When culture grows ever more closely intertwined with the economy, and culture itself becomes a commodity — becomes “consumer culture” — that is, when culture no longer merely “sets the stage” for the economy but is itself a saleable “fast food,” literature and art too undergo, without anyone noticing, a substantive change; and the research paradigm of literary studies — indeed the discipline of literary studies itself — must therefore undergo a fundamental transformation.
1. The Marriage of Culture and Commodity
In “Transformations of the Image in Postmodernity,” Jameson points out:
On a global scale, the last remaining enclaves — the unconscious and ‘nature,’ or culture and aesthetic production, agriculture — have now all been assimilated into commodity production . . . Today the image is the commodity; that is why it is in vain to look to images to find any negation of the logic of commodity production; that, finally, is why all today’s beauty is merely virtual, and why contemporary pseudo-aestheticism’s favor for the image is an ideological strategy rather than a source of creativity. [1]
Driven by the speed of modern technology and the strong wave of globalization, the commodity economy, with its great lure and its unbreakable force, captures one field after another, seeking to bring every domain — even the outermost “enclave” — under its colonial rule, to be toyed with in its palm. Literature and art, which long held themselves sacred and lofty, have had to put down their reserve and sell themselves to the commodity economy. On the one hand, literary and artistic forms — sitcoms, soap operas, pop music, body art, popular fiction, rock and roll, and so on — have become hot-selling commercial points. On the other hand, literature and art change their faces and find every means to enter everyday life and to marry the commodity: advertising, planning, beauty, slimming, design, dining, fashion, environment — culture seeps into them all, and the trim figure of literature and art is seen in all of them. So wine culture, tea culture, food culture, shoe culture, clothing culture, all manner of business under the fine name of “culture,” come on stage to song and dance and glossy magazine and book. Never before has culture roamed so comfortably and so freely through the marketplace and the whole of everyday life; the commodity, too, no longer goes naked with its “dirty body,” but is elegantly wrapped by “culture” and seems itself to become “high culture.” As Baudrillard puts it:
The cultural center has become a component of the commercial center . . . At the same time, the commodity (clothing, groceries, dining, etc.) has been culturalized, for it has become playful, distinctive material, an elegant accompaniment, one ingredient in the whole array of consumption goods. [2]
Culture, literature, and art do not merely play the role of “setting the stage”; they have become, of their own willingness, the servant that the commodity economy drives as it pleases.
The marriage of culture and commodity is not merely an outer formal cooperation: culture itself must be transformed into “consumer culture.” So literature and art no longer hold to their chastity from the commodity; they willingly give up the intention of using utopian ideals to resist the alienation of the commodity economy and fall, irrevocably, into the ranks of consumer goods, keeping company with the very commodity they once disdained.
Horkheimer and Adorno set forth the commodification of art from the angle of the culture industry. They held that under the dual action of the development of commodity economy and modern mechanical-reproduction technology, cultural production no longer belongs to the individual activity of spirit and soul; it has degenerated into a culture industry — a market-oriented, mass-production culture industry.
The culture industry is proud that, by its own power, it has converted earlier clumsy art into something within the realm of consumption and has made this its principle. The culture industry has cast off the rough and naive features of earlier art and has raised art into a commodity type. [3]
This culture industry, which uses modern reproduction technology for standardized mass production, has thoroughly changed the mode of being of art: art is no longer proudly set in the museum or kept in the private mansion; it has put down its aristocratic standing, lowered itself, and returned to everyday life — sharing a place in the marketplace with all manner of merchandise. To stir the buying desire of the masses, gorgeous packaging and pandering to taste cannot be omitted, while inner content recedes — even to the point of being ignored. The result: art falls into being “a commodity type,” into being a consumer good.
2. From Appreciation to Consumption
From literature and art as object of appreciation to literature and art as consumer good is a great metamorphosis. If “appreciation” is aristocratic, the activity of an individual soul, then “consumption” pulls “appreciation” down from its aristocratic station and turns it into a group activity, into the satisfaction of pleasure and desire. Even when each consumer pursues individuality and difference, the consumers are not independent of one another. In fact, when the expression of individuality has become a fashion, it is no longer the expression of individuality but the chasing of fashion. Although culture, by distinction and classification, gives the world order and gives the human being identities, because the activity of consumption is first of all the confirmation of the consumer’s social identity, however much one tries to mark oneself off, one converges with a model, with a fashion. One thereby marks one’s submission to a certain social coding of signs and one’s naturalization into a certain hierarchy of value.
