The Tragedy of Culture and the Liberalization of the Self

In his 1911 essay “The Tragedy of Culture”, Georg Simmel describes the inherent paradox at the core of modern mass culture. Our tragedy unfolds as objective culture such as fashion, art or music dominates the subjective culture of the individual self. Something that, in our day, simply goes without question and already did in 1911, but is worth thinking about as the recognition of, and self-fulfillment through, individual identity has become the rallying cry and the ammunition with which much of today’s political discourse is carried out. To think that Simmel saw this tragedy of culture, where an individual's character and self-development was dependent on the product of its own creativity, occurring in his own time – before radio, television, pop culture and everything else that has come since – is quite sobering. Taking this concept and combining it with the rise of the neo-liberal values of the completely sovereign individual, and the more recent explosion of digital technology, paints quite a persuasive picture of the causes behind our disarray, confusion and anger at the “other”, whoever that might be. Contemporary hyper-individualization thrives at a time where the bigger problems facing us would require solidarity across value sets and political identities. Today, identification is the confirmation of one’s own “rightness” and our entire society, from the products to our means of communicating views and even humor, are all tailor-maid to fulfill individualized concepts. No matter where one places oneself in the political spectrum, our society is such that it will not allow us to recognize the other. Our culture is simply there for us to reflect ourselves in it and, in doing so, we create even bigger oceans of culture from which to draw on. Never completely satisfied, we create more and more cultural quicksand in our struggle for recognition.

Though based on Marx’ ideas concerning commodity fetishism, there is no need to anchor oneself in the left to make sense of Simmel’s idea. A quick synopsis allows for an overview of the thinking, as well as opening up a bridge to present day examples.

Through the division of labor, Simmel saw people having more time to be creative and express aspects of their subjective identity in innovative ways they had not been able to before. This led to an increase in the production of cultural objects for consumption. These objects are infused with subjective meaning from their creation, while taking on new meaning when they are consumed and used. Simmel’s main example was fashion, but he also touches on art. With fashion, there are mass produced clothes which the person can buy, wear and combine to express their identity, thereby creating a version of culture and moving beyond the function of merely clothing ourselves. These are cultural identifiers which other people can follow and create anew for themselves. In art, the subjective experience one has when considering a piece adds to the interpretation of that work, giving all pieces of art a myriad of interpretations and meanings for individuals, and ones that can change and shift over time with the prevailing mindsets. The irony of these interactions between objective and subjective culture is that our efforts to identify ourselves as individual and different leads to us buying more mass-produced goods. The more culture is produced and consumed, the more the ocean of cultural objects grows and with them the subjective experiences one can have interacting with, or consuming, them. Again, one should always keep in mind that this was written in 1911. The exponential growth of culture in the last decades through digital technologies and platforms and the related ever-expanding body of subjective identification creates a world where we sink deeper and deeper into more niche and reproduced experiences.

The transition into mass culture in the 19th century brought with it all the effects that Simmel spoke about, but it was the catastrophes of the 20th century and the explosion of globalization that tore the ocean of subjective identities wide open. The political and cultural cataclysm that was World War I triggered the first flood of abstraction and dismantling of societal norms, opening the flood gates for all that has come since. The cut and paste of Dada, Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” are the deepest expressions of taking objects from the ordinary world and repurposing them to express a highly subjective view of society or the world as a whole. And while “Fountain” is a perfect image of how our understanding of the world and our place in it was changing, it soon itself became an easily reproduceable product of expression that could simply be placed in a room and filled with meaning. Since that time, it is wholly possible to take a product, say a shampoo your mother used, and place it on a stand as an expression of memory, parental conflict etc. This doesn’t make it meaningless, it just adds to the infinite expanse of meaning that culture creates. Performance art followed this same subjective deconstruction of objective meaning and I could very easily stand in a room repeating the letter “G” for ten minutes straight and it would be both meaningless and full of meaning for myself and anyone who is currently inhabiting a mood that makes them open to the experience.

