CULTURAL HISTORY AND LlTERARY IMAGINATION Cultural Transformations

EDITED BY CHRISTIAN J. EMDEN & DAVID MIDGLEY

of the Public Sphere
VOL. 24
Contemporary and Historical Perspectives
EDITORIAL BOARD
RODRIGO CACHO, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
SARAH COLVIN, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
KENNETH LOISELLE, TRINITY UNIVERSITY Bernd Fischer and May Mergenthaler (eds)
HEATHER WEBB, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

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IIERND FISCHER AND MAY MERGENTHALER

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PART I Historical Perspectives: Real and Imaginary,

ISBN 978-3-03-430991-2 (alk.

Inclusive and Exclusive Public Spheres 13

1. Communities.2. Civil society. 3. Public spaces. I. Fischer, Bernd, 1953- 11. Mer­

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 vi

PART III Cultural and Theoretical Transformations II:

IHtRND FISCHER AND MAY MERGENTHALER

The Aesthetic Potentials ofPublic Spheres
155
JULIANE REBENTISCH Introduction
Mass - People - Multitude: A Reflection on the Source
ofDemocratic Legitimacy
157

CHRISTOPH MENKE
'11\1: idea for this volume developed during a larger interdisciplinary pro­
A Different Taste: Neither Autonomy nor Mass Consumption 18, Ieee on 'The Puhlic Sphere and Modem Sodal Imaginaries: a lecture senes
Imd a conference that took place at The Ohio State University hetween
KAM SHAPIRO
2.009 and 2012. We invited those participants and several additional col­
Biopolitical Reflections: Cognitive, Aesthetic and Reflexive
lellgues, who were particularly interested in conceptual work on the cultural
Mappings ofGlobal Economies
lmplications and aesthetic formations of the public sphere, to contribute
2°3
co this volume. Our thanks go foremost to the authors, who responded
HO convincingly to our invitation; to the participants of the conference
PART IV Three Case Studies: From Postcolonial
I\nd the lecture series; and to the colleagues from OSU's departments of
to Global Literary Public Spheres
229 Comparative Studies, History, Political Science, Spanish and Portuguese,
Imd Germanic Languages and Literatures who participated in the concep­
FERNANDO UNZUETA
tlon and organization ofthe larger project. Special thanks are due to Alice
National Novels and the Emergence ofthe Public Sphere Schlingman, who helped with the editorial work that felliargely into May
in Latin America Mergenthaler's hands. Finally, we would like to thank the College (now
23 1
})ivision) ofHumanities for generously supporting the lecture series, the
IGNACIO CORONA conference, and the publication ofchis volume.
Gendering the Public Sphere: Literary Journalism Pondering the potentials, limits, hopes and hazards ofexpounding the
by Women in Mexico and Brazil role ofaesthetics and culture in the formation ofpublic spheres and sodal
27 1
Imaginaries, it is perhaps helpful to search for possible beginnings. When
Immanuel Kant, in bis ~swer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?'
ODED NIR
(1784), introduced his notion ofa public [publikum] that has the potential
Totalizing Imaginaries: Collectiviry and Utopia in Modern to enlighten itself, bis anticipated model was a yet to be established uncen­
Hehrew Fiction fromAltneuland to Neuland sored intellectual exchange of ideas and arguments. Reason alone was to
3°5
determine the validity of any puhlished argument, and in the process of
Notes on Contrihutors its quasi-scholarly self-enlightenment, the public would not only debate
337
innovative and diverse ideas, it would also learn how to reason. Culture
Index and aesthetics did not come into view. For Kant, gratuitous rhetorical
34 1
devices, polemical structures and aesthetic emhellishments were, as he
CHRISTOPH MENKE

A Different Taste: Neither Autonomy

nor Mass Consumption

Recent theories and diagnoses of sodal states of affairs have attempted

to use the figure of the aesthetic to gain insight into central mechanisms
of contemporary society. These attempts rest on the assumption that the
aesthetic is a figure of subjectivity, or more precisdy, of freedom. This
assumption is correct: the last word ofaesthetics is human freedom. 1 More
pressing is the need for us to darify what aesthetics means by freedom. For
only when that is dear can we decide how compelling the attempt is to
describe, let alone to explain and evaluate, 2 today's emerging postmodern
society by referring to figures of thought daborated by the aesthetics of
modernity between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. This attempt

Christoph Menke, Kraft: Ein GrundbegriffästhetischerAnthropologie (Frankfurt/M.:

