.
The relation between the economy and culture is therefore not limited to the
instrumentalization of culture, which has gone so far as to display over every

https://libcom.org/library/cat-mouse-culture-economy-anselm-jappe

2/8

3/21/2016

The cat, the mouse, culture and the economy - Anselm Jappe

artwork the logo of the sponsor who, by the way, has financed culture for the
last forty years through the taxes he paid, without getting any credit for it, and
above all without being able to influence artistic choices. Certainly the relation
between the current phase of capitalism and the current phase of cultural
production goes much further. There is a profound idiosyncrasy that connects
the entertainment industry with capitalisms drive towards infantilization and
narcissism. The material economy is extensively linked to the new forms of the
psychological and libidinous economy. In order to make this clear, I must
once again attempt to briefly explain the basics.
The contemporary world is characterized by the total dominance of the
phenomenon that Karl Marx called commodity fetishism. This term, which is
often misunderstood, indicates much more than an exaggerated adoration of
commodities, and does not merely refer to simple mystification. It refers to the
fact that in modern capitalist society most social activities assume a
commodity form, regardless of whether they also assume material forms or not.
The value of a commodity is determined by the necessary labor expended upon
its production. It is the quantity of labor incorporated in these objects, rather
than their concrete qualities, which defines their fate, and this quantity is
always reflected in a sum of money. The products created by man thus take on
a life of their own, ruled by the laws of money and its accumulation in capital. It
is necessary to take the term commodity fetishism literally: modern men
behave like so-called savages: they worship the fetishes that they have
themselves produced, attributing to them an independent life and the power to
rule over men. This commodity fetishism is not an illusion or a trick, it is the
real way that commodity society functions. It therefore dominates all sectors of
life, beyond the economy. This materialized religion implies, among other
things, that all objects and all acts, as commodities, are equal. They are
nothing but greater or lesser quantities of accumulated labor and thus of
money. The market brings this homogenization about, independently of the
subjective intentions of the agents involved. The reign of the commodity is
therefore terribly monotonous, and possesses absolutely no content of its own.
An empty and abstract form, always the same, a pure quantity without quality
moneyis gradually imposed upon the infinite concrete multiplicity of the
world. The commodity and money are indifferent towards the world, which to
them is nothing but a material to use. The very existence of a concrete world,
with its own laws and its own resistances, is ultimately an obstacle standing in
the way of capital accumulation, which acknowledges no other goal than itself.
In order to transform every sum of money into a larger sum, capitalism
consumes the entire world, on the social, ecological, aesthetic, ethical, etc.,
planes. Concealed behind the commodity and its fetishism lies a veritable
death wish, a tendency, unconscious but powerful, towards the destruction of
the world.
The equivalent of commodity fetishism on the scale of the individual psyche is
narcissism. Here this term is not used to indicate, as in everyday speech, the
worship of ones own body, or of ones own person. It is more or less a question
of a serious pathology, well known in psychoanalysis: it means that an adult
person preserves the psychic structure of the first moments of infancy, when
the distinction between the ego and the surrounding world did not yet exist. The
narcissist sees every external object as a projection of his own ego. But in
reality this ego remains terribly impoverished due to its inability to enrich itself
with real objective relations with external objects; in order to do so, the subject
must first recognize the existence of the external world and his own
dependence upon it, as well as his own limitations. The narcissist can appear
to be a normal person; nevertheless he has never really emerged from the
original unity with the surrounding world and does everything possible to
preserve the illusion of omnipotence that derives from that condition. This form
of psychosis, a rarity during the era of Sigmund Freud, who described it for the
first time, has now become one of the leading psychological disorders; its
traces are everywhere. Nor is this purely coincidental: one finds the same loss
of reality, the same absence of the worlda world recognized for its
fundamental autonomyin commodity fetishism. From another point of view,
this drastic denial of the existence of a world independent of our actions and our
desires has characterized the heart of modernity from its beginnings: it is the
program enunciated by Descartes when he described the existence of the
individual to be the only possible certainty.
In a society based on commodity production it was inevitable, after many
detours, that narcissism would become the prevailing psychological form. It is
thus obvious that the enormous growth of the entertainment industry is
simultaneously the cause and the consequence of this flourishing of
narcissism. This industry therefore participates in a veritable anthropological
regression, to which capitalism is currently leading us: a gradual rollback of the
stages of humanization that characterized the essence of previous history. This
topic could be the subject of extended discussion. I will limit myself to
reminding you of the stages through which every human being, according to the