Over the last hundred years, creative endeavors of all kinds have triggered an almost industrial-like reproduction of culture to cover ever more areas of our emotional landscapes, producing all-encompassing modes of expression with which to define ourselves within contemporary culture. Rock’n’roll was born out of a mix of American musical cultures and itself then metastasized into subgenres like punk and heavy metal, which then metastasized into further subgenres, each with their own forms of clothing, preferred haircuts and value sets that informed behavior, political views and how the followers saw their life trajectories unfolding. The sampling of old soul, disco or jazz records laid the foundation for Hip Hop and all the avenues of subjective expression that define much of mainstream culture today. For decades people have chosen to dress in the fashion of past decades to express their subjective personality. Sportswear brands favored by the poor in one part of the world become hip fashion for the middle and upper class in other regions. A constant borrowing and reuse to elaborate one’s own borders, to claim some region of culture as one’s own. Television and other visual media have grown and multiplied a thousand times over, to the point where we now expect everything we look at to somehow mirror our own personal feelings and are repelled by cultural expression that does not. A mirror on a notion that all objective culture must give meaning to our subjective experience. Though these expressions carry massive weight and can be said to have changed people’s lives, they are still products of a mass-cultural reproduction that has become hyper-defined and, through this, less objective and relatable for larger groups. Our inherent drive and curiosity means we devise our own trap – stuck in the search for meaning in creation we create more, which others feed off and we sink deeper into the quicksand of splintered, subjective identification. In the last decade, through digitization, we have even seen distinctly personal forms of expression such as humor become a commodity of mass production. Memes allow us to be funny without even having to remember a joke, let alone work on delivery or timing. We simply share a small picture, and, in a matter of seconds, we are funny, sarcastic, an astute political observer or a cynical cultural commentator. Technology has now made it so that “classical” art forms are no longer needed as potential vessels for our emotional selves.

With personal identities so caught up in the subjective creation of objective culture, all forms of expression have become politically infused while simultaneously becoming more meaningless as the process progresses. Political notions are one liners, memes or gifs, that are shot off, devoid of any deeper substance and not meant to initiate an interaction. Merely a cultural identifier to outline who one should be seen as.

In the last thirty to forty years, the rise of neo-liberal values has increased the level of identification through tailored culture. Much the same way that the Enlightenment merely replaced god with the universal human being as the center of meaning, all areas of society have rallied around the individual self as the focal point of meaning and fulfillment. Liberalization has seeped into the individual and all culture exists as a vessel from which to form the exact person you want or need to be. The acceleration through digitization, the spread of the internet, and the rise of various devices that help connect all of us at all times, has sped up globalization once more, this time on a hyper-individualized level. The more fervent push, from all sides, to have ones’ concerns recognized and taken seriously is a result of this, with culture being the conduit through which this happens. It is therefore not surprising that the media, and especially the internet, has become such a battlefield. The spread of simultaneously more global and more personalized echo chambers and identification allows for the forming of increasingly solid identities across national borders, giving impetus and drive to some civil rights’ movements, while at the same time, increasing a deficiency in solidarity within countries and communities that hinders the effective tackling of social problems. In these struggles, the perceived global community of like-minded and like-feeling individuals become one’s community in a larger objective culture.

With an increasing awareness of the dull stupidity and archaic roots of concepts surrounding sexism, racism and homophobia, a broader, pragmatic understanding of the subjects would seem to be needed, while at the same time a more acute feeling for how they manifest themselves in ones’ surroundings. A problem can only be tackled effectively with this type of understanding, yet currently we only have vague global ideas about them and their effects. “Black Lives Matter” is an important movement for pushing back against complacency in the US, a country that has so many of its values and ideals called into question through the legacy of slavery, the American Civil War and the civil rights movement (to name a few examples). Black Lives Matter has found great resonance in other countries too, but the resonance also exposes one of the problems of the quicksand of subjective cultural identification in a globalized objective culture. The fact that the name of the movement states that these “lives matter” is something that is quintessentially American. It is a movement born of police violence, institutionalized racism, elements that are very specific to the US. Even a country like Brazil, that shares a history of slavery and has a much bigger problem with urban violence, cannot share the same mindset. Specific national history and demographics alone define the problem differently. Likewise, European countries have completely different starting points. The majority of countries in Europe with populations of African or Asian descent were colonizers, where the groups of various populations came after World War II to help prop up the economy. Movements such as Black Lives Matter can offer signposts for people of color in other countries, but each country has a unique history of ethnic relations, and therefore must work through their separate histories themselves. People on the ground have to take on the task of solving these country-specific problems with an understanding of both the broader cultural implications, but also the specific histories and identities in play.