Suhrkamp, 2008), 129; Christoph Menke, Force: A Fundamental Concept ofAesthetic
Anthropology, trans. Garrit Jackson (New York: Fordham University Press, 20I3), 98.
2 For a descriptive-phenomenological usage ofthe category ofthe aesthetic see Axel
Honneth, 'Organisierte Selbstverwirklichung. Paradoxien der Individualisierung', in
Axel Honneth,Das Ich im Wir: Studien zur Anerleennungstheorie (Berlin: Suhrkamp,
20m), 202-21. In contrast to this usage, see Luc Boltanski and Eve ChiapeHo 'Die
Arbeit der Kritik und der normative Wandel: in Marion von Osten, ed., Norm der
Abweichung (Zurich: Springer 2003), 57-80, as weH as Andreas Reckwitz, 'Vom
KÜllsclermythos zur Normalisierung kreativer Prozesse. Der Beitrag des Kunstfelds
zur Genese des Kreativsubjekts', in Christoph Menke and Juliane Rebentisch, eds,
Kreation und Depression: Freiheit im gegenwärtigen Kapitalismus (Berlin: Kadmos,
20II), 98-II7. These authors use the category ofthe aesthetic in order to explain the
development of certain social formations and figures, on the basis of a process of
aestheticization. On the use of the aesthetic and thc acsthcticization as categories
ofvalue assessment see the comprehcnsivc study by Juliane Rebentisch, Die Kunst
der Freiheit: Zur Dialektik demokratischer Existenz (Berlin: Suhrkamp,
184 CHRISTOPH MENKE
attributes to modern aesthetics an antidpatory quality with regard to
today's postmodern sodal developments.
In the following, I will argue that this recourse of sodal theory to
aesthetics must fau: the emerging forrns ofa postmodern subjectivity (or,
as I will say, for reasons I will explain, a subjectivity that is both post~
disdplinary and post~autonomous) cannot be understood as the sodal
realization of a figure delineated by modern aesthetics. That is so for two
reasons that seem to be mutually contradictory: because the aesthetic
freedom ofmodernity is both less and more than the freedom ofthe post~
disciplinary subjectivity we currently see taking shape. On the one hand,
the post-disdplinary form ofsubjectivity goes beyond the idea offreedom
framed by aesthetic modernity; the former is not the lace sodal realization
of the latter (but in fact a result of its crisis). On the other hand, however,
the idea of freedom framed byaesthetic modernity likewise goes beyond
the post-disdplinary form ofsubjectivity; the former is not the blueprint
for the latter (but in fact energizes its critique).
I will explain this double hypothesis with a few desultory remarks
about the concept oftaste. is an aesthetic category and at once a sodal
one. It is an aesthetic category because taste constitutes the exemplary figure
ofaesthetic freedom. Taste is a faculty offreedom because it is a faculty of
perception and evaluation in which the subject proceeds, quite radically,
'without guidance from another':3 without the guidance of tradition, but
also without the guidance ofa generally defined method, and indeed even
without the guidance of a determinate, which is to say, predetermined
concept. At the same time, this possibility is available to all: whereas only
a few people can have genius, the freedom ofaesthetic creation, taste is that
faculty ofaesthetic freedom that everyone may develop. And taste is asocial
category because taste is offundamental importance for the subject's sodal
constitution and its sodal function. That is true not because (or not only
3 Kant darifles this formulation hom 'Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?'
in Kritik der Urteilskraft [Critique of the Power ofJudgment] (§ 40, B IS8-9) as an
overcoming of the 'passivity' of reason. To guide oneself constitutes the activity of
reason, or transforms the selfinto a subjecr.
A Different Taste: Neither Autonom] nor Mass Consumption I8S
because) the concept of'good' taste designates yet another field in which
sodal distinctions and convertible forms of accumulated capital may be
generated... Rather, it is true first and foremost because the faculty of taste
is crucial- though crudal in very different ways - both to modern sodety
and CO the emerging postmodern or post~disdplinary sodety.
Autonomy
The category of taste, more than almost any other, is tied to the emer~
gence ofaesthetics in the eighteenth century.5 It is here that the concept's
essential features take shape: 'taste: as aesthetics defines it, is a faculty of
cognition and judgment that belongs to the 'sensible: which is to say, it
proceeds without predetermined rules or concepts. Taste is the faculty
of perceiving and judging the qualities of an object without methodical
verification or argumentative justification in an act ofsensible comprehen­
sion. This conception is opposed at once to traditional doctrines ofartistic
production and to the phuosophy of rationalism. Against the traditional
doctrines ofartistic production, it describes the aesthetic objects oftaste as
incapable of regulation and as fundamentally exempt from theory and its
conceptual~discursive knowledge. It is not enough, aesthetics likes to say,
quoting Horace, that poems be beautiful (in accordance with the rules):
'let them be tender and affecting, and bear away the soul of the auditor
whithersoever they please: To have taste means to have understood that
4 This is Pierre Bourdieus thesis (presented here in an abbreviated form), which is
part ofhis attempt to reverse the 'denial of the soda!' that tries to deflne taste and