https://libcom.org/library/cat-mouse-culture-economy-anselm-jappe

3/8

3/21/2016

The cat, the mouse, culture and the economy - Anselm Jappe

conclusions of psychoanalysis, must pass in his first steps of psychological

development. He must overcome the sensation of protective unity with his
mother, which is characteristic of the first year of life (this is what Freud called
primary narcissism, a necessary stage) and then pass through the pains of
oedipal conflict in order to arrive at a realistic evaluation of his own abilities and
his own limitations, finally renouncing infantile dreams of omnipotence. Only in
this way can a psychologically balanced person be created. Traditional
education aimed more or less accurately to accomplish the following: to replace
the pleasure principle with the reality principle, but without utterly annihilating
the pleasure principle. Stages that are not concretely resolved in psychological
development give way to neurosis and even psychosis. The child is not born
perfected, nor does he spontaneously abandon his initial narcissism. He needs
guidance in order to accede to the full development of his humanity. The
symbolic constructs characteristic of every culture obviously play an essential
role in this process and thus constitute a precious legacy of humanity (even if
not all traditional symbolic constructs seem equally suitable for promoting a full
human life, but this is another question). Capitalism in its most recent phase,
on the other handwe are speaking of the period starting in the 1970sin
which consumption and seduction seem to have replaced production and
repression as motor forces and modalities of development, represents
historically the only society that promotes a massive infantilization of its
subjects, linked to a desymbolization. With regard to this issue, everything
conspires to maintain the human being in an infantile condition. All domains of
culture, from caricature to television, from art restoration to advertising, from
video games to educational curricula, from professional sports to
psychopharmaceuticals, from Second Life to museum expositions contribute to
the creation of a docile and narcissistic consumer who sees the entire world as
an extension of himself, controllable with a mouseclick.
There can therefore be no excuse or justification for the entertainment industry
or for the adaptation of culture to the demands of the market that have thereby
been such powerful contributors to these regressive tendencies. We may
therefore ask why degradation on such a scale has triggered so little
opposition. Everyone has contributed to this situation: the right because of its
constant unwavering faith in the market, at least since it has been transformed
domestically into liberalism; the left, because of its belief in civil equality. What
is most curious is the role played by the left in this adjustment of culture to the
demands of neocapitalism. The left has always constituted the vanguard of and
the main force behind the transformation of culture into a commodity.
Everything has unfolded under the rubric of the magic words democratization
and equality. Culture must be at the disposal of all. Who can deny that this is
a noble aspiration? Much more rapidly than the right, the lefthowever
moderate or radicalhas abandonedespecially since 1968any idea that
there could be a qualitative difference between cultural expressions. Try to
explain to any representative of the cultural left that Beethoven is worth more
than a rap single or that it would be better if children memorized poetry instead
of playing video games, and he will automatically call you reactionary and
elitist. The left has been reconciled everywhere with hierarchies of wealth and
power, discovering that they are inevitable or even pleasant, despite the obvious
harm done before the eyes of the whole world. It has instead sought to abolish
hierarchies where they in fact make some sense, providing that they are not
permanent but are subject to change: those of intelligence, of taste, of
sensibility, of talent. It is also worth noting, however, that there are people who
admit that the general culture is in decline, but who immediately add as if by
reflex, that perhaps culture used to be at a higher level, but it was then a
prerogative of a tiny minority, while the vast majority was mired in illiteracy.
Today, on the other hand, everyone has access to knowledge. It seems to me,
however, that the children who grow up with Homer and Shakespeare or
Cervantes today constitute an even smaller minority than they did in the remote
past. The entertainment industry has merely substituted one form of ignorance
for another, just as the increase in the number of persons with college degrees
does not seem to have led to a corresponding increase in the number of people
who really know anything. In France, for example, one can be awarded a
masters degree on the basis of having completed course requirements that
thirty years ago would not have sufficed to allow one to graduate from a twoyear technical school. In France it is therefore a simple matter for 50% of high
school students to successfully obtain a college degreea great victory for
democratization.
One cannot call the products of the entertainment industry mass culture or
popular culture, as is implied for example by the term pop music, and as is
asserted by those who charge any critique of what in reality is nothing more
than the formatting of the masses, to use a very eloquent contemporary term,
with elitism. Generalized relativism and the rejection of all cultural hierarchy
has often passed, above all in the postmodern era, for forms of emancipation
and social critique, in the name of subaltern cultures, for example. It seems
obvious to me that they are a cultural reflection of the rule of the commodity. As

