Industrial Revolution and development of capitalism focused around the key rational drivers to raise productivity, as a result society approached to issue of "complex relations among cultural products and processes, consciousness, and the economic and social organization of society" (1991, Halley, p.228). How successful was a solution of these complex relations in the capitalist world through attempts of delegitimation and reenchantment of rationality?
Cultural Processes: New processes need the new cultural drivers. Gradually separated from their generic and institutional origins the cultural activities followed the historic processes. This movement was not easy often followed by the cultural resistance, taking the active forms as in the Art of avant-garde.
Cultural Products: According to Webber, emerging rationality became a driver to measure the human cultural activities. Delegitimated cultural products migrated from personal to the impersonal functions and roles, described as formal rationality which “models action in terms of impersonal functions and roles.” (1991, Halley, p.228).
Consciousness: However how to allocate once personal and now impersonal functions and roles to the individuals? The bourgeoisie separated activities based on the rational basis assigning them the values.
Economic and Social Organization of Society: Labor driven by the rational values became administered by bourgeoisie. Lukacs (1991, Halley) further claims: “rationalization is not autonomous, but in fact is a form of capitalism.” (p.230) Bourgeoisie society builds the technical apparatus to find a better allocation of the impersonal functions and roles based on the values and the instrumental multiple manifestations of rationalism.
Tasks of the Ideologies: The ideologies face the task to sat goals (1991, Halley, p.223) “define human conduct in terms of these concrete goals and goal directions” and finally rate these goals through the discourse in the society.
Questions of Delegitimation: Actually these goals shall be rated again and allocated to the emerging commodities. There are many principally new and well developing commodities nowadays, for example according to NASDAQ (2013) the market capitalization of Facebook Inc. is 123.02B. Marx (2010, Marx) noted the function of commodities inherent to society, moreover “commodities may be sold at prices deviating from their values” (p.110). However by now no one delegitimated the commodity or exchange of commodities. The features of delegitimating such as particularization, disruption of linear time, randomization and subjectivity are only an attempt to reassign the key definition to the processes active in the society.
The attempts of Dada artists to delegitimate the rationality and ideology still involve only the art line. Richter (1991, J. A. Halley) for example taking pain of Dadaist attempts noted they were "known, to laymen and expert alike, more by our roars of laughter than by the things we were really doing." (p. 238).
Questions of Reenchantment: Reenactment is opposite to delegitimation and involves creation of a new unity through imagination by involving particularization, annihilation, randomization and subjectivity. However how reliable the features of reenchantement such as particularization, annihilation, randomization and subjectivity can be defined through the personal perceptions of the world?
In other words the avant-garde moment, one of the examples is the Dada Art attempted to delegitimate rationality and reenchant aspirations. This moment started from the processes, however Dada Art has never been a movement and failed even to define the main processes in the society. On the other hand I think avant-garde and Dada art was a call to destroy the backdoor thinking ‘out of box’ to think instead ‘inside the box’ for making some important internal audit.
Reference
Google Finance. (2013). Facebook Inc. NASDAQ. Retrieved 08.10.2013 from https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:FB
Halley, J.A.(l991). The Renascence of Sociological Theory. (H. Etzkowitz, & R. Glassman, Eds.).Itasca, Illinois: F. E. Peacock Publishers, Inc., pp.227-244. Retrieved from Library of Congress. (No. 90-63132. ISBN 0-87581-344-5)
Karl, Marx.(2010). Book One: The Proces of Production of Capital., Capital. A Critique of Political Economy., (S.Moore & E.Aveling,Trans.)., (Vol. 1,p.110).,p.110. Moscow, USSR, Progress Publishers. Retrieved from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf
QUESTONS
- Marx said “commodities may be sold at prices deviating from their values”. In July 2013, the Facebook stock value fell 6.2%, which of the following reasons for delegitimation do you find crucial in such a stock failure: particularization, disruption of linear time, randomization or subjectivity?
- Halley addressed reenchantment as a tool for "rediscovering and rebuilding some vision of unity and integration". By example of an election campaign, is reenchantment a strategic or a tactical tool?