to uncover its hidden sodal ti.mction. But perhaps the sodal element of taste lies
precisely in its denial ofthe sodal. CE Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Sodal Critique
oftheJudgment ofTaste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 11.
For more detailed and exact analyses ofthe following see Christoph Menke, 'Subjekt,
Subjektivitär: in Karlheinz Barck et al., eds, Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: Historisches
Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden V (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2003), 734-87.
186 CHRISTOPH MENKE
a 'work mat is full ofbreaches of me rules can be excellent': taste savours
the 'irregularites heureuses [the happy irregularities]'.6 Yet me aesmetic
category of taste is at once also opposed to me philosophy ofrationalism,
which had dedared me idea ofa faculty ofsensible judgment to be absurd:
operating in me sensible and wimout dearly defined concepts, rationalism
had argued, we do not comprehend objects but project our impressions and
preferences (and men immediately forget mat we merely projected). Good
taste, as La Rochefoucauld purs it in a maxim aimed against me rationalist
reduction of me judgment of taste to a mere projection of preferences, is
distinguishable from bad taste, good taste being mat taste which knows
'me real value of things': it 'teaches us: Jean-Baptiste Dubos says, 'how
someming is in itself'; it disdoses mings as mey truly are. 7
Aesmetics, men, defines taste as me conjunction of two conflicting
elements: the form ofsubjectivity and me aspiration to objective validity.
Taste is a subjective faculty: an abilitymat has been acquired mrough prac­
tice and is merefore irreducible to rules, an ability me subject can applyon
its own responsibility, wimout me guidance oflived tradition or rational
memod. In taste, me subject itselfjudges. And yet taste is at once an objec­
tive aumority: me ability to see mings as mey are in memselves wimout
me dissembling veil ofprejudice and na'ivete. Taste judges me thing itself.
It is not me reason of scientific memod but reason as aesmetic taste mat
lends me dearest expression to me bourgeois ideal ofautonomy. For to be
'autonomous' means to unite wimin oneselfme freedom ofself-governed
activitywim me normativity implied by me 'law' ofme ming itself. Because
aesmetic taste can meet this normative requirement wimout rdying on
external guidelines for orientation, and because it can comprehend me
thing according to its own constitution and valence, it is the exemplary
autonomous agency. S
6 Jean-Bapriste Dubos, Rijlexions critiques sur la poesie et sur la peinture 11 (Genf:
Slatkine Reprints, 1967), 368.
7 La Rochefoucauld, 'Reflexions diverses' X, in CEuvres compu.~tes (Paris: Gallimard
1964), 517; Dubos, Rijlexions critiques, 343-4.
8 Taste is without laws, but not without Law: taste conforms without law - or rather
without submitting itself to Iaw - tO the law of objecrivity.
A Different Taste: Neither Autonom} nor Mass Consumption 187
Part and parcel of me aesmetic idea of taste is me awareness mat me
form ofsubjectivity and me aspiration to objective validity are not given
and in mutual agreement by nature. Taste is a matter of'education': taste,
and mus aesmetics, is a product ofcultural formation, an artefact. There
is taste only in a culture. For only he who, setting out as a natural being,
has been formed into a participant in a culture has acquired mat form of
subjectivity wh ich is capable ofobjectivity. This is where me internal con­
nection between modern aesmetics and me disdplinary sodety becomes
apparent. This connection consists in how bom conceive the subject. The
disdplinary procedures mat 'in me course of the seventeenm and eight­
eenm centuries, [... ] became general formulas ofdomination' manifest me
'subjection ofmose who are perceived as objects and me objectification of
mose who are subjected:9 Disdplinary procedures exerdse sodal power in
such fashion mat mey turn mose mey subject into subjects who are capable
and willing of meir own accord to render me services required of memo
The addressees of disdplines do not obey instructions whose normative
substance they cannot understand (mat is me traditional definition ofme
servant or slave). Instead, me addressees ofdisciplines can orient themselves
in accordance wim me norms whose implementation mey are required to
perform; merein lies meir being 'subjects'. That is why procedures ofexercise I
and examination stand at me centre ofme disciplinary society, procedures
through which individuals become subjects. The educational institutions
mat are in charge of mis process come to play an utterly fundamental role
in me disciplinary society; education becomes me institution of institu­
tion, me meta-institution. 10
In other words, by describing me subject as somemingmat has become,
or more precisely, that has been made, aesthetics merely repeats me new
9 Michel Foucault, Überwachen undStrafon: Die Geburtdes Gefängnisses (Frankfurt/M.:
Suhrkamp, 1977),176 and 2.38. (With the formulation 'subjektivierende Unterwerfung'
[subjectifying subjection] the German translation reflects the ambiguity ofFollcault's
concept of'assujettissement: CE ibid, 137 and 185.)
ro Every institution in the disdplinary sodety is also an edllcational institution: the
institution first produces the subjects that then are able co enter into sociery.