The cult of difference is built precisely on the basis of the loss of differences. [2]
The inevitable result of consumption is the loss of individuality.
Whereas the appreciation of literature and art must be a distanced contemplation of the work — a meditation of the soul, an interpretation of meaning, a savoring of resonance — consumption is directly a bodily action. It puts more weight on sensory pleasure, throws the flesh into it, even takes the cultural product as a part of the body, as a marker of social identity, and from it draws the satisfaction of pleasure and desire. One may say: it is precisely the shift from appreciation to consumption that brings the qualitative change in literature and art. Under the conditions of a commodity economy in which market demand is the iron law, literature and art, in order to make a living, have to give up their depth and pursue outer packaging; have to give up the lonely “sublime” and turn toward the “beautiful” and the “popular”; have to give up the temporal and turn into the spatial. For what consumption pursues is the instantaneous pleasure and not the long-savoring meditation, the relaxed steeping in the beautiful — a return to the collective unconscious, not the mind’s climb toward the sublime.
In speaking of the history of aesthetics, Croce traced the term “appreciation” to its origin. He notes that the word “appreciation” has carried various senses; in its earliest sense it meant “to enjoy,” “to take pleasure in,” and only in the last fifty years of the eighteenth century did it come to refer specifically to aesthetic fact. In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant discussed aesthetic appreciation in depth and made a definition:
When the form of an object (not as the material of its representation, but as feeling), in the act of reflection upon it alone, is judged to be a ground of pleasure in the representation of this object (without intending to draw a concept from this object), then this pleasure too is judged to be necessarily bound up with its representation, and is valid not only for the subject who grasps this form but also for every judging being in general. The object is therefore called beautiful; and the faculty of judging through such a pleasure (and so also of judging with universal validity) is called appreciation. [4]
In this definition Kant clearly imports into “appreciation” the indispensable quality of “reflection.”
On this basis Kant distinguished the “appreciative judgment” from the “sensory judgment” and put forward the question of “appreciative taste.” The evolution of the meaning of “appreciation,” and its eventual fixing, is in fact the process by which literary and artistic activity has been steadily aristocratized and sacralized: appreciation no longer refers loosely to general activities of leisure for amusement or for pleasure but becomes an activity requiring a specific cultivation. It calls on the appreciator to possess the power of “reflection” and elegant taste, and so to be set apart from the cultural amusements of the ordinary mass. Appreciation and taste gradually become the distinctive cultural capital of the educated and seize the dominant position; they in turn guide literary and artistic creation and drive literature and art toward the elegant and refined.
But when literature and art become commodities, and because the cost of their reproduction is low, become commodities the broad mass of ordinary people can buy, the age of mass culture has arrived. This is an irresistible mass-culture wave that drowns whatever is special, aristocratic, or even sacred. The noble, orthodox station of “appreciation” is overturned; “entertainment” regains its legitimacy and, because such entertainment is freely bought and sold, turns into cultural “consumption.”
In the whole history of the genesis and evolution of literature and art, “appreciation” is rather like a hurried passing guest: it gains its distinctive character with the independence of literature and art, and sinks with the auctioning-off of literature and art. Benjamin once pointed out that the reception of artworks contains two extremes: one weighs only the cult value of the artwork; the other weighs only its exhibition value. At the start of artistic creation, when art was still tied to magic and to religious ritual, it had only cult value. Only when artistic practices were freed from ritual, walked out of the shadows of magic and religion, and stood independent, did art — besides cult value — also sprout exhibition value. The value-change of independent literature and art is the steady depreciation of cult value and the steady increase of exhibition value; the activity of appreciation is generated in the very process of the transition from cult value to exhibition value and gradually becomes a distinctive activity.
The cult value of art, closely tied to ritual, is a very peculiar value-phenomenon. On the one side, the participant can be one with the divinity, so that every distance dissolves. On the other side, the object also has an “unapproachability.” The high divinity is severe, unapproachable. The man in the state of worship neither should nor can look at the divinity with an appreciating eye; to do so would be a desecration of the divinity. “Appreciation” is an activity between “worship” and “exhibition.” In the activity of appreciation, the divinity has gone far away, leaving only an illusory shadow. The cult object turns into the appreciative object; the mysterious and sacred “aura” turns into the misty “poetic”; the unapproachable distance turns into an “approachable distance” or “distanced approach” — that is, “the aesthetic distance of contemplation.” [5] It is precisely this distance that is the necessary precondition for the activity of literary and artistic appreciation; and it is precisely this distance that lets reflection and recognition of literary and artistic activity exist — that lets the theory of literature and art come to be.
