To the definition of the concept "cultural industry": description of symptoms and analysis of trends

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of such extensively studied phenomenon of modernity as cultural industry, which includes two opposite tendencies: the industrialization of cultural objects production and the "culturification" of industry. The former presupposes the presence of such symptoms of modernity as: a modernist version of the commodification of cultural objects (works of art, university education, etc.) as well as their massive reproduction. In addition, this tendency includes the following positions: the commodification of consumption, the loss of cultural objects of their regulatory and critical functions, the projectivity of cultural production. The reverse tendency – "culturification" of industry – contains the following aspects: the reduction of commercial goals of industrial production, the "economy of signs": an increase in the role of cultural competence in the process of actual industrial production, a reduction in the cost of the material component of the production. The proposed classification of tendencies and symptoms of the cultural industry does not claim for exhaustiveness and completed systematicity. It is designed to clarify the logic of the formation of this phenomenon of culture, not only as a form of de-differentiation of cultural (in the sense of high culture) and industrial (as a historical form of social),but also as the de-differentiation of cultural and social ones in general. The industrial society, whose existence is the basis for the absolutization of the industry autonomy, is one of the historical forms of the social itself. In this type of society, cultural autonomy is realized as the closure of an elitist social structure. Withdrawal from an industrial society implies "Reassembling the social", a synthetic unity of social and cultural. In the logic of "liquidity of Modern" (opposite to solidity) and of the subject-object opposition, this process manifests itself in the process of human and things synthesis (as a "Making things public"), that is, in the de-differentiation of material and spiritual production and consumption, is therefore in social and cultural. The definition of the cultural industry clarifies the meaning of culture as a way of being a human in the perspective of the sustainability of his efforts, the kind of their institutionalization and signification.