188 CHRISTOPH MENKE
sodal reality ofdisdplinary domination. l l Aesthetics is a theory and prac­
tice of the procedures of subjectivation - of exerdse, of the heightening
and co ordination of forces, of examination that constitute the core of
the sodal disdpline. Without the very sodal procedures that engender a
sodal subject by way of the internalization of sodal norms, there would
be no aesthetic taste either. And yet aesthetic taste and hence the aesthetic
subject, are in one crudal regard antithetical to the faculties ofself-control
that constitute the subject of the disdplines: in the disdplinary subject,
the prehistory ofits disdplinary training remains inscribed in perennially
legible form. As a disdplinary subject it orients itself in accordance with
the norms defined by the institutions in which it participates. Yet
self-governance always retains the recollection ofthe heteronomous scene
of disciplination in which this faculty was first acquired. In the aesthetic
subject, by contrast, the prehistory oHts disdpHnary training has been Iefi:
behind forgotten or repressed. The way aesthetics portrays it in its con­
cept oftaste, the aesthetic subject not onIy orients itself in accordance with
sodal norms. It also does so in such a fashion that any difference between
what it is of itself and what the sodal norm wants from it seems to have
been effaced altogether. The aesthetic subject has entirely transformed its
sensible forces into faculties oHts own: by developing fully and in compiete
freedom, its sensible forces agree of their own accord with the legal form
ofthe sodal norms 12 to which theywere subject to as an external compulsion
1I The connection between aesthetics and disciplinary society is so dose that Foucault
could take the fundamental caregories ofhis theory ofthe disdplinary subject direccly
from the programmatic writings ofthe emerging aesthetic disdpline, especially from
Baumgarten's Aesthetica. For more on this see Christoph Menke, 'Die Disziplin
der Ästhetik: Eine Lektüre von Überwachen und Strafen: in Gertrud Koch, Sylvia
Sasse and Ludger Schwarte, eds, Kumt als Strafe: Zur Asthetik der Disziplinierung
(Munich: Wilhelm Fink 2.003), 109-:tl; 'Zweierlei Übung: Zum Verhältnis von
sozialer Disziplinierung und ästhetischer Existenz', in Axel Honneth and Martin
Saar, eds,MichelFoucault: Zwischenbilanz einerRezeption (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp,
2.0 0 3), 28 3-99.
12 For more on this description oftaste see Kant, Kritik der Urteilskrafi;, § 35, B 145-6.
In the aesthetic harmony between the sensuousness of'imagination' and the sodal
norms of'reason: Kant reformulates Baumgarten's ideal offelix acstheticus.
A Different Taste: Neithcr Autonomy nor Mass Consumption 18 9
in the scene ofdisciplination. The aesthetic subject is the effortless subject:
the subject to which its being a subject is natural; that did not need to first
be made a subject but, even though it was first exercised and educated,
appears as though it were or seems to be - a subject 'ofitself'. The aesthetic
subject is the semblance of the subject; the aesthetic subject is ideologi­
13
cal, and the aesthetic ideology is the ideology of the subject. Aesthetics,
as a theory and practice, means: aestheticization ofdisdpline. Not before,
and only in, the aesthetic subject of taste does the teleology of the disd­
plinary society - to make the heteronomy of disdplination disappear in
the autonomous self-disdplination of subjects co me to fulfilment. The
subject ofaesthetic taste is the epitome of the bourgeois idea ofautonomy
because autonomy exists only in aesthetic semblance.
That renders the beautiful, with its 'felicitous irregularity', the exem­
plary object of taste. 14 True, the domain of taste is much wider than the
field of aesthetically beautiful or sublime things: it comprises everything
for whose cognition there is as yet no concept, whose assessment is not
yet subject to any rule. The domain oftaste is a field that is expanding ever
more rapidly in the bourgeois sodety: the field ofthe unknown. Bourgeois
society needs taste in order to comprehend all those unfamiliar forms of
behaviour and objects with which it confronts the individual. Within this
field, the beautiful is not only an unusual case but also, and predsely there­
fore, a comforting one. The beautiful as an object of taste is at once also ! i
the medium in which the aesthetic subject assures itself oHts possibility. In
the beautiful, taste becomes consdous ofitself: the taste for the beautiful
assures the aesthetic subject that the labour ofeducation can succeed, that
the form of subjectivity and the aspiration to objective validity are capa­
ble of a perfect union. The aesthetic taste for the beautiful is not merely
an espedally cultivated and refined sort oftaste, it is the taste for taste. In
takingpleasure in the beautiful, the subject takes pleasure in the perfeetion
of its self-education: an education in whose course all heteronomy, which
13 See Terry Eagleton, Tbe Ideology ofthe Aesthetic (Oxford: Wiley, 1990), Ch. I.
14 Cf. Paul de Man,DieJdeologie des Ästhetischen, cd. by Christoph Menke (Frankfurt/M.:
Suhrkamp, 1993), Part I.

