THE PARADOXICAL UNITY OF

CULTURE
The Arts and the Sciences

György Markus

ABSTRACT The two main domains of high culture – the arts and the sciences
– seem to be completely different, simply unrelated. Is there any sense then in
talking about culture in the singular as a unity? A positive answer to this
question presupposes that there is a single conceptual scheme, in terms of
which it is possible to articulate both the underlying similarities and the basic
differences between these domains. This article argues that – at least in respect
of ‘classical’ modernity – there is such a framework: the normatively conceived
Author-Work-Recipient relation. It allows the disclosure of the paradoxical unity
of culture: its two main realms are constituted as polar opposites and thus as
strictly complementary. Through such an organization, culture could fulfil an
affirmative, compensatory role. At the same time however, it also allowed
culture to acquire the character of social critique, a function realized through
the antagonistically opposed projects of Enlightenment and Romanticism –
projects whose illusions are now evident.
KEYWORDS Author-Work-Recipient • compensation • critique • Enlighten-
ment • nation • Romanticism • tradition

First some introductory remarks, just to clarify the topic of this article.
‘Culture’ is used here not in its broad, anthropological sense, in which it is
usually contrasted with ‘nature’, but exclusively in the meaning of ‘high
culture’ as opposed to ‘low’ or ‘mass’ culture. In this sense culture encom-
passes the domains of the arts, the sciences, and what vaguely can be called
the ‘humanities’, occupying an ill-defined, intermediary position between the
first two (and with which I shall not specifically deal in this article).
Such a composition of culture is remarkable first of all in view of what
it does not contain – religion. The process of secularization constitutive of
Thesis Eleven, Number 75, November 2003: 7–24
SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd
[0725-5136(200311)75;7–24;037123]
8 Thesis Eleven (Number 75 2003)

modernity certainly did not lead to unbelief becoming the dominant attitude
in society. Secularization led, not to the disappearance, but to the privatiz-
ation of religion. With this transformation into a matter of private beliefs,
religion lost its earlier central cultural role.
As these remarks indicate, the concept of culture to be discussed is of
relatively recent origin, its emergence was, of course, the outcome of
complex and long term processes. Broadly however, one can point to the
late 18th century as the period in which the new concept of culture acquired
stable content. This is the terminus a quo for the discussion to follow. It has,
however, also a terminus ad quem, that – with an equal degree of arbitrari-
ness – can be fixed at the end of the Second World War. So the subject of
this article is a matter of the past: ‘classical modern culture’, a shocking
oxymoron.

I
I would like to address here a single question – whether it is meaning-
ful and legitimate to talk about culture in the singular, whether there is any
kind of unity that connects the different domains of the sciences and the arts.
From Kant through Hegel, up to the later representatives of a German Kul-
turphilosophie, a positive answer to such a general question would have been
almost self-evident. This belief in the unity of culture however, disappeared
in the early decades of the 20th century, together with the social stratum, the
Kulturbürgertum, for whom such a unity was at least an ideal and perhaps
also an experience. What motivates me to raise the question are some
present-day observations and experiences, strange similarities in the con-
temporary situation of the two great cultural domains: science and art.
Their now completely unrelated discourses have long been characterized by
the same unresolved dispute between the normatively oriented essentialist-
‘internalist’ and the empirically oriented relativist-‘externalist’ approaches.
These opposed approaches give irreconcilable answers to the seemingly
simple question: what makes something belong to science, or to be art? Even
the recent ‘science wars’ are closely mirrored by the ‘culture wars’ in the arts.
Today we hear equally often prognoses of an ‘end of art’ and of an ‘end of
science’. The list of such analogies can be easily continued: the well-known
slogan of the ‘death of the author’ in literary theory finds its parallel in the
‘reflexivist’ approach in science studies, with its advocacy of a new, ‘multi-
vocal’ form of science writing. Is there perhaps some deeper and hidden con-
nection between these two very different domains of practices, a unity that
we have lost sight of, and of which we are forcefully reminded now that it
actually may be disintegrating?
Of course, a positive answer to this question makes sense only if one
can propose a single conceptual scheme, in terms of which it is possible to
articulate both the basic similarities and the no less fundamental differences
 Markus: The Paradoxical Unity of Culture 9