https://libcom.org/library/cat-mouse-culture-economy-anselm-jappe

4/8

3/21/2016

The cat, the mouse, culture and the economy - Anselm Jappe

we have seen, the commodity is a pure quantity of labor and therefore of

money, always equal, incapable of making qualitative distinctions. To the
commodity, everything is equal. Everything is simply material for the alwaysequal process of the valorization of value. This indifference of the commodity
towards all content is manifested in a cultural production that rejects any
qualitative judgment and for which everything is equal to everything else. The
cultural industry makes everything equal, as Adorno said in 1944.
Perhaps someone will accuse an argument like mine of authoritarianism and
claim that it is the people themselves who spontaneously want, request, and
desire the products of the cultural industry, even in the presence of other
cultural expressions, just as millions of people have no qualms about eating
fast food, even though they could, for the same price, eat in a traditional
restaurant. It is a simple matter to refute this by recalling that in the presence of
a massive and continuous media bombardment in favor of certain lifestyles free
choice is somewhat circumscribed. But that is not all. As we have seen,
access to the fullness of human existence requires assistance from those who
already, at least partially, possess this fullness. To allow everything to run its
spontaneous course of development is not in fact the same thing as creating
the conditions for freedom. The invisible hand of the market ends in absolute
monopoly or the war of all against all, not in harmony. In the same way, to not
help someone to develop his capacity for differentiation means to condemn him
to an eternal infantilism. I will provide you with an example that is not from
psychoanalysis and for which I have a special affection. There are four basic
flavors in the sense of taste: sweet, salty, sour and bitter. The human palate is
capable of perceiving a one-ten thousandth part of a drop of a bitter substance
in a glass of water, while for the other flavors an entire drop is required. As a
result, no other flavor is so variable or characterized by an almost infinite
multiplicity of taste-related sensations as bitterness. The cultivation of wine, tea
and cheese, those great sources of pleasure for human existence, are based
on these infinite types and gradations of bitterness. But young children
spontaneously reject bitter flavors and only accept sweet ones, and later salty
ones. They must be educated to appreciate bitterness, overcoming their initial
resistance. In this manner they will develop a capacity for enjoyment which
otherwise would have remained forever inaccessible to them. In any event, if
nobody imposes this upon them, they will never ask for anything besides sweet
and salty, of which there are few nuances, only a degree of more or less. Thus
is born the consumer of fast foodwhich is based solely upon sweetness and
saltinesswho is incapable of appreciating different flavors. And everything
which is not learned while young will not be learned when older: if the child who
has grown up with hamburgers and Coca-Cola becomes a nouveau riche and
wants to show off culture and refinement, consuming Italian wines and French
cheeses, he will not really be able to appreciate them.
I hold that one can apply this reasoning concerning gastronomic taste, without
too many alterations, to aesthetic taste as well. An education is required to
appreciate the music of Bach or traditional Arab music, while the simple
possession of a body is enough to appreciate the somatic stimuli of rock
music. It is true that at this time the majority of the population spontaneously
demands Coca-Cola and rock music, caricatures and internet pornography: but
this does not prove that capitalism, which offers all these marvels in abundance,
is in harmony with human nature, although it has succeeded in preserving this
nature in its initial state. Not even the practice of eating with a knife and a fork
makes a spontaneous appearance in the development of the individual.
Therefore, the success of the entertainment industries and the culture of
conveniencean incredibly global success that overcomes all cultural barriers
is not due solely to propaganda and manipulation, but also to the fact that the
latter are united with the natural desire of the child to not abandon his
narcissist status. The alliance between the new forms of domination, the
requirements of capital valorization and marketing techniques is so effective
because it relies on a regressive tendency already present in man. The
virtualization of the world, concerning which so much has been said, is also a
stimulation of the infantile desires for omnipotence. No limits is the greatest
incitement broadcast today, whether it concerns a professional career or the
promise of eternal health and eternal life thanks to medicine, the infinitely
diverse existences that can be experienced in video games or the idea that
unlimited economic growth is the solution to every evil. Capitalism is
historically the first society based on the absence of limits. We are only now
beginning to understand just what this means.
The entertainment industry is then absolutely integral to commodity society.
Real art, on the other hand, if it is to be taken seriously, if it is to be faithful to
its existence, must therefore never be in accord with the economy and the
market. The qualitative and the quantitative are, in this connection, antithetical
principles. But does this real culture exist, and if so, where is it to be found?
We have defined it here above all in an ex negativo fashion, speaking of