19° CHRISTOPH MENKE
defines the sodal existence of the disciplinary subject, has been sublated.
'Beautiful things: Kant writes, are evidence 'that man fits into the world: 15
Consumerism
The aesthecic of taste is tied to the contemporaneous emergence ofbour­
geois sodety; aesthetics supplies that society's disciplinary subjectivation
with the ideal ofautonomy: ofa subjectivity that can be purely self-govem­
ing because it is capable offorming itself. This ideal ofautonomy is realized
onIy in aesthetic semblance, but it is precisely therein that it constitutes
the sodal reality in which the disciplinary subject appears as the 'citizen'.
The subjectivity of the bourgeois citizen is made by social disciplination
and yet capable ofobjectively comprehending the qualities and valences of
things. In the citizen's taste, social disciplination is transmuted into objec­
tivityfreelyundertaken. Taste as aesthetic ideology is required so that the
disdplinary subject, as the cicizen, can believe itselfcapable ofan (objective)
understanding ofits world based purelyon its own (subjective) judgment.
In today's post-disdplinary capitalism/6 taste presents a vety differ­
ent figure and serves an encirely different funccion: taste now becomes the
decisive precondition for mass consumption. 'Mass consumption' is not
merely a quantitative term, describing the consumption oflarger amounts
ofcommodities by larger groups ofconsumers. Rather, 'mass consumpcion'
means that the central aim and motor ofeconomic activity is the mass pro­
duccion ofcommodities that serve solely to satisfy needs that were generated
in the first place specifically for and by these same commodities. The needs
IS Immanucl Kant, 'Handschriftlicher Nachlass: Logik', Akademie-Ausgabe vol. 16,
Berlin: Reimer, 1914, 1:1.7 [Nr. 18:1.0 aJ), <http://korpora.zim.uni-duisburg-essen.
de/kant/aaI6/> accessed 1 April :1.OIS.
16 For more on this characterization see Gilles Deleuze, 'Post-scriptum sur les sodetes
de controle' [Postscript on the Societies ofControl], inL'autrejournall (199 0 )
<http:/hlibertaire.free.fr/DeleuzePostScriptum.html> accessed 3]anuary 2.014.
'I
:;1 '
A DijJerent Taste: Neither Autonomy nor ldass Consumption 19 1
with relation to which these commodities are to possess 'use value'17 in the
system ofmass consumption are thus 'cultural' needs in an eminent sense:
theyare not just artificially generated but ofthemselves directed toward the
meaning that the commodity and the possession ofit are said to have. Mass
consumption accordingly does not just presuppose mass culture; rather,
the systems of mass consumption and mass culture are identical. 18 In this
system, the economic consumer is thus essentially a cultural participant:
he needs taste. Ifthe mass-consumerist economy entails the unprecedented
acceleration of the production of forever new commodities, their recep­
don conversely requires a no less drastically heightened flexibility and
enthusiasm for noveltyon the part ofthe consumer's faculty ofjudgment.
What the consumerist taste accomplishes is a new conjunccion ofcrea­
don and adaptation. The consumerist taste is as creative as it is adaptive:
it is adaptive by virtue of its creativity. The economy defined by mass con­
sumption continually produces commodities co satisfy needs that cannot
even exist yet. That is what is called here 'innovation': going beyond what
is already known to be needed. And so production engenders what, by
past and current standards, is pointless and useless: what is the human
being of 2006 supposed to be able to do with the iPhone, a device that,
Time magazine declared, was 'the invention of 200i? It is ofno use to hirn
until he has transformed hirnself into someone else: into someone who is 1'1
equal to the presence of this device. Its producers bet on the creative per­
formance of consumers who, guided by advertisements and the culture
industry, in the first place engender those standards and the needs directed
toward their attainment that are a match for this device. Because this crea­
tive performance of taste has become, in mass-consumerist capitalism, an
17 That, for this reason, the differentiation between use and value becomes
itselfproblematic is also the thesis in Theodor W. Adorno, 'Über den Fetischcharakter
der Musik und die Regression des Hörens: in Dissonanzen. Musik in der verwalteten
U0lt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969), 9-4S. According to Zygmunt
Bauman's terminological suggestion this constitutes the difference between consump­
don and consumerism. CE Bauman, Consuming Lift (Cambridge, MA:
Polity Press, 2.007), :1.5-SI.
18 Michael Makropoulous, Theorie der Massenkultur (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2.008).
I92. CHRISTOPH MENKl!
essential precondition for its ongoing operation, taste has shed all aspects
of the sodal privilege that aesthetically good taste, despite its aspiration
to universalizability, still implied. 19 Taste is as widespread in the system
of mass-consumerism as the role of the consumer. Taste has accordingly
become commonplace. It is no longer concerned only with the beautiful
sides of life, but now with life in its entirety. At this moment, all oflife
is beautiful: there is no commodity that does not have its beautiful (or
less beautiful) side, no commodity whose consumption does not call for
a judgment of taste. And so in contemporary capitalism, taste is also no
longer something anyone could take pride in: everyone has (or must have)
taste. Indeed, despite the pride which the new bourgeois take in their own
'good taste', often hard-won against their petit-bourgeois backgrounds, it
is precisely the avant-gardes of mass-consumerism, lusting after the day's
newest product, who have the most highly developed faculty oftaste. They
perform the ongoing labour ofgiving meaning to what is meaningless by
inventingcriteria bywhich to judge the new product.
At the same time, this heightening ofcreativity that distinguishes the
consumerist from the bourgeois taste serves the principle of adaptation.
Taste is the faculty ofchoosing: it judges and thus prefers one to the other,
slights the other in favour of the one. Like, and even more fundamentally
than, aesthetic taste before it, consumerist taste cannot rely on criteria that
are already defined as it assesses products. It must first develop the criteria
that wi11fit these products - it must creatively invent them. Yet unlike the
bourgeois-aesthetic taste, the consumerist taste does not seek to find these
criteria in the things at hand; it instead looks to the practices and lifestyles
into which things are supposed to fit. It is not the things themselves but such
relations offittingness that concern the mass-consumerist taste: does this
19 The acsthetic regime oftaste does not tolerate the originally proclaimed openness oHts
criteria in its sodal reality and '[die] so überzeugend vorgetragene Theorie rekurriert
schließlich doch wieder aufSchichtung' [the (thus) convindngly presented theory
refers back to stratification]. Niklas Luhmann, 'Individuum, Individualität,
Individualismus', Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik 3 (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp,
I993), wS· Bourdieu's analyses refer co the mechanisms through which 'good' taste
is defined as 'our' taste.
/I Different Taste: Neither Autonom] nor Mass Consumption I93
thing fit into my life? Or rather: which life fits this thing? And how does
the life that fits this new thing fit my old life? How do I have to change my
life, to redefine and reinvent my life, so that this new thingwi11fit into it,
or that I can make myself fit for this new thing? The harmonious mutual
between the human being and the thing, of which the aesthetic taste
assured itself in the pleasure it took in the beautiful, is transformed into
the continual effort to be fit for, and to adapt to, forever novel products.
With all its creativity, the consumerist faculty oftaste pursues a single aim,
to ensure the subject's fitness: pure self-preservation.
Many observers have noted and lamented that 'self-preservation' in this
sense cannot mean the realization or fulfilment of a self that, by virtue
meaningful continuity oHts judgments, appears CO itself and others as
identical to itself (and that consumerist mass culture talks so much about
'self-fulfilment' only because no fulfilment of the self in any demanding
sense in fact takes place): ehe consumerist taste is the creativity of adap­
tation, which no longer has the resources to worry over such questions
of meaning and continuity; it is the expression of infinite flexibility.20
Yet it is important to note that the consumerist subject does not suffer
chis 'corrosion ofcharacter' as Richard Sennett called it in the tide ofhis
book; on the contrary, it perflrms this corrosion. '[T]he playing down and
derogation of yesterday's needs and the ridicule and uglification of their
objects, now passes, and even more the discrediting of the very idea that
consuming life ought to be guided by the satiifaction ofneeds'21: all these are
things the consumerist subject does itself, by virtue of its faculty of taste.
Flexibility i8 the service it renders. And it does so for the one reason for
which services are rendered in capitalism: in order to seIl them. The sole
:tO Cf. Richard Sennett, Ihe Corrosion ofCharacter: Ihe Personal Consequences ofWOrk in
the New Capitalism (New York: Notton, 1998), eh. 5. - For a more precise determina­
tion ofthe contemporary, sodoeconomic form ofcreativity as weH as its economic­
aesthetic pre-history, see Ulrich Bräckling 'Über Kreativität. Ein Brainstorming: and
Dieter Thomä, ~sthetische Freiheit zwischen Kreativität und Exstase: Überlegungen
zum Spannungsfeld zwischen Ästhetik und Ökonomik: both in Christoph Mcnke
and Juliane Rebentisch, eds, Kreation und Depression, 89-97 and 149-70.
21 Bauman, ConsumingLift, 99.
 194
CHRISTOPH MENKE A Dijferent Taste: Neither Autonomy nor Mass Consumption 195