of these domains. My contention is, at least for the ‘classical modern’ period,
that there is such a framework. Namely, whatever belongs to the realm of
culture must be conceived as fulfilling one of the functional roles defined by
the relation Author-Work-Recipient, and thus being related in a specific, nor-
matively demanded way to persons or objects embodying one of its terms.
It is in terms of this relation – the ‘cultural relation’ – that the common charac-
teristics necessarily shared by all forms of cultural practices can be articulated
and demarcated from utilitarian-technical activities. For the outcomes of these
activities are artefacts, not works in the sense intended here. They may have
a maker, but not an author. They are there for users/consumers, not recipi-
ents. The constitutive terms of this relation receive particular and different
determinations for each domain of culture, according to the normative
requirements and expectations that authors, works and recipients are
supposed to satisfy in each specific field. These normative roles, however,
do not prescriptively determine the actual character of these practices nor
the effective evaluative criteria of their results. They are (in Kantian termi-
nology) not of constitutive, but only of regulative character. They only
indicate delimiting conditions that ought to be met if something is to be
regarded as pertaining to the general realm and to a particular domain of
culture. In this sense however, they orient both the reception of the works
of culture and, indirectly, their production as well.
On the basis of this cultural relation, the common features of all cultural
practices can be designated by the terms objectivation, idealization,
autonomy and novelty.
Culture is first of all a realm of works, i.e. objectivations. Many pre-
modern societies distinguished a group of activities to which a particular
spiritual significance and excellence were ascribed. These activities were
understood and valued in terms of their contribution to the formation of a
particular mental habitus and the corresponding conduct of their prac-
titioners. Culture in the modern sense however, is primarily conceived not
as an edifying but as a productive activity. The significance attributed to
cultural practices is based on the value of what they produce – objectivations
that are publicly accessible, transmittable and detached from the comport-
ment of those who produced them. In fact, as culture develops, its ‘cultivat-
ing’ role declines. For there is a sense – true, a merely negative one – in
which today’s culture is radically autonomous: it is nobody’s culture, no-one
can master it even in the bare outlines of its whole compass.
Cultural objectivations are sometimes stagings of public events or
performances, but usually they are objects of particular kinds: texts, paint-
ings, buildings, etc. These objects are regarded as culturally significant only
because they are conceived as vehicles and embodiments of some ideal
complex of meanings. These meanings are posited as inherent in these
objects, but in no way reducible to the material properties or the elementary,
direct significance of these things. What the practice of science truly
10 Thesis Eleven (Number 75 2003)

‘produces’ are not short-lived scientific texts, but ideal constructs – experi-
ments, hypotheses, theories, paradigms. A musical work of art is not identi-
cal either with its score or with any of its actual performances, though only
its fixation as a score and its realization through performances sustain its
existence as a work of art. This distinction between the actual objectivation
and its ideal meaning is present also in autographic arts (painting, sculpture),
even though in these cases no practical differentiation can be made between
objectivation and meaning. Cultural modernity developed a whole vocabu-
lary to articulate this difference – copy, reproduction, quotation, translation,
adaptation, arrangement, replication of an experiment, etc.
As embodied meaning-complexes, works of culture are regarded as
intrinsically valuable. They are valuable not in view of some external end,
but of norms and standards immanent to these practices themselves. As such
they are regarded as valuable not only for those who may need them for
some relevant purpose, but in principle valuable for everyone, though in fact
it is only a minority who take an active interest in them. This does not mean
that they cannot promote some ‘external’ end, such as fulfilling a social
function – only that it is conceived as the consequence, not the criterion of
their intrinsic value. This is the positive meaning of the autonomy of culture.
This autonomy is not only an ideal claim made on behalf of these practices,
it has a wide, general social acceptance.
Lastly, to have cultural significance the objectivation in question must
be original (arts) or novel (science). The making of a material object of utility
is only a single moment in the repetitive cycle of modern industrial produc-
tion. A mere act of reproduction does not, however, pertain to the sphere of
culture. Cultural practices are conceived not simply as productive, but as
creative acts. Such a requirement, however, has a determinate meaning only
if there is a stable background against which something can be judged to be
novel in relevant ways. This adds a further determination to the concept of
the ‘work’. To be recognized as a work of culture the objectivation must in
some systematic way be integrated into an appropriately constituted tradition
that it then expands, changes or challenges. The work both stabilizes and
destabilizes the tradition, in the context of which it alone exists. Radical
temporalization and historization are thus constitutive of cultural mod-
ernity. Cultural practices manifest a consistent tendency towards an ever
greater acceleration of the tempo of innovation. In their development the
sciences and the arts approximate more and more to a state of ‘permanent
revolution’.
These shared characteristics exemplify the internal coherence of our
conceptual scheme, the Author-Work-Recipient relation. A Work is an objec-
tified meaning-complex. As such it is to be understood as the result of inten-
tional activity that must be attributed to a subject. This is the Author – not
necessarily the actual maker of the object, but the one who can be considered
as the originator of the meaning realized in a uniquely determined fashion
 Markus: The Paradoxical Unity of Culture 11

in the Work. Since this meaning must be novel, the Author is to be conceived
as creator, inventor or first discoverer.
The Work is posited as valuable in itself. It is an objectivation for others
– not for specific persons in view of their particular needs or purposes, but
for anonymous others, the Recipients. It belongs to the public sphere, in prin-
ciple accessible to everyone. Only this allows works of culture to be
systematically novel – their recognition does not depend on meeting the
imperative demands or expectations of particular persons, i.e. traditional
patrons. And since the Work is an objectified meaning-complex, the proper
relation of the Recipient to it is understanding, interpretation, appreciation
and critical evaluation. The practical relation of a consumer/user to an
artefact, i.e. its consumption/use, results sooner or later in the destruction of
the purposeful form that gave it its relative value. In the case of works of
culture, alternatively, it is only the appropriate relation of recipients that
preserves and sustains them as culturally significant. In its absence they
become mere historical documents.
Our cultural relation includes not only the common features shared by
the diverse forms of cultural practices and their creations. The cultural
relation also allows us to articulate the fundamental differences between its
main domains. However paradoxical it may seem, it is not their common
characteristics but primarily the differences between them that confer an
essential unity upon culture. Culture’s most important and determining
domains, the arts and the sciences, are systematically constituted and
endowed with characteristics that make them polar opposites. Culture has an
abiding structure, stable at least for one and a half centuries, its main domains
are to be conceived as standing in a relation of strict complementarity.
Let us begin with art. In the aesthetic domain the relation of the work
to its author – a relation that in general we characterized through the concept
of intention – becomes specified as expression. The work of art in its mean-
ingfulness is to be comprehended as the generally significant, yet unique
manifestation of an original and incomparable creative subjectivity. The aes-
thetically relevant ‘authorial intention’ cannot be simply identified with the
explicitly stated views and purposes of the author. Nor are the significations
commonly associated with what (if anything) the work represents directly
relevant here. For it is not what the work brings to presence (its ‘content’),
but the way it expresses and makes it present, its ‘form’ in the broadest
meaning of this term, that makes it aesthetically significant. Form primarily
constitutes the meaning of the work. This meaning is retroactively attributed
to its author, as the expression (perhaps an unconscious one) of his/her per-
sonality and unique vision of the world.
Such a rather vacuous notion of ‘authorial intention’ is not particularly
useful for exegetical or explanatory purposes. Its genuine accomplishment
lies elsewhere – it firmly situates the significance of an artwork in the sphere
of subjectivity. Subjectivity is most intimately connected with what makes
12 Thesis Eleven (Number 75 2003)

