ILLUSION ONLY IS SACRED From the Culture Industry to the Aesthetic Economy

ABSTRACT Integral to the modern paradigm of cultural critique is an entropic vision of the ‘completion ’ of modernity reaching from Heidegger and Adorno to Debord and Baudrillard. Are contemporary cultural developments to be grasped in terms of this ‘completion ’ or do we need a more open-ended account of capitalism and culture? The article examines two key aspects of contemporary culture, both tied to processes of aestheticization and commodification since the 18th century: the progression from the culture industry (Adorno) to the aes-thetic economy (Böhme), premised on the creation of aesthetic value in addition to use and exchange value; the progression from the ‘age of the world picture ’ (Heidegger) to culturalism, in which the culturalization of nature and history responds to the reduction of nature and history to standing reserves. KEYWORDS aesthetic economy • culturalism • culture industry • spirit of capitalism • world picture THE AGE OF THE WORLD PICTURE I The concept of the culture industry needs to be seen in the larger context of the critique of modernity. From Rousseau and the romantics, from Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Wagner, and Nietzsche onwards, the normative critique of a market-based culture has seen it as symptomatic of the deca-dence of civilization, of the dialectic of enlightenment, of the advent of one-dimensional man and the end of history, art, the subject and experience. The completion of modernity thus envisaged is not apocalyptic but entropic: the progressive loss of critical distinctions whose vanishing point can be described as the convergence of utopia and dystopia. This is the fate o