But the independence of literature and art is only a transitional state. The very moment literature and art freed themselves from magical and religious ritual and showed their distinctive value was the moment they were prepared for commodification. For only when literature and art are independent and have distinctive value can they enter the market to be freely bought and sold, and can fetch a good price. So, looking at the historical process, modernism strenuously argued the independence and originality of literature and art so as to resist the wave of commodification — but its actual meaning is like the price-rigging of shrewd merchants: to make literature and art a scarce resource and so to stir greater buying desire. Before the commodity economy, every reserve is hollow; every independence is feeble. “Independence” and “scarcity” spurred the rapid development of mechanical reproduction technology, which has quickly destroyed the sacredness and mystery of literature and art and at last pushed them into the ranks of consumer goods. The poetic atmosphere is thereby exhausted; literature and art no longer need to be savored and appreciated again and again — they are merely possessed directly, consumed.
On the surface, the becoming of literature and art into consumer goods is a process of “demotion.” In fact, however, they have become a new “god” — a god that doubles as commodity and cultural sign. The cultural commodity not only marks the possession of money; it also signifies and symbolizes the possession of cultural capital and the elevation of taste. The process of cultural consumption is the double possession and double enjoyment. It cancels the bodily distance and the psychical distance, so that consumption becomes the feast of the carnival, a festival of pleasure and indulgence.
3. The Transformation of the Research Paradigm in Literary Studies
The change of literature and art from “appreciation” to “consumption” foretells that the research paradigm of literature and art must undergo a fundamental change with it — foretells the transformation of literary studies as a whole. Appreciative activity has determined every kind of literary and artistic research: textual exegesis, biographical research, the psychology of art, the sociology of art . . . none of these can do without the literary and artistic work, none can do without the creator of the distinctive work. By the time of modernism, with its emphasis on the independence of literature and art, the text was further stripped from the complex contexts that surrounded it and made to stand forth. So the study of work-form and of work-language became the focus of the theorists. Formalist poetics, narratology, semiotics, and the like soon became “fashionable scholarship” and enjoyed special favor. Even later reception theory could not do without the textual pole and the inquiry into textual strategy. Even deconstruction is a deconstruction of textual meaning; it attends first of all to the text, even though it deliberately seeks the margin and overturns meaning — it still sets out from the text. So long as literature and art are objects of appreciation, literary studies cannot leave its traditional fences. Whatever change the research paradigm of literature and art undergoes, it has an inner consistency and continuity.
From “appreciation” to “consumption,” by contrast, is a qualitative change; it must produce a rupture in literary theory.
Mike Featherstone groups consumer-culture theory under three main perspectives: one takes the expansion of commodity production as the founding premise and goes on to examine the changes in social relations and ideology that the mass accumulation of material culture brings; the second is a more strictly sociological perspective, discussing how people consume in different ways in order to build social relations or social distinctions; the third explores the emotional pleasures, the dreams and the desires of consumption. [6] Here, whether sociological, economic, or psychological, the center of the text has been dissolved without our noticing. Once literature and art become consumer goods, they are no longer the organic whole of independent creation; their inventiveness has degenerated into ingenious collage and is mass-reproduced, swiftly disseminated as cultural commodity, broadly covering the market. This mass, broad-coverage commodity rollout drives the popularity of fashion. But fashion is, in the end, short-lived; consumption is always one-time. This is an age without classics and in which the production of classics is impossible. In the process of consumption, the text is indeed no longer as important as before; it no longer needs to carry depth or resonance. Correspondingly, the internal research of literature and art has lost its ground of existence; the metaphysical search for meaning no longer carries meaning. The center of the discipline of literary studies will also dissolve. Literary studies will fall into being a “colony” — first of sociology and likewise of economics and psychology — colonies they will tread on at will. From this angle, perhaps this is the end of traditional literary studies.
Consumer culture differs from ordinary commodity: it uses primarily images, figures, and signs. So the study of consumer culture, beyond the study of the general commodity-level, must also be semiotic — must study the production and circulation of signs, the social coding of signs, and the social and psychological meanings the signs symbolize. Sociology, economics, and psychology must here combine with semiotics, becoming a semiotic sociology, economics, and psychology — a multi-disciplinary integrative study.