something a work of art. For it to be so conceived the objectivation must

have a meaning that is original and unique, it cannot be fully and adequately
expressed in any other way. Because this meaning does not involve abstract,
conceptual comprehension, it has to be imaginatively experienced.
While authorial subjectivity is central to the constitution of the art
domain, authorship as a social role is without a clear-cut mechanism of
accreditation. To be an author (in the culturally relevant sense) is not a pro-
fessional qualification. It is rather the recognition of achievements conferred
by an extremely ill-defined and manifold milieu constituted by the various
institutions associated with art. Since many of these institutions are in a com-
petitive relation with each other, there rarely emerges in the shorter term a
consensus about our contemporaries.
The ‘subjectivization’ of aesthetic significance implies also the ‘subjec-
tivization’ of reception, of ‘taste’. This competence is paradoxically consti-
tuted. The ideal recipient is characterized, on the one hand, by a
contemplative absorption in the work, a self-abandoning openness to its
unique meaning. On the other hand, this attitude must be active, because the
recipient is posited as critically capable of judging whether what is offered
as a ‘work’ deserves attention. In addition the ultimate end of reception is to
imaginatively re-experience what constitutes (for me) the meaning of the
work, to make it personally significant as enlightening, comforting, upsetting
or challenging. The autonomy of art also makes its recipient autonomous, a
subject who freely chooses, without legitimating grounds, what it ‘likes’ –
whether he/she has a liking for, and an interest in, art at all. The distribution
of such an interest and the associated competences are to a large extent – in
statistical average – socially determined. They depend on the educational
level, professional and social standing of the anonymous recipients. The great
cultural efforts of the 18th century at an aesthetic education later became the
institutionalized aims of the system of general education. These efforts to
transform the universal claim of art into an empirically true state of affairs
however, failed radically. The culture of ‘high’ art remained the minority
culture of a largely self-styled elite.
As aesthetic modernity developed, the gap between these two
autonomies became ever broader. It grew into a gulf between artistic practice
and its (restricted) public. The demand of originality in principle always
implied an incongruence between the work as meaning-complex and the
ingrained expectations of the recipients. As the tempo of innovation accel-
erated with the emergence of the avant-garde, the usual complaints about
the uncomprehending public become transformed into a hostile attitude. Art
declares itself autonomous from its reception as well. Although this is imposs-
ible in a direct sense, since it would undercut the artwork’s very claim to
cultural significance, adequate reception is now projected into the future. The
work created today is actually the artwork of the future, subject solely to the
‘test of time’ as legitimate judge. The ‘futurization’ of artistic practices is one
of the constitutive aspects of the historicity of art.
 Markus: The Paradoxical Unity of Culture 13

It is, however, only one of its aspects. The very idea of originality, as
indicated, presupposes a particularly constituted tradition against which
something can be novel. The two fundamental characteristics of tradition in
art are that it is living and effective, and that its compass constantly expands.
The whole range of aesthetic heritage is ‘living’ in the sense that it is con-
tinuously accessible, both for the recipient and, as an imaginative resource,
for practice as well. The art of the past (all forms and kinds of art) has been
musealized. This provides an historical legitimation for the boundless
varieties of individual tastes that have become a signature of personality. At
the same time it contributes to the dissolution of all fixed standards of aes-
thetic evaluation, even more generally, of the boundaries of art.
This is the case because the compass of aesthetic tradition constantly
grows. Whether one labels it as a sign of the incredible openness of mod-
ernity or of its insatiable cultural imperialism, the history of modern art is
also that of the recovery and absorption of forgotten or alien aesthetic pasts
– and this process is still going on. It certainly results in a growth of artistic
freedom. Tradition now lacks what it was always meant to be – a binding
force for contemporary practice. But as the power of tradition dissipates, its
weight constantly increases. Hence the need to create something novel
against its immense wealth and variety, in which, so it seems, everything has
already been tried out. Innovation not only accelerates, its drive becomes
ever more radical, transgressing the boundaries of art as they are conceived
by the recipient public.
This acceleration and radicalization of the production of novelty,
however, only contributes to the expansion of the musealized tradition which
spurs it on. As the temporal distance between the outdated old and the radi-
cally new becomes ever shorter, the life-span of the new, in which it still
counts as novel, of contemporary relevance, diminishes too. The more radical
the novelty, the more rapidly it becomes musealized. The more artistic
practice seems to approximate to the state of permanent revolution, the more
the artwork of the future turns immediately into the artwork of the past. Its
novelty proves to be just the fading memory of how original it appeared to
be just an historical instant ago.
Let us now compare, in the most schematic way, this cultural consti-
tution of the domain of art with that of the modern sciences. I shall restrict
my remarks to the most significant and paradigmatic field of scientific
research, the experimental sciences of nature, and here primarily the very
idea of experiment.
To speak about ‘authorial intention’ with regard to an experiment may
seem rather odd. Nevertheless it is just the explicit statement of such an inten-
tion that transforms the mixture of material, social, and cognitive activities in
a laboratory into a scientifically relevant experiment. The results of the experi-
ment must be made public through reporting. The author – very often a
persona ficta, since multiple authorship is very common in science – is
assumed to be the one who designed and directed the conduct of the
14 Thesis Eleven (Number 75 2003)