https://libcom.org/library/cat-mouse-culture-economy-anselm-jappe

5/8

3/21/2016

The cat, the mouse, culture and the economy - Anselm Jappe

everything that it is not. We do not have the time to digress upon the greatness
and the ambiguity of traditional culture. The latter was occasionally capable of
moving the observer, the public, it was capable of saying no not only to
society, but also to the constitution of every individual, imposing upon him, as a
poem of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke says: You must change your life,
or proclaiming, like the French poet Arthur Rimbaud: You must change life, or
even as the French writer Lautramont said: Art must be made by all, not just
by some. Some works of the past, while we observe them, seem to observe us
and expect a response on our part. One cannot however establish an absolute
opposition between a high or great art of the past, always based on the
improvement of human existence, with todays cultural industry. Open or
concealed complicity with the dominant powers and with dominant lifestyles
has always characterized a large proportion of cultural works. What is important
is that in the past there was the possibility of rejection, sometimes expressed
through the aesthetic category of the sublime. A work of art, from this
perspective, should not be at the service of the subject contemplating it. It is
not the works of art that should please men, but men should seek to raise
themselves to the level of works of art. It is not up to the spectator, or the
consumer to choose his work of art, but to the work of art to choose its public
and to determine who is worthy of it. It is not up to us to judge Baudelaire or
Malevitch; instead, they are the ones who judge us and determine our faculty of
judgment. Not so long agoin the field of aestheticsa person was judged
according to the works he knew how to appreciate, rather than the works being
judged according to the number of people attracted to them. A person who was
capable of understanding all the complexity and the richness of a particularly
well-done work of art was then considered to be someone who had made
significant progress on the road of human realization, normally thanks to hard
work of self-improvement. What a contrast to the postmodern view that holds
that each spectator is democratically free to see whatever he wants in a work of
art, and thus everything he projects upon it from himself! It is true that in this
way the spectator will never be confronted with anything really new and will have
the comforting certainty that he will always be able to remain just as he is. And
this is precisely the narcissists refusal to enter into a real objective relation
with a world distinct from himself.
This attitude of imparting essential shocks, of throwing the individual into crisis
instead of comforting him and reinforcing his mode of existence, is visibly
absent in the products of the entertainment industry, which look towards the
experience and the event. Whoever wants to sell something investigates the
needs of the buyers and their search for immediate satisfaction, confirming the
high opinion they have of themselves rather than frustrating them with works
that are not immediately legible. From this point of view, today there is almost
no difference between high or cultured art and mass art. The works of the
past are being incorporated into the cultural machine, by way of spectacular
exhibitions, restoration work that must make works enjoyable for every
spectator (by making the colors too bright, for example), or by means of
bowdlerized versions of literary or musical classics which have been so altered
in order to make them accessible to the public. Or mixing them with
contemporary idioms that eradicate all historical specificity, as in the case of
the unfortunately famous pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre in Paris. The
bite that the works of the past could still possess, if only because of their
temporal distance, in neutralized by means of their spectacularization and
commercialization.
There is nothing more annoying than those museums that become teaching
institutions and seek to make culture accessible to the common people
with a series of explanations on the walls and by means of the headphones that
tell everyone precisely what they should feel about the work, videos, interactive
games, museum shops, sneakers. . . . It is claimed that this makes it possible
for culture and history to be enjoyed by the non-bourgeois strata, too (as if
todays bourgeoisie were cultured). To me, it is just this user-friendly approach
that seems to be the pinnacle of arrogance regarding the popular strata,
concerning whom it is supposed that they are by definition insensible to culture,
which they can appreciate only if it is presented in the most frivolous and
infantile manner possible. This also signals the end of that pleasant, somewhat
dusty atmosphere of the museums of the past; pleasant because it seemed
that one entered a separate world, where one could relax away from the tornado
of activities that always surrounds us, and this was to some extent true
because these museums were seldom visited. Now, the more efficiently
managed and more attractive to the public a museum is, the more it takes on
the characteristics of a combination of a train station at rush hour and an
information booth. And since we are discussing the topic of museums, why
bother to continue to visit them at all? One might as well look at the same
works on a DVD, because nothing at all remains of the aura of the original
work anyway. This is another perverse way of uniting art and life, of erasing their
difference and eliminating any idea that something different from the global
plane of reality that surrounds us could exist. The old museum, with all its