The activity of cultural consumption differs from the activity of ordinary consumption. The ordinary activity of consumption is separated from the activity of production; for the cultural product, the production of meaning and of pleasure goes on within the process of production and at the same time is interwoven with the process of consumption. The consumer does not stand at the end of the “production-consumption” chain; there is no real boundary between producer and consumer. [7] This feature further sets consumer culture off from the ordinary commodity. The consumption of an ordinary commodity is most often a simple use or enjoyment; the consumption of consumer culture is at the same time a process of producing meaning. Consumption and production are simultaneous and co-acting; the pleasure and the desire-satisfaction experienced in the activity of consumption are gained within the very process of meaning-generation.
This emphasis on meaning does not mean that the research on the literature and art that has fallen into consumer culture must return to the text as center. Unlike the appreciation and research of the traditional text — which is deep, complete, and in whose process of meaning-generation the inner structure, latent power, and strategy of the text play the dominant role, making the text the unavoidable center of interpretation — the text of consumer culture is shallow, without depth, incomplete, full of cracks. Its meaning-generation depends more on the consumer’s (reader’s) social experience and on his mode of involvement.
The popular text is agent and resource, not object. [8]
The text, having drifted into poverty and intertextuality, is no longer the center of meaning-generation. What decides meaning is the agent and his social experience — the context in which, and the mode in which, he takes part in consumption. So the study of meaning and pleasure, though it touches on the text, no longer takes the text as center but focuses more on the study of the “relevance” to everyday life. The text has moved to the margin; the research, accordingly, has lost its center.
At the same time, the shift from “appreciation” to “consumption” must bring a change in “meaning” itself. The meaning of the traditional text was always tied to the “truth” the text revealed; meaning was the appreciator’s experience of seeking, discovering, and understanding the “truth.” The “truth” was held within the text and referred to real life. In consumer culture, however, the question of truth has been indefinitely deferred and suspended. The consumer’s experience of meaning has drifted from any seeking of truth; “meaning” in the traditional sense has faded and gone stale. It has fallen from the heaven of the spirit and sunk into a direct feeling of the sense and the body, into a symbol of social identity. That is to say: for literature and art — traditional, or fallen into the ranks of consumer culture — the “meaning” that meaning-interpretation interprets has become wholly different. One may say: the traditional paradigm of meaning-interpretation is approaching its grave. To live again, it must be like the phoenix, which, in the burning flames of nirvana, thoroughly transforms its interpretive paradigm.
More importantly, the shift from “appreciation” to “consumption” thoroughly throws away the distinctive relation between appreciator and text that took shape in long aesthetic practice. It dissolves the aesthetic psychical distance between appreciator and text. The object is no longer the aesthetic object that keeps a contemplative distance with the appreciator; it is directly possessed, enjoyed, consumed. This is an activity without distance, an activity that refuses distance. So the structural studies, formal studies, narratological studies, reception theory, deconstructive analysis, and so on, all built on the distance of aesthetic appreciation, suddenly lose their former meaning and the basis on which they stood. This does not, however, mean that prior research results will be all cast aside; on the contrary, they should be received into the new research paradigm, while undergoing major adjustment. For the consumption of literature and art is the consumption of the text, the consumption of image, figure, and sign. Just this point opens the way for prior textual-research results to enter the new field of research. Only that the independence and ontological station of textual structure, literary-artistic form, narrative mode, and so on, has been canceled. They are now only a kind of “rhetorical” device that, to a certain extent, influences and modulates the way the participant possesses and consumes the text — influences how he enters the text and fuses with it — and the extent to which the text can be shared by society and thus drive a fashion.
The above discussion does not mean that elegant literature and art have come to their end. They may go on existing; elegant activities of appreciation may go on existing. But they are helplessly falling into ever more confining straits, so that they seem bound to retreat into the museum, kept as a “specimen” under constant temperature, only occasionally used by scholars as an instructional sample in the lecture hall, or savored in private by the old guard of cultural aristocracy. The change from “appreciation” to “consumption” has become an unstoppable tide. So literary studies, if it is to keep theoretical leadership and to keep its voice on reality, must undergo major adjustment and transformation.
In sum: the shift from “appreciation” to “consumption” will dissolve the center of the discipline of traditional literary studies, will rupture its traditional research paradigm. Literary studies will launch a great breakout — breaking through traditional fences, opening up and gradually building a new, blurred-edged, multi-disciplinary “discipline.”