experiment and is automatically identified with the ‘writer’ of the experi-

mental report. In this latter role he/she must clearly relate the methods and
the results of the experiment to the actual state of research in the field and
indicate explicitly in what sense they are new. This alone confers a meaning
on the experiment in the sense of scientific relevance. And it is truly an inten-
tion, something ‘subjective’ – a meaning merely claimed. As regards the
establishment of what the results really ‘mean’, the author has no specific
authority in comparison with the other members of the research community.
They can accept, reinterpret or reject his claim. For while the experimental
results must be novel, they cannot be unique – they must be replicable. Only
reproducibility in the appropriate circumstances confers upon the experiment
its cultural significance, the discovery of new facts about nature. The author
first made this discovery, but he made it by being a competent member of
the research community. He/she figures in the report as the reliable per-
former of methodologically certified operations, the accurate recorder of their
outcomes and the capable interpreter of such data in accordance with
accepted methods of analysis. In respect of their cognitive authority, there is
a complete symmetry between the positions of the author and that of the
adequate recipients.
The interchangeability of the roles of author and recipient is made
possible by the depersonalization of the authorial voice and its role in
science. The textual objectivization that transforms the happenings and
doings in a laboratory into an ‘experiment’ simultaneously transforms a local,
complex, and messy history into an ‘objective’ general description. The report
should mention only typified physical objects and materials, codified pro-
cedures, and events belonging to recognized classes of physical occurrences.
It does not say who did what and when, but what occurs under replicable
conditions. Even the general structure of such a paper is regulated – it is to
consist of an established sequence of appropriate sections. One could say
that the textual objectivations of experimental science reduce the role of
literary form to the minimum possible, in order to foreground their referen-
tial, factual content.
This ‘interchangeability’ of the author and recipient has of course also
another precondition – the very narrow definition of the adequate recipients.
The addressee in science is certainly anonymous (publications are not
addressed and accessible to particular persons only), but the circle of readers
recognized as competent is narrowly drawn. It is essentially restricted to the
members of the particular research community. This does not mean that this
circle is closed. Depending upon the broader theoretical implications of an
experiment, members of the wider disciplinary, or even scientific community
may legitimately take an active role in the discussion of the acceptability of
the authorial claim. In the case of the general or even the interested public
however, the opinion of its members is in principle considered as incom-
petent and irrelevant in these matters. In fact to present such a claim to a
 Markus: The Paradoxical Unity of Culture 15

diffuse ‘public’ before it has been certified by scientific peers is regarded as

a serious breach of the rules of correct scholarly conduct.
Given that the ‘work’ in science is addressed to a narrow professional
group, there arises the question – in what sense can science be regarded as
a domain of culture at all, if culture is defined by claims to some intrinsic
value, in principle significant to everyone? The commonsense and correct
answer points to the fundamental role of science in sustained technical
progress. Prima facie this answer seems to undercut the very claim it is
supposed to legitimate, since it appears to transform science into a means
for something else, negating its autonomy. Technical applicability is,
however, neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of scientific validity.
It is constructed as the consequence of the intrinsic character of scientific
practice, which provides us with true (even if fallible) knowledge of the
objects of its inquiry. This is the reason why science as a whole can be the
great motor of technical development, even though it is in general unpre-
dictable which concrete areas and lines of research will have direct practical
relevance in the future. Practical relevance is certainly not the criterion of
scientific significance.
Thus in respect of their autonomy the two great domains of culture are
constituted in sharply divergent ways. As already stressed, their autonomy
does not imply that they cannot fulfil some ‘external’, social function. But for
the arts autonomy meant their defunctionalization, i.e. the loss of any preset
social purpose they would be required or expected to meet. Every work of
art must now create its own function, to find recipients for whom its meaning
has genuine human significance in some sense, as education of sentiments
and sensibility, as better self-understanding, as presentation of the idea of a
better future etc. The range of these significations is open and underdeter-
mined. Modern science, on the other hand, has become in its development
essentially monofunctional. As a result of its professionalization and
specialization, and the dissolution of the very idea of a stable ‘scientific world-
view’, due to the quick succession of ‘revolutions’ in its basic disciplines,
science has progressively lost its edifying and cultivating role that the 18th
century still regarded as its greatest contribution to human progress.
There are also equally fundamental differences between art and science
in respect of how tradition is constituted and how new works are inserted
into tradition. The aesthetically relevant tradition, as we have seen, is ever
expanding, of great depth in time. Scientific tradition, on the other hand, is
short-term, since it is an ‘evolving’ tradition.
On the one hand, the effective tradition in natural sciences – meaning
the texts researchers utilise, discuss or at least refer to in their practice and
writings – is of exceptionally short temporal duration. Even seminal theor-
etical publications tend to ‘disappear’ after 30–50 years. On the other hand,
this skin-deep tradition is usually explicitly presented with each new research
paper, which is expected to open with the reconstruction of the ‘present state
16 Thesis Eleven (Number 75 2003)