The current tackling of sexual misconduct and abuse in the work place is also something much-needed, while also being something so big and multi-faceted that a controlled approach is needed to affect change. The power dynamics in the film and music industry may be very similar, yet they are also different in specific ways. Sexism in the corporate environment is different than in academia, and all these manifestations differ from country to country. Going even beyond this are the clear distinctions between the types of abuse. While effective in raising awareness initially, hashtag movements are inherently one-dimensional and can even have deeply negative effects on people trying to recover from the trauma of abuse. Equating subjective experience and identity with an all-encompassing objective cultural truth can lead to exactly those people being harmed that one is trying to help. A fractured landscape of individual subjective identities that assert single objective truths is a potential minefield for effective problem-solving. Addressing a real problem should require the full understanding of its roots, effects and environment, something that needs to be tackled from industry to industry, and from country to country. When addressing the various forms of sexual violence that are mainly enacted by males in society, a more objective, solution-oriented approach might be to look at, and address, what male sexuality actually is in and of itself, as a whole and in its broadest terms. Gay, straight, what are more typical male fetishes, how does male sexuality manifest itself under different cultural circumstances? Questions like these, researched, and then applied to the different areas of a society and life could open up fields within which to tackle the roots of a problem. Keeping the approach too one-dimensional leads to responses such as "All Lives Matter", "Blue Lives Matter" or men's rights groups, once again highlighting the quagmire of subjectively outlined individual identities and understandings of culture and meaning.

These are just two recent examples, but there are many pushing back and forth from all sides of society and all with the justification of being "right" from their view on the respective culture. Yet, as our world’s religions have shown us, proselytisation and castigation are not very effective tools for problem-solving. Understanding the environment from which a problem evolves and the dynamics with which they unfold can lead the way to an effective combating of occurrences which cause so much harm and pain down through generations. More solidarity within geography and across broader identities would allow for a more effective combating of these phenomena.

To quickly summarize the current cultural paradox we live with today, we form our subjective identities from the objective culture on offer in our time. In doing so, our subjective cultural expression creates new objective culture for others in society, thereby contributing to a growing ocean of objective culture. The more recent explosion of mass-produced culture means that we now live in a time of an accelerated expansion of subjective and objective culture, a growing cultural quicksand that we keep sinking into deeper. This quicksand of culture, combined with the neo-liberal mindset that has become the foundation of contemporary thinking, means that individual identity is the highest good. Today, the main struggle is that for the recognition of the truth of one’s own identity, a struggle in which the global community of like-minded individuals has taken the place of one’s community in a larger objective culture. The paradox lies in the fact that the problems remain defined by local and regional conditions. While the expansion of objective culture allowed for a more detailed definition of subjective identity, it can also never be fully satisfied, as it remains by its very nature a never-ending process. Not only this, but the process of identification and its results are also counter-productive in the struggle to having one’s subjective problems recognized as legitimate. The mechanism we use to identify ourselves and others in society also presents the biggest obstacle to having a healthy and effective societal discourse.

Whereas (much) older cultures had ritualized forms of expression that remained consistent over millennia, our cultures have had their pedal floored for the last few hundred years, accelerating ever faster into a splintered and disoriented present. We have at our disposal huge expanses of cultural elements from which to constitute our views on the world and our identities in it. These allow us to relate to other people all around the world. At the same time, they can and often do alienate us from others in our own communities who we are reliant on to solve the very problems we are grappling with. Georg Simmel’s take on the tragedy of culture remains insightful, or has become even more so, due to the extreme abundance of cultural identities in our day, the weight they are given and the emotions that run so high when elements that relate to them are being discussed. Solving the current conflict between subjective cultural identity and healthy objective cultural discourse, maneuvering ourselves away from the reoccurring tragedy we so readily create for ourselves and our societies as a whole, may somehow bring the self and solidarity together to form healthier identities out of which healthier societies could be formed. To do this, we would first need to well and truly get over ourselves, and what is the likelihood of that in our time?