https://libcom.org/library/cat-mouse-culture-economy-anselm-jappe

6/8

3/21/2016

The cat, the mouse, culture and the economy - Anselm Jappe

defects, was capable of being the appropriate space for the appearance of
something truly unprecedented for the spectator, precisely because it was so
different from the latters everyday life. Today, the groups of students led
through the exhibition halls receive, more than anything else, an effective
preventive inoculation against any risk that they will be able to grasp an
essential message from art or history, or at least the risk that they will seek
them out on their own account. . . .
So-called contemporary culture generally has a similarly regressive impact.
The artists themselves have betrayed the duty of art. This is demonstrated by
contemporary arts eternal repetition of Marcel Duchamps joke for the last forty
years. The urinal displayed in 1917 as a fountain was a provocation that had
the effect of conferring a carte blanche for anyone to display any object as a
work of art, thereby eliminating any idea of an excellent or sublime work. Such
art is just as incapable of excellence as are the products of the entertainment
industry, and for the same reasons. While the so-called classical vanguards of
the first half of the 20th century knew how to say what was essential about their
historical epoch, todays art can hardly avoid giving the impression of its own
insignificance. One can also reject the idea of a general death of art (I have
already dealt with this problem elsewhere), but it is nonetheless difficult to find
a contemporary art form that can stand comparison to its predecessors.
Contemporary art is involved in the general de-realization, like the entertainment
industry, and it has become a subspecies of design and advertising. It therefore
deserves its commercialization. Contemporary art has thrown itself into the
arms of the culture industry and humbly petitions to be admitted to its table.
This is a result, long postponed and unforeseen, of that enlargement of the
sphere of art and the aestheticization of life that was initiated a century ago by
the artists themselves, Duchamp among them. It appears then that there
cannot be many works capable of contributing to the birth of critical subjects.
There are only clients. It then makes little difference how the museums are
operated. It is claimed that museums must adjust to the need to generate a
public, or else disappear. But the result is the same. An art that serves only to
create satisfied customers is in any case no longer an art worthy of the name.
It is at least necessary to admit a qualitative difference, a difference of
importance, between the products of the entertainment industry and a possible
real culture in order to be capable of evoking a separate treatment for the
latter. It is then necessary to admit the possibility of a qualitative and not just a
purely relative and subjective judgment. There is a big difference between
wanting to establish parameters for judgment, knowing that they will not just
drop from the sky, but must be subjected to debate and change, on the one
hand, and denying a priori the very possibility of establishing such parameters,
so that everything equals everything else, on the other hand. If everything is
equal, nothing is worth the trouble anymore. It is these equivalences, and the
indifference that follows in their wake, that are unfolding like a shroud over a life
dominated by the market and the commodity. The latter are undermining the
basis of the ability of humans to confront the omnipresent threats of barbarism.
The challenges that await us in the times ahead must be confronted by people
in the full possession of their human faculties, not by adults who are still
children in the worst sense of the word. It will be interesting to see what place
art and cultural institutions can occupy in this epochal transformation.
Originally published as Il gatto, il topo, la cultura e leconoma. Translated into
Spanish by Magdaluz Bonilla Atrin. Mxico 2009. Spanish translation
published in El Viejo Topo, No. 263, December 2009. Spanish translation at:
http://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=3089154
Original text in Italian at:
http://www.exitonline.org/textanz1.php?
tabelle=transnationales&index=4&posnr=157&backtext1=text1.php

login or register to post comments

blog

news

library

history

Ed - We Want Our Club Back!: the

Clapton Supporters Action Fund

21st Annual Bay Area Anarchist Book

Fair

Intakes: Communist Theory - Beyond

the Ultra-left

Looking back at anarchists and the

2006 Progressive Enterprises lockout

Fredo Corvo - Bombings by suicide

terrorists in Ankara and Istanbul

Workers strike at Tata Motors, Sanand,

Gujarat, in India

What next for the American workers? United Workers Party of America

Shusui, Kotoko, 1871-1911

Out of the Woods - Human nature

What sort of uprising do we need in Iraqi

Kurdistan?

How I got fired and won my job back

https://libcom.org/library/cat-mouse-culture-economy-anselm-jappe

Chumbawambas long voyage

7/8

3/21/2016

libcom.org

The cat, the mouse, culture and the economy - Anselm Jappe
about | donate | help out | submitting content | other languages | a-z | contact us | site notes

https://libcom.org/library/cat-mouse-culture-economy-anselm-jappe

8/8