purpose ofconsumption is to be capable ofbeing consumed _ to become

consumable: 'Members o/the society o/consumers are themselves consumer
Counter-taste
commodities [... J. Becoming and remaininga sellable commodity is rhe most
potent motive ofconsumer concerns.'22 In orher words, rhe social mean­
There are socioeconomic causes behind rhis transformation of rhe bour­
ing ofconsumerist taste, unlike rhat ofaesrhetic taste, no longer consists
geois-aesrhetic taste into rhe consumerist taste, but also cultural and intel­
in rhe ideological transfiguration ofdiscipline into autonomy. Its social
lectual ones. This second set ofcauses was at rhe centre of rhe debate over
meaning is instead immediately economic: it serves rhe 'recommoditiza­
postmodernism. For rhe rheories of postmodernism were rhe first ones,
tion' (Zygmunt Bauman's term) ofrhe subject, its self-representaoon and
self-advertisement as a commodity to be bought and used by orhers. As a since rhe bourgeois aesrhetics of the eighteenrh century, to focus again
on rhe concept of taste: rheyare apologies of rhe consumerist taste. 24 This
commodity, rhe subject is rhe commodity oflabour: by being a competent
apology is articulated in rhe name ofaesrhetic freedom: in rhe postmodern
participant in mass consumption as mass culture, rhe subject acquires, and
reading, rhe transformation of rhe bourgeois into rhe consumerist taste is
shows rhat it possesses, rhe very abilities - rhe creativity of adaptation _
an unleashing of its true aesrhetic potential - an act of 'aesrheticization':
rhat render its Iabour a commodity rhat is in demand. 23 In rhis fashion, rhe
only when taste, formerly a bourgeois privilege, becomes an egalitarian
consumerist subject reveals itself to be post-disciplinary: ifrhe disciplinary
possession of rhe masses, rhis interpretation argues, does it become truly
society defined commercially useful abilities in institution-specific ways (so
creative; only rhen does it truly break free, as its conception in aesrhetics
rhat rhe acquisition ofa given ability at once also entailed rhe certainty rhat
had already promised, from all predetermined ruIes and standards.
rhe subject would find its lifelong horne in rhe respective institution), rhese
The culture industry's control ofaesrhetic freedom and rhe fimctional
abilities now consist in rhe unspecific or meta-ability offlexible adaptation.
role it plays in capitalist exploitation belie its postmodern praise. Yet post­
The subject who can do rhat - which is to say, who can do anyrhing _ is

modernism remains right to reject rhe nostalgie apology ofbourgeois taste

marketable as rhe commodity ofits labour. And taste is where rhe subject

exercises and exhibits rhis ability.

as a faculty of autonomy. For rhere is a good reason for rhe demise of rhe
bourgeois taste in mass consumerism, a reason rhat blocks rhe return to
it: rhe bourgeois taste is false; rhe identity it asserts between rhe form of
subjectivity and rhe claim to objective validity is an ideological subreption.
When rhis taste comprehends rhings as rhey objectively are, it takes credit
for rhis success as being rhe fruit of its own subjective effort,25 which it