of research’ in the relevant area. Each paper draws in this way a boundary
between what it now makes the past – what is, or assumed to be, known –
and its own contribution, that is, what it offers as addition, modification or
refutation in respect of this pre-existent corpus of knowledge. Science is thus
not only in a process of constant change, it ‘advances’. It is culturally con-
stituted as progress towards its objective – truth.
This form of constituting the effective tradition is in a sense necessi-
tated by the very progress and acceleration of science. The short life-span of
some scientific result or idea in its textual presentation is at least partly due
to the fact that such texts have a ‘built-in obsolescence’. The experimental
apparatuses they mention have in the meantime disappeared from the labora-
tories, the results presented by them do not satisfy contemporary standards
of accuracy, the theoretical concepts they employ may have been refined or
revised, etc. To be able to use them the scientist would need some working
knowledge of the history of his/her discipline. Such knowledge, however,
does not pertain to his/her required competence.
That this knowledge does not need to be part of this competence is
rendered possible by another constitutive feature of the practice of natural
sciences. It proceeds usually on the basis of a widely shared background
consensus among its practitioners. Disputes are endemic in experimental
sciences, but they are usually resolved in a short time by the research com-
munity consensually accepting or rejecting the contentious claim, though one
can almost always argue (and some ‘crazy outsiders’ usually do) that there
are no strictly compelling epistemic reasons for such a decision. It is esti-
mated that disputes which really occupy the scientific community usually do
not last longer than ten years. Science is constantly advancing, because it
constantly normalises and stabilises its state. It can approximate to the state
of permanent revolution, because it succeeds in transforming what was com-
pletely unexpected and unthinkable yesterday into what is simply evident
today.
From the viewpoint of the principles regulating the Author-Work-
Recipient relation, the arts and the sciences (at least the experimental sciences
of nature) are constructed as possessing directly opposed characteristics. This
direct opposition is reflected in the fundamental differences in the insti-
tutional mechanisms through which their practices are integrated into the
broader society. To put it simply – works of art are legally and economically
constructed as private property which is at the same time a common good
(in the economic sense). Scientific knowledge, as the genuine product of
science, is treated as a common good, the appropriate employment of which
can legitimately give rise to a particular form of private property.
In the domain of art, it is not only the physical object, of which the
author is usually (though not necessarily) the maker, but also the unique ideal
object, of which he/she is the creator, that is constituted as his/her private
‘intellectual property’ defined as ‘copyright’. The author as its holder has the
 Markus: The Paradoxical Unity of Culture 17

appropriate dispositional right over the work as ideal meaning-complex,

which he can sell, bequest or otherwise alienate. In most cases it is through
such transactions that the artwork ultimately reaches its recipients.
‘Intellectual property’ is, however, a rather particular concept. It
concerns the product of activities, whose social recognition is based on the
acceptance of their claim to create something of universal value that is ‘good’
for everyone. Monopolistic private appropriation of such objects may seem
to be contrary to their raison d’etre. This is taken into account by the legal
system as well. Though intellectual property may be seen as the paradigmatic
case for a liberal labour theory of private property, it has – in contrast to
most other instances of ownership – a temporarily restricted validity, it is a
self-extinguishing right. After some specified span of time the work of art
becomes a public good legally and a common good economically. No one
can claim a privileged right of disposition over it as an ideal object, in dis-
tinction from its material objectivation that remains in the sphere of private
property and market exchange. And the common good of artworks is recog-
nized (especially in continental European legislations) also in a number of
other restrictions concerning the rights of those who acquired copyright from
the author through legitimate transactions: e.g. regulations concerning objects
belonging to ‘national patrimony’, the ‘moral right’ of the author to the
integrity of his/her work, etc.
With all these restrictions, it is however, predominantly through market
transactions with objects of private property that artistic practices are inte-
grated into the economic systems of modern societies and artworks become
accessible to recipients as commodities. This is the predominant, but not the
sole mode of their integration. In modern societies artistic practices also
usually receive public, i.e. not directly market-steered, support from agencies
of the state and municipalities, and also from private institutions and indi-
viduals, in the form of neopatronage. I use this term to underline the principal
distinction between this form of support and the pre-modern practices of
patronage. Pre-modern patronage was, in its ideal form, a person-to-person
relation having the formal character of gift-exchange. Neopatronage, on the
other hand, is realized through impersonal relations with an implicitly or
explicitly contractual form.
The extent, distribution and concrete manner of this support varies from
country to country. There is, however, one general point to be made. Though
neopatronage only supplements the working of cultural markets, this sup-
plementation is necessary on economic grounds alone. This is the so-called
problem of ‘cost disease’. Crudely formulated, all high cultural activities are
characterized in various degrees by the fact that – in distinction from pro-
cesses of material production – general technical advances do not systemati-
cally result in the growth of artistic (or scientific) productivity. In economic
terms: they only allow to a very limited degree for the substitution of labour
by capital. If artists are not to become what they are in cultural mythology,
18 Thesis Eleven (Number 75 2003)

