Does modern communication flatten our culture? (Shutterstock)

Clorox knows what you’re experiencing better than you do. The cleaning-supplies company recently launched an advertising campaign that purports to use cutting-edge brain science to show consumers that they like cleaning more than they think. Touting “findings from global neurotech leader Emotiv,” they reported that “37 percent of participants felt better cleaning the toilet than they did petting puppies.” In an ad, a woman, helpfully disabused by science of the notion that she prefers manicures to wiping down countertops, tells the camera, “I don’t even know myself anymore.”

In A Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil’s magnum opus about alienation in a crumbling empire, the narrator muses at one point:

Have we not noticed that experiences have made themselves independent of people? They have gone on the stage, into books, into the reports of research institutes and explorers, into ideological or religious communities, which foster certain kinds of experience at the expense of others as if they are conducting a kind of social experiment and insofar as experiences are not actually being developed, they are simply left dangling in the air. Who can say nowadays that his anger is really his own anger when so many people talk about it and claim to know more about it than he does? A world of qualities without a man has arisen, of experiences without the person who experiences them and it almost looks as though ideally private experience is a thing of the past.

Set in Kakania, a stand-in for Austro-Hungary, in the months before World War I, Musil’s novel hits on a paradox of modern life. The liberalization of politics and culture, together with the possibilities for work and leisure opened up by new technologies, have greatly expanded individual rights and freedoms. At the same time, though, the scope of private life itself seems to be shrinking. Our experiences are flattened by the mass culture that everyone consumes, regurgitates, remixes (and that AI is now beginning to remix for us). Social science and marketing—combined with coercive technology—turn what seem, from the first-person perspective, like deeply personal choices into statistically predictable and controllable behaviors. And, as noted privacy foe Mark Zuckerberg infamously pointed out in 2010, that particular “social norm” has “evolved”—that is, privacy has begun to disappear.

This same paradox concerns Olivier Roy in a recent book, The Crisis of Culture. “Why,” he asks in the book’s first chapter, “are transformations supposedly made in the name of greater individual freedom accompanied by an expanding codification of social practices that considerably shrink ‘inner’ spaces (intimacy, privacy, the unconscious)?” Roy, a French sociologist known for his previous work on Islamic fundamentalism, asks the question in an attempt to reframe the pitched, increasingly irrational cultural battles that consume our politics. These battles are, for Roy, not signs of irreconcilably divided cultural tribes—progressives versus traditionalists—but symptoms of the fact that culture itself is, in some sense, losing relevance. Roy’s book has a tendency to assert more than to argue, but it offers a compelling lens for understanding what is happening to us and our culture. We are “not in the midst of a cultural transition,” he writes, “but a crisis over the very notion of culture.”

One central feature of this “deculturation,” Roy argues, is an expansion of the realm of normativity, or what he refers to as “coding,” to all domains of life. Roy explains this with an analogy to language. Children learn their first language very differently from the way adults acquire a second language in, say, a college French course. Parisian children are initiated into French through a process of immersion and imitation that leaves implicit much of the structure of language and the rules governing its use. In French I, by contrast, that structure is made explicit; students learn and practice the application of the rules until, ideally, they reach fluency and begin to speak without first having to translate in their minds.

Culture—which is, of course, closely bound up with language—works in a similar way. Its meanings and values can be explicated and elaborated in practices like art, philosophy, and law. But “there can be no culture without” its “implicit dimension,” which comes before these later elaborations. Though there is a “dialectic” or interchange between the explicit and the implicit—cultural practices and their elaborations—“the act of explication always aims to bring out what is implicit; it does not claim to mark a departure from it.” What we’re heading toward now, according to Roy, is a completely coded culture consisting of the explicit only: grammar without language—a society where norms are imposed from outside rather than generated by the practices within.

Why? And why now? Cultures break down all the time, of course. Roy offers as examples the rise of Christianity and Islam in once-pagan cultures, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and the cultural destruction wrought by colonialism and the Industrial Revolution. But in all these cases deculturation was followed by acculturation—the rooting of a new culture, whether by contingency, persuasion, or force. What’s happening now is different, Roy argues. There is no successor to the cultures currently breaking down. Nor is globalization simply replacing unique cultures around the world with an American (or any other) monoculture. The version of English used in international contexts, which Roy calls “Globish,” is not a sign of Anglo-American cultural dominance. International English is merely the stump of a language, necessary for functional communication in a decultured global environment. It is language emptied of its cultural baggage and reduced to a bare-bones instrument of communication—a code.