24 This is most clear in the programmatic writings ofarchitectural theory (Charies Jencks,
22 Bauman, ConsumingLift, S7. Robert Venturi) that oppose postlIlodernity to an elitist modernity in the name of
the 'popular'. Cf. Christoph Menke, 'Aporien der kulturellen Moderne' [Aporias of
23 Provided that 'dignity' characterizes the quaHtythatthe (bourgeois-autonomous) sub­
Cultural Modernity], in Hauke Brunkhorst, Regina Kreide, and Cristina Lafont,
;A~' ~._;.,< as it portrays its individual identity beyond its disdplinarily authenticated
eds,Habermas-Handbuch (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2009), 205-14.
institutional roIes, the formallyextrasodal performance ofdignity now becomes, in
2.5 What Kant says about the taste for beauty also applies to the bourgeois faculty of
postdisdplinaty society, the actual determination oflabour as commodity. Conversely,
taste in general: 'We can easily see that, in order for me to say that an object is beau­
this also means that the creation and maintenance oflabour now becomes an extra­
sodal, 'private' performance. tiJUl, and to prove that I have taste, what matters is what I do with this presentation
within myself. and not the [respect] in which I depend on the object's existence:

196 CHRISTOPH MENKE
believes guarantees such success. The bourgeois subject performs this effort
in its 'operation of reflection: which it understands as a re-enactment of
that Iabour of formation that engendered it in the first place. 'Nowwe do
this as folIows: we compare our judgment not so much with the actual as
rather with the merely possible judgments ofothers, and put ourselves in
the position of everyone else, merely by abstracting from the limitations
that happen to attach to our own judging'.26 In the work ofsubjectivation
associated with disciplination, comparing the subject's own judging to
that of the other and sloughing offits crudeness until it had become like
the other's, and hence ostensibly objective, was done by others and from
outside the subject. Now taste is to accomplish the same oHts own accord
and byvirtue oHts own faculty, in the operation oHts reflection.This free
repetition of the work ofdisciplination by power ofself-reflection consti­
tutes the autonomy of taste: it proceeds soIely in accordance with its own
law, which enables it tocomprehend things in themselves. 27
Immanuel Kant, Critique ojJudgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing, 1987), 46.
26 Kant, Critique offudgment, § 40, B 157, trans. Pluhar, 160.
27 It also holds true for consumerist taste that it 'ultimately rests on individual per­
fOrmanceS. The exercise of taste is a 'task that must be individually undertaken and
resolved with the help ofconsumer skills and patterns ofaction individually obtained].
Bauman, ConsumingLift, 75. What differentiates consumerist taste from bourgeois
taste is that the latter's personal contribution consisted in the free repetition ofsocial
disciplination, whereas consumerist society demands that the subject itselfturns itself
into a subject, becomes his own creator. What constitutes the post-disciplinarychar­
acter ofconsumerist taste is the ability to participate socially. Thus, the marketable
labour is no longer produced by those institutions which then consume it as it was
the case in the disciplinary society, instead, in today's mass consumerist society the
performance ofsubjectification-through-socialization is privatized. It is Ws paradox­
whose resolution overstrains everyone through which mass-consumerist sOciety
also produces mass depression. See Alain Ehrenberg, 'Depression: Unbehagen in
der Kultur oder neue Formen der Sozialität: Texte zur Kunst 65 (2007),57-65. The
desperation of the mass-consumerist subject in the face of the impossible task of
producing its labour as a consurnable commodity replaces the unanswerable doubt of
the bourgeois subject oftaste as to whether or not it has appropriated the disciplinary
!~l
i
..I Dijferent Taste: Neither Autonomy nor Mass Consumption 197
In light of this optimistic ideology of cultivation, wh ich defincs the
hourgeois taste, the consumerist taste would seem to be not so much a
postmodern progression toward aesthetic freedom but rather the result
of a disillusionment for which there are very good reasons: the promise
oF the bourgeois model of taste that the subject's own reflection can form
taste into the authoritative source ofobjectivity has become implausible.
Pure reflection leads toward the 'precipice of bottomless profundity', a
28
profundity that 'things, in the simplicity of their essence', elude. Yet the
disconsolate conclusion that the consumerist taste draws from this disil­
lusioned insight merely replaces the aspiration to objectivity undertaken
by the subject, which the success ofa flexible adaptation ofthe consrunerist
subject, in keepingwith the postmodern ist program, glorifies into aesthetic­
creative self-fulfilment: consumerist taste is not about comprehending
objects as they themselves are, but rather about performingthe ever more
demanding feats ofadaptation required, under conditions ofaccelerating
change, to attain the status of a consrunable commodity and to shore up
the illusion of an identity engaged in self-fulfilment. This double care ­
for the subject's own consrunability and for its self-fulfilment - supersedes
the idea of truth whose unregulated-subjective comprehension had been
at issue in aesthetic taste.
***
Is there a conclusion to be drawn from the disintegration of bourgeois
taste that would be different hom consumerist taste (and its postmodernist
theory)? Is there a different taste? A different taste can emerge only from
the force with which taste turns against itself. Adorno weites:
requirements completely enough in order to become 'universal' and therefore capa­
ble ofobjectivity.
28 Walter Benjamin, 'Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels: in Gesammelte Schriften VII I
(Frankfurt1M.: Suhrkamp, 1974), 402-3, trans. Jackson. Cf. Walter Benjamin, The
Origin ofGerman Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 200 3), 23 1•
 198 CHRISTOPH MENKE
Taste is the most accurate seismograph ofhistorical experience. Unlike almost all
other faculties, it is even able to register its own behavior. Reacting againSt itself, it
recognizes its own lack oftaste. [... ] It is precisely the nerves most highly-developed
aesthetically that now find self-righteous aestheticism intolerable.29
Silvia Bovenschen explains:
By performing this idiosyncratic reaction against itself, taste can become a sort of
aesthetic conscience. If taste guides the idiosyncrasies, the latter are conversely con­
stitutive oftaste; theyare in a process ofinfinite one-upmanship - the other side
oftaste, ensuring that it does not degenerate into rule or diktat. 30
When taste turns against itself, it implies a break with me subject's cer­
tainty mat the reRective repetition of its disciplinary socialization will
render it free and capable ofcomprehending mings as meyare of its own
accord. This break is an intervention of me 'nerves'; it is fed by me 'repug­
nance for all artistic subjectivism: 31 Taste turns against itself, as a faculty
of autonomous subjectivity, by virtue of me fact mat it is force - passion
(pathos) or energy.That is me motifwhich me programmaticwritings on
aesmetics, as it emerges in me eighteenm century, incessandy encircle, me
motifwim which aesmetics itself turns, from me very outset, against me
bourgeois model of taste mat Baumgarten delineated and Kant mought
mrough to its condusion. Aesmetics itself mus already contains me idea
mat leads beyond me - false, bad contradiction pitting me bourgeois­
autonomous taste against me consumerist-postmodem one. It is me idea
32
of me 'aporia of taste: mat taste is split into subjective faculty and aes­
2.9 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Mora/ta: Reflections}rom Damaged Lift, trans.
E. F. N. Jephcott (London: 2.005). 145; Germ. orig. Minima Mora/ta:
Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 1978), 191•
30 Silvia Bovenschen, Über-Empfindlichkeit. Spielformen der Idiosynkrasie
[Hypersensitivity: Variations ofIdiosyncrasy] (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2.000).
89. trallS. Jackson.
31 Adorno,MinimaMora/ta, 145: Germ. orig. Minima Mora/ta, 19 1.
32. Adorno, Minima Mora/ia, 146; Germ. orig. Minima Moralta, 192.. On the develop­
ment ofthis aporia (oftaste) in programmatic writings ofaesthetics cf. Menke. Power,
31 -47; Germ. orig. Kraft, 46-66.
A Different Taste: Neither Autonomy nor Mass Consumption 199
thetic force; me idea mat taste is indeed intrinsically antagonistic: it is
always already busy examining its imaginations in a reRective operation and
recovering mem by supplying reasons and tuming mem into judgments
omers share for reasons. That is what elicits me 'repugnance' (Adomo) felt
by taste as force: me force is me counter-will, me will against me will to
control me imaginations of taste in an operation of reRection. The force
oftaste expresses itself as 'impression soudaine' or 'sentiment subit'33 as a
sudden and unexpected sensation mat, abrupdy bursting form, disrupts
me steady progress of reRection and renders me subject incapable ofpro­
ceeding based on reason. And it is precisely mereby mat me force of taste
makes possible for me subject what me subject cannot do by means ofits
own faculty: to be open to me thing itself.The relation oftaste to me ming
has its locus exacdy where me two aspects it joins in an aporetic union of
mutual repugnance collide.
The passion of taste is me individual at his core, me 'most particular'
singularity mat defines him, yet it remains forever alien to him because it
is here mat me individual transcends hirnself; mat me possibility opens
before him to approach mings as mey are. It is by virtue ofwhat is most
particular to hirn mat the individual is most objective: only me 'repug­
nance' of taste against its own 'subjectivism' enables taste to comprehend
me ming. Anomer taste cannot emerge but where me subject does not rely
on its ability to live up to its aspiration to objectivity by means ofits own
reflective accomplishments, while on me omer hand me individual does
not expend his creativity on performing accomplishments of adaptation.
Taste is what constitutes us; and for mis very reason, taste is what discloses
mings to us as mey are. A different taste begins wim me insight mat me
unconditionality of trum is owed to aesmetic force.
Translated from me German by Gereit Jackson
33 Dubos, Rej!exions critiques, VI. II, 3+3-4·
2.00 CHRISTOPH MENKE A Different Taste: Neither Autonomy nor Mass Consumption 2.01

