BOOKS
THE END OF CULTURE
THE CULTURAL CONTRADICTIONS OF CAPITALISM.
By Daniel
Bell. Basic Books. $12.95.
Having predicted accurately the end of ideology some years
ago, Daniel Bell now proceeds to announce the end of culture in his
new book,
The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.
Of course, as
even Bell has admitted recently, by the end of ideology he meant only
radical ideology. Simi larly, the end of culture for Bell means the end of
radical , or modernist, or avant-garde culture-terms which he uses
rather loosely and more or less interchangeably.
It is not easy to summarize Bell 's argument, for it is quite
sprawling and full of digressions, contradictions, and quotations
whose relevance is not always immediately apparent. H e tries to cover
so much ground- art, literature, politics, economics, history-with so
many theories and so many facts, that one feels he is surveying what is
happening on this planet from a distant satellite, and that one has to
put everything into a computer
to
unscramble it. So far as I can make
out on my own, however, Bell's line seems
to
be that we are in an era of
technological growth and cultural decline, a disparity he describes as a
" cultural contradiction of capitalism." What Bell means by cultural
decline is somewhat ambiguous, however, for sometimes he seems
to
be
talking about the failure of the entire culture, in almost an anthropo–
logical sense, though most of the time h e is excoriating that part of the
culture that is customarily thought of as the advanced or serious sector.
His complaint about the culture as a whole appears
to
be that it has
been softened up by the modernist and avant-garde movements to the
point where it is over-eager to assimilate them. But this part of his
argument depends on a reduction of modern art and criticism to a
purely antibourgeois, alienated, shock-producing, unrestrained, erotic
mode of self-indulgence-in other words, he has reduced modern art
to
its most extreme and least appeal ing expressions. And this permits him
to
make the standard conservative argument against modern art,
blaming it for th e cheap imitations fostered by th e mass and commer–
cial media.