There is no successor to the cultures currently breaking down.

Globalization is just one of four drivers of the deculturation that Roy traces back sixty years. The others are neoliberal financialization, the internet revolution, and the “individualist and hedonist revolution of the 1960s.” All of these developments tend, for Roy, toward a leveling that both tears up roots—denying the relevance of history and tradition—and cuts down references to transcendent value above. Roughly speaking, globalization flattens space and pares away cultural particularity; neoliberalism flattens value, reducing everything to its going rate on the market; the internet, and especially social media, flatten transactions and relationships into their barest, most instrumentalized form (consider the difference between friendship and Facebook friendship); and hedonic individualism flattens identity into desire. The result is human societies that exist more and more on a banal, sanitized, and explicitly coded middle tier, without depths to plumb or heights to scale.

Take, as another example (though Roy does not mention it explicitly), the life-hacks, self-help suggestions, and consumer assistance so prevalent online. The implied audience of these countless articles and videos is an isolated individual looking for the best ways to fulfill their desires. The life-hacker is productivity-obsessed and desperate to optimize; he appropriates whatever cultural resources seem effective without concern for their origins or deeper significance (yoga, Stoicism, the Mediterranean diet); and he tends to evaluate personal relationships through the lens of his own “wellness.” This is life lived out of a cookbook. As with a cookbook, the instructions must be as clear and explicit as possible: they must, in Roy’s terms, be “coded” by a “system designed to make all forms of human communication and relationship unequivocal and linear.” Roy’s contention is that a culture “transmitted” through explicit instructions like this, with no implicit values that bubble up from practice, is no culture at all.

Roy’s analysis of culture is itself coded conservative. Fretting over cultural collapse and locating its demise in things like “hedonic individualism” is usually the remit of the right. And there is in fact some overlap between the approach taken by Roy and standard conservative cultural critique. But Roy is up to something more analytical; he’s not bemoaning the decline so much as trying to figure out how it works. And he doesn’t pin the blame for it on avant-garde progressivism. Western conservatives badly misunderstand the problem as a more-or-less intentional assault on “the culture” by their enemies: intellectuals, the media, nonwhite “outsiders.” And, again, for Roy it is not the decline of a culture that’s at issue but the declining purchase of culture itself on how human beings live their lives. Finally, he regards conservative and populist projects as symptoms of, and active participants in, deculturation rather than genuine efforts to combat it.

His analysis of Vatican II and the culture war in the Church is a case in point. In The Crisis of Culture and 2019’s Is Europe Christian?, Roy echoes the reading of many conservatives who see in the modernizing changes of Vatican II a flattening of religion. “[T]he very notion of sacrament” and the “vertical ordering of the world, from the Fall to Redemption” are “under threat,” he writes. Whatever one thinks of that account, Roy holds that the conservative reaction to changes like Vatican II only accelerates deculturation, and not just because it demands an impossible return to some ahistorically conceived religious idyll. The reaction also manages to adopt the very terms of the secularizing movement it thinks it’s resisting. Instead of concerning itself with fostering genuine religiosity, it simply clings to preferred prohibitions and oppositional identity markers: the Latin Mass, withholding Communion from divorcees, restrictions on abortion and homosexuality. “Deculturation,” Roy writes, “releases religious markers from their cultural framework.” They may be coded religious, but in practice they couldn’t be more secular. They are imposed for the purposes of constructing oppositional social and political identities to wield in (now often online) political struggles. They do not remediate, but simply express and exacerbate the cultural weakening of religion and the values implicit in its practice.