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Kapitalismus (Berlin: Kadmos, 2011), 89-97.
"
KAM SHAPIRO
".
f·
ir.
·.·I.
Biopolitical Reflections: Cognitive, Aesthetic :~
r~
and Reflexive Mappings of Global Economies rfl
'il
11
11
We have associated new materialism with renewed attention to the dense
causes and eEfects ofglobal political economy and thus with questions of
social justice for embodied individuals.
11I
- DIANA COOLE AND SAMANTHA FROST
It is not a question of eEfacing what can be fclt, but of multiplying the
powers ofproducing what can be fclt and making them intersect.
- JACQUES RANCIERE
Maps to me are tricl<y and insidious, and they've always fascinated mc.
- MARK BRADFORD
In this essay I reflect on FredricJameson's suggestion that 'an aesthetk of
cognitive mapping (ofsodal processes ] is an integral part of any sodalist
political project' in light of recent theories ofembodied cognition. I first
explore mappings of sodal processes in connection with popular media
accounts of the global economy ofcoltan (a metal used in consumer elec­
tronics). I then consider possibilities for a reflexive orientation to the pro­
cesses shaping such mappings. That is, I consider what happens when we try
to map the political economy ofour embodied and mediated perceptions
of political economies. Reflexive mapping of this kind leads quicldy to a
series oflimits and paradoxes. However, I argue that an encounter with
such limits comprises an important component of a materialist politics.
Moreover, I find encounters of this kind are also staged in popular media.
Insofar as this is the case, I condude, such media can contribute to what