the impoverished and starving martyrs of their calling, neopatronage is neces-

sary, since total marketisation would slowly but inevitably price their works
out of the reach of a broader public, thereby undermining the cultural
markets themselves.
There is thus a remarkable fit between the cultural constitution and the
legal-economic institutionalization of artistic practices. This should not be
understood as implying a unidirectional causal dependence of the cultural
upon the social, or the reverse. In fact the institution of copyright originally
had nothing to do with securing the rights of authors. It was motivated by
considerations of effective censorship and by the necessity to regulate the
competition between proliferating printing houses. It acquired its contem-
porary sense as the result of struggles in which writers played a prominent
part. And they could play such a role because they were already accepted
as public figures owing to their cultural status and prestige. Yet insti-
tutionalization did not simply ‘codify’ pre-existent cultural roles and
meanings. One point seems to be of particular significance; the distinction
between form and content, fundamental to the modern understanding of art,
was, to my knowledge, first clearly formulated in the legal sphere. In the
English disputes concerning the meaning and scope of copyright, a concep-
tual discrimination was made between the ideas expressed in a literary work,
that constitute common property, and their expression. The ‘style and senti-
ment’ (Blackstone), peculiar to each original work and its author, were
deemed the sole proper object of copyright.
The institutionalization of science could not be accomplished through
mechanisms effective in the domain of art. For ‘style and sentiment’ are just
what should not distinguish scientific publications. Science is all about
‘content’. Its contents are posited as ‘facts’, which by definition belong to the
public domain. The scientist-author is, of course, holder of copyright, his
writing and results cannot be published without his consent, they cannot be
plagiarized. And many scientific publishers are profit-oriented enterprises,
just as scientific publications in general are commodities. All this has,
however, little relevance to the way scientific activities are sustained and inte-
grated into a broader social context.
Authorship plays a fundamental role in the organization of science. But
not because it constitutes an entitlement to a commodifiable private property,
but because it is the ground upon which recognition and reputation among
scientists’ peers depends. Recognition, at least ideally, determines the actual
rewards of the individual – promotion, tenure, awards, etc. This organization
of scientific activities is, or at least was possible, because in the period con-
cerned forms of neopatronage provided the link between the practices of
‘pure’ science and its broader environment. Agencies of the state and non-
profit oriented private academic institutions generally funded ‘pure’ research.
This distinguished it from ‘applied’ science. The organizations of applied
sciences were usually created and supported by large industrial firms with a
 Markus: The Paradoxical Unity of Culture 19

view to a longer term financial return. Profit was made possible by the legal
institutions of patent.
Scientific knowledge belongs to the public realm – anyone can use it
for his/her legitimate purposes. When, however, the use of such knowledge
results in a new invention capable of industrial application and of potential
usefulness for others, it can be patented, i.e. turned for a limited period into
the marketable intellectual property of the inventing person or institution.
Thus while experimental natural science, from its very inception, was pri-
marily legitimated through its immense technical-practical fecundity, science
proper, ‘pure’ science was simultaneously sharply divorced from the practical
realization of its usefulness, which was conceived as mere ‘application’. The
two follow distinct socio-economic logics. The social system of artistic prac-
tices is organized through market mechanisms supplemented by forms of
neopatronage. Science as a social system functions through the complemen-
tarity of two distinct principles of organization – pure science through neo-
patronage and applied science through the market, the two are strictly kept
apart. No doubt, such a separation was always only an ideal, but the
problems it posed only came to the fore in our time.

II
Cultural modernity had an enduring structure which confers upon it a
unity, but of a rather paradoxical kind. It was not a unity based on some
dominant constituent pervading and constraining all other practices. Nor was
it founded on a persisting process of mutual adaptation among its diverse
elements through an accommodating syncretism. Unity was based upon the
fact that the two most significant domains of this culture were constituted,
both categorically and institutionally, as polar opposites. How is this particu-
lar form of structuration to be explained? Does it serve some particular
function, a function pertaining to culture as such, as an autonomous sphere
and unity? One possible answer to this question is articulated by the idea of
compensation.
The background to this idea is the familiar diagnosis of the antinomies
of modernity. Modernity’s dynamics, on the one hand, destroyed the organic
communities of the past and transformed the unrestrained freedom of
atomised individuals into the highest value alone capable of conferring
meaning upon life. On the other hand, this very same process made the
originally embedded spheres of social interaction into independent, self-
steering systems with their own, uncontrollable logics of development, to
which individuals are subjected. By destroying their personal integrity, this
process ultimately transformed individuals into unresisting objects of imper-
sonal social influences. The cult of the personality and massification are the
two sides of the same process.
Culture itself is, first of all, a part of such a society; it is one of its
20 Thesis Eleven (Number 75 2003)