Fundamentalist religious movements of all kinds, along with the conservative populist movements they are increasingly adjoined to, are, for Roy, involved in the same deculturation. Their turn to normativity—adherence to rigid and explicit cultural scripts—seems like an attempt to turn back the clock, but the movements actually betray and denature religious and cultural traditions, turning them into wardrobes for the disaffected. There is “less a desire to preserve a continuity than to redefine cultural boundaries that delimit identities rather than actual societies.” Roy quotes the anthropologist James Clifford, who has written about the same phenomenon of “self-stereotyping” involved in the attempt to recover Indigenous cultures. “It is difficult to know, sometimes even for participants, how much of the performance of identity reflects deep belief, how much a tactical presentation of self.”

Identity politics on both left and right—and in the subcultures and fandoms that pervade the internet—evince the same reductiveness and playacting, the same desperate worship of certain codes and stereotypes, and the same defensiveness. The “weak identities” they promulgate are at times comically disconnected from—and even antithetical to—the cultures they claim to defend. (Take, for instance, J. D. Vance’s backward understanding of Christian love.) For each identity group or subculture, the struggle is not for recognition of a common humanity by the mainstream culture, which is in any case ceasing to exist. Rather, it is to carve out spaces where members of the in-group can signal identity and belonging to each other and define themselves against common enemies. In the course of vacuous skirmishes over cultural symbols evacuated of any deeper meaning, both sides of the culture war do little more than validate the stereotypes their enemies harbor for them.

Where coding stands in for culture, the inner life of the individual becomes reduced. Like the deracinated markers of the favored tradition, individual experience matters only insofar as it supports the cultural identity in question. As Musil worried, those experiences increasingly “have become independent of people,” fostered by ideological communities rather than individuals. Indeed, those whose experiences do not match the codes of their assigned cultural group—Black conservatives, women who don’t want children, liberal believers—are frequently told by members of the relevant in-group that, like the Clorox convert, they are simply mistaken about their own experience of the world.

The paradox lies in the fact that we seem to live in a golden age of self-expression. How can inner life be in decline when we can publish every stray thought we deem fit for circulation? On Twitter and Facebook, in blogs and memoirs, through reality TV and TikTok, we are inundated with people’s innermost thoughts and feelings. But inner lives can spend only so much time circulating before they cease to be inner. The philosopher Roland Barthes wrote in a book on photography that “‘private life’ is nothing but that zone of space, of time, where I am not an image, an object.”

Where coding stands in for culture, the inner life of the individual becomes reduced.

The internet democratizes expression but at the same time flattens it (as it also begins to relentlessly extricate data from it). Roy writes about this in terms of the internet profile, a term which refers “by definition [to] a drawing without depth that aims to represent only what is explicit in a person, using a finite number of preselected traits.” “While a portrait should leave an element of mystery and exceptionality about a person,” Roy writes, “a profile requires no interpretation or doubt…. Profiles are never far from stereotypes, even caricature.” According to Roy’s account, then, the internet is an ideal setting for deculturation: removed from any social contexts where aspects of communication can be left implicit, the internet codes not just communication but its users themselves. As we make ourselves clear, we make our selves clear—transparent stereotypes, self-caricatures, machine-readable.

Barthes’s remark is cited by Anna Kornbluh in another recent book titled Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism. Both Roy and Kornbluh conceive of the internet as breaking down any mediating structures involved in cultural production and self-presentation. “[E]very aspect,” Roy writes, “or nearly, of a person’s everyday life should be visible without mediation or selection.” But where Roy views these developments as part of a process of deculturation, Kornbluh offers a more materialist and Marxist explanation of this particular cultural shift. For her, it is immediacy in the economic realm that is driving disintermediation in the cultural realm.

In all kinds of economic transactions, from ordering a taxi or burrito to buying a computer or car, mediators have been cut out. But the economic transformation goes further. Internet platforms allow for economic infrastructure itself to be “disintermediated” to the point that everything is becoming unfixed and flexible: “Companies and jobs are on the wane,” replaced by gig workers selling their services directly on various platforms; stores either have no physical presence or exist as “pop-ups,” ready to pivot instantly in response to market shifts. Just-in-time manufacturing, high-frequency trading, the “sharing” economy—all these economic arrangements prioritize “fluid circulation” or “flow.”