autonomous spheres. It is, however, a quite particular sphere: the opposi-

tional dualism of its most prominent constituents also reflects the antinomistic
nature of modernity itself. And since culture consists of meaning-creating
practices, its dualism both expresses this antinomy and endows it with
meaning. In particular, since culture’s two great domains are constituted as
complementary opposites, each of them can function as a form of compen-
sation for the threatening onesidedness of the principle raised to an intrin-
sic value by its other.
The central role played by science in the development of modern
societies tends to surround it with a halo of objective necessity and ration-
ality. This is however, only a side-effect of a science that became mono-
functional. The importance of science to technical development as an
enabling condition of the whole contradictory dynamics of modernity means
that it can also be made responsible for all modernity’s defects and ills. Here
the arts – precisely owing to their defunctionalization – can take over the
general function of compensation. Art is the sphere of compensation par
excellence in modernity.
In this disenchanted world that has been robbed of the metaphysical
dignity of perfection, art offers a counter-world of re-enchantment, of
humanly created beauty. When everything has been transformed into an
always replaceable, disposable object, works of art offer the encounter with
what is unique and irreplaceable in its otherness. Moreover, in a world that
has transformed human beings themselves into interchangeable executors of
standardized roles, art – freed of predetermined functions – represents the
sphere of unrestrained freedom of creativity, or at least of choice. It is here
that the individual can experience, in all its diverse modalities, the true enjoy-
ment of the self, an enjoyment that can be pure, since it is only imaginary.
Of course, this notion of compensation hovers somehow between the
false surrogate and the genuine remedy. But whatever the evaluation, the
ascription of such a function to the arts, or to culture in general, presents
them primarily in the role of stabilising, ‘affirmative’ powers, sublimated
safety-valves enabling individuals to live somehow with modernity’s funda-
mental contradictions.
There is, however, an elementary objection that all such conceptuali-
sations must face. High culture has always been the culture of a relatively
small, usually privileged minority. How can it play the role of a compen-
satory safety-valve, when it is irrelevant to the majority which primarily bears
the burden of the contradictions and defects of modernity?
I think this is a misplaced objection. It does not take into account the
difference between the actual circle of recipients of culture, on the one hand,
and its reach and social resonance, on the other, i.e. the difference between
its genuine public and its publicity. The latter has always been significantly
broader then the former. This presence of a ‘heroised’ culture in broad social
consciousness is closely related to its role in the constitution of that other
 Markus: The Paradoxical Unity of Culture 21

product of modernity, which also performs, among others, a compensatory

function in defusing direct social antagonisms: the consciousness of nation
as ‘imagined’ community.
It is not accidental that the modern ideas of ‘culture’ and ‘nation’
emerged roughly around the same time. Modern nationalism, especially in
its exclusivist forms, is predominantly – the role of racist ideas notwith-
standing – a cultural nationalism. No doubt, the adjective ‘cultural’ here has
no clearly definable sense since the contents of a nationalist imagery are just
too heterogeneous. But perhaps the most important constituent of the nation
is the construction of a collective historical memory as shared fate. Further-
more, it is not merely the case that the heroes of culture – a Dante, Shake-
speare, Galileo, Newton – belong to this form of identity. All the staging and
mythologising of heroes ultimately derived, through transformation, their
chosen material from high cultural representations: poems and paintings,
sculptures and forms of history writing, etc. Culture played a decisive role in
the formation of this content.
At the beginning of this article I referred to our present culture wars. It
should be pointed out that they are nothing but the generalizations and glob-
alizations of two centuries of struggles over the one issue: the composition
of the canon. Earlier, these struggles took place within each national culture.
What are the true treasures of a nation’s cultural heritage, who are its genuine
heroes, who – whatever their fame – should be excluded? These were matters
of passionate disputes, often of direct political import.
Although these disputes proceeded largely independently within each
national culture, they manifested a remarkably analogous character. For they
were, to a significant extent, informed by two great and quite cosmopolitan
ideological tendencies, representing opposed orientations concerning the
meaning and role of culture, and fighting each other over the direction of its
development – Enlightenment and Romanticism. In this ideological reflec-
tion the relation between the arts and the sciences no longer appears as a
static dualism of opposites. It is now transformed into a sharp competition
for cultural primacy and supremacy.
When religion in modernity loses its central cultural power, culture is
deprived of any coherent system of ideas and symbols capable of orienting
and regulating directly the conduct of individuals. Both Enlightenment and
Romanticism shared the intention of regaining for culture this life-orienting
role of religion. They have, however, fundamentally opposed ideas regard-
ing the realization of such an end and the actual cultural powers capable of
its realization.
Both Enlightenment and Romanticism – even when conceived, as they
are here, merely as ideal-types – stand for complex trends of thought, in no
way reducible to the idea of ‘science as salvation’ vs ‘religion of art’. But the
claim to primacy of one of these domains is constitutive for their project.
Enlightenment saw in rational-critical thinking, embodied today only in the
22 Thesis Eleven (Number 75 2003)

practice and methods of science, both the means to and also, in its general
dissemination, the end of the transformation of society. It aimed at the real-
ization of a truly democratic public, whose autonomous members would
regain control over their life and could participate equally in decisions con-
cerning the common affairs of their society. Science is the model of such a
social organization, the living proof of its enormous benefits, and scientific
progress can contribute substantively to the creation of the conditions of its
realization. The point, of course, is not to make everyone an expert in some
kind of science, but to rationalize everyday life and thinking. By making the
universal rules and procedures of rational discourse and decision-making also
empirically universal in their social spread and practical applicability, each
individual will be enabled to think on his/her own.
For Romanticism, on the other hand, it was the arts alone that could
serve as the cultural vehicle and model of the desired transformation. Its
project aimed at the willed recreation of the lost organic community which
was sustained by the living force of a shared tradition, ungroundable in its
uniqueness and capable of conferring meaning upon life. Only as members
of such a community can individuals live a self-fulfilling life. Art is the great
example of the possibility of such an ‘original repetition’, the creation of a
completely new tradition that reconfirms and refounds what has always been
valid. The point, of course, is not to make everyone an artist or connoisseur,
but to aestheticise everyday life and conduct. The great imaginative and
emotional appeal of art makes it also capable of effectively contributing to
this end through the creation of a ‘new mythology’.
The dispute and struggles of these two ideological tendencies accom-
panied and permeated the whole history of cultural modernity. It was pri-
marily the ‘humanities’ that provided the two ideological tendencies with the
ever-renewed formulations of their basic ideas – understandably, since one
of the basic functions of the humanities is the self-reflexive interpretation of
culture itself. And they found their spokespersons in the figure of the
‘engaged intellectuals’, who owed both their autonomy and their public
presence to their recognized achievements in some domain of culture and
used it for committed intervention in public affairs.
It was due to such a refraction through opposed ideological prisms that
self-reflection upon culture acquired the character of critique. Cultural
critique was first of all a critique of the depraved state of culture. But it
necessarily aimed at a broader target as well: the existing social arrangements.
Since both Enlightenment and Romanticism aimed at regaining the life-
orienting power of culture, they were necessarily critical of societies whose
structuring principles denied culture such a role, simply by virtue of the fact
that they restricted its direct reach to a small minority. For Enlightenment the
problem lies in the fact that modern societies never truly overcome the past,
with which they promised to break. Their functioning and development is
still governed by a blind spontaneity, because they re-established – even if
 Markus: The Paradoxical Unity of Culture 23

through impersonal mechanisms – uncontrollable authorities with a power

of decision impacting upon a voiceless majority. The result is the ever
growing danger of a loss of freedom. Enlightenment thus sets out to complete
the project of modernity – and in this attempt it often seems to rely on the
very institutions that produced the present impasse.
For Romanticism the roots of the problem lie in modernity’s break with
the organic continuity of past history. By destroying the binding force of tra-
dition, modernity fragmented the social fabric. It atomized the isolated indi-
viduals and transformed them into mere objects of the impersonal machinery
called ‘progress’. All this brings us ever closer to an ultimate catastrophe, the
danger of which we are unable to perceive, since we have lost all measure
and meaning. Romanticism thus demands a conscious break with the spon-
taneous continuity of modernity – because modernity consciously broke with
the unconscious continuity of that ground that alone can sustain historical
life.
Through these two ideological interpretations – deeply influencing also
the cultural practices in their proper domains – culture as a whole acquired,
in addition to whatever affirmative role it may fulfil, the function of critique.
This means, however, that culture as a critical instance was ultimately en-
tangled in illusions. It is not hard today to perceive the illusory nature of both
these grand projects. Radical attempts at their practical realization – or at least
attempts that claimed such a heritage – radically failed. They resulted in social
and human catastrophes. Moreover, they became discredited not only by their
failures but by their ‘successes’ as well. For it is evident that both scientiza-
tion/rationalization and the aestheticization of everyday life have made
significant advances in modernity – with outcomes deeply discordant with
the expectations either of Enlightenment or Romanticism. One could say that
culture as critique was embedded in a double illusion. Its role was predomi-
nantly articulated in terms of opposed, but equally illusory ideologies, and
this allowed it to nourish exaggerated ideas about its own social power and
effectivity.
Nevertheless, these very illusions gave cultural critique a social impact
which was not only negative. If the radicality of its critique of modernity may
have contributed to some devastating historical occurrences, this very radi-
cality – inherent in a totalising critique of modernity based on universal value
considerations – also allowed it to play a positive role. It made culture not
just a shadowy compensation, but also – in intermittent and modest ways –
a corrective to spontaneous tendencies of modernity. This universalising
radicalism offered ideas – maybe merely as cliches – that made it possible to
represent, in the public arena, the particular grievances of particular groups
as instances of some general malaise, and hence a matter of common
concern. These great ideologies did point to real disfunctionalities of modern
developments, even if in often exaggerated and overdramatized fashion, in
conjunction with false expectations. They provided ideas upon which
24 Thesis Eleven (Number 75 2003)

individuals could draw, especially in times of social crisis; they provided

resources for social mobilization and for a unified search for practical
solutions to problems. Intermittently and with various degrees of success,
culture as critique helped temporary associations of individuals to assert their
own autonomy against the spontaneous consequences of the autonomy of
the self-steering institutional systems of modern societies.
The great ideologies of Enlightenment and Romanticism seem to be dis-
credited today. The role of their main spokespersons, the ‘committed’ public
intellectuals, also seems to be in decline, replaced by media celebrities. If
such a diagnosis is true – and this needs to be critically examined – does it
also imply that the function of culture as critique is exhausted as well? And
more generally, is it still legitimate to talk about modern culture as a unity
in the sense I tried to present? Is our – allegedly post-modern – epoch also
a ‘post-cultural’ world, characterized by the power of a much more encom-
passing unity as is often maintained today: the all-pervading world of
simulacra and spectacle, that has dissolved not only the distinction between
high and mass culture, but also the distinction between the fictions of imagin-
ation and the truth of facts disclosed by the intellect?

György Markus is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of

Sydney. Born in 1934 in Budapest, Hungary, he belonged to the so called Budapest
School – a group of philosophers and sociologists around Gyorgy Lukacs. In 1973 he
lost his position in the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Science
because of his ‘anti-Marxist’ and ‘anti-party’ views, together with other members of
this group. In 1978 he emigrated to Australia, where he teaches philosophy at the
University of Sydney. Address: Department of Philosophy, University of Sydney,
Sydney NSW 2006, Australia. [email: george.markus@philosophy.usyd.edu.au]