Of course, this has ramifications for the individual worker, who, like the information and goods moving responsively throughout the market, must always be “on,” ready to answer emails, adapt to market signals, and reinvent themselves. It also affects our social lives, which are subject to many of the same pressures. Personal relationships become modular and insecure—increasingly indistinguishable from work. Life has become a “sleepless Groundhog Day in which we socialize all the time, work all the time, consume all the time, answer all the time.”

Kornbluh argues that this disintermediation and “flow” in work and communication has also influenced culture, even when it is relatively insulated from the economic demands of the market. Twenty-first-century art, even “high art,” she argues, is increasingly characterized by the same immediacy. Kornbluh cites “exhibitions” like “Immersive Van Gogh,” where the painter’s works are technologically enhanced and projected to create environments that can either wash over us or accompany practices like yoga. She also mentions the Safdie brothers’ film Uncut Gems, which uses claustrophobically tight shots, constant motion, and a saturated color palette to create an atmosphere of severe, inescapable anxiety. Persisting throughout the film, these techniques don’t just convey the Adam Sandler character’s state of mind, they force the viewer to inhabit it. Like horror and melodrama (though without the mediating genre conventions), Uncut Gems produces a visceral, unmediated experience. Kornbluh finds a similar immediacy in Marina Abramović’s 2010 MoMA exhibit The Artist Is Present. A highbrow staring contest between artist and viewer, Abramović’s performance artwork offered a profound emotional experience to many critics and visitors. But the work’s “relational aesthetics,” Kornbluh writes, did “not produce a contoured or commodified object so much as a happening that defie[d] representation.” Immediate art eliminates interpretive distance.

Another place Kornbluh sees this is in the rise of autofiction and novelists’ increasing suspicion of literary devices like plot and fully imagined characters. She quotes the writers Sheila Heti—“it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story”—and Karl Ove Knausgård—“[j]ust the thought of a fabricated character in a fabricated plot made me nauseous.” For Kornbluh, the turn to unapologetically autobiographical fiction is a sign not that authenticity has vanquished artifice, but that mediation is in crisis. The distance between an author and his or her characters creates ambiguities and invites readers to reflect on both the author’s intentions and the wider social context that gives the work meaning beyond the author’s strict control. Without that mediation, we are left with the production and consumption of personal, emotional impressions—sophisticated doomscrolling.

Even in literature that is not in the strict sense “autofiction,” Kornbluh finds the increasing dominance of first-person narration a sign of the same disdain for interpretation, mediation, and depth. (A recent viral tweet suggested that young readers have trouble even reading third-person omniscient narration.) To put it in Roy’s terms, it is in the space between expression and meaning that culture can actually breathe. In a culture of immediacy, where meanings (or codes) exist only on the surface—completely explicit and legible without need of interpretation—the depths and ambiguity of genuine culture are lost. Immediate art like autofiction rejects that space, forecloses interpretation, and suffocates both culture and individuality at the same time.

One last example. Both Roy and Kornbluh discuss emojis as an example of the cultural tendency they’re trying to capture. For Kornbluh, they are the “the quintessential format of our time.” “In their anti-semanticism,” she writes (in her characteristically overstuffed prose style), “emojis oppose symbolic delegation, auto-constructing as pure immanence and aesthetically crystallizing the political economy of instantaneity and flow.” In other words, they turn emotion itself into a circulating commodity. Roy is, of course, more interested in their capacity to code:

Culturally constructed emotions overflow the meaning they are given. They need a background and they refer to a shared imaginary. Literature constructs this imaginary by commenting on and staging emotion…whereas emotion expressed in emojis has no need for comment…. [T]his system…tends to deny (or deprive of pertinence) the subjective depth that underpins emotion.

Like Roy, Kornbluh sees in this degradation of our culture a degradation of our politics, though she theorizes it somewhat differently than he does. Immediacy culture—by privileging direct experience, the first-personal, the “real”—robs us of the ability to articulate or understand the forces conditioning our experience and to imagine alternatives, especially collective ones. This is especially dire given the challenges we face: climate change, war, atomism, plutocracy, authoritarianism. “Without thick representation, mental exertion, and symbolic functions,” Kornbluh argues, “we doom our efforts to intervene.”

Though Donald Trump receives scant mention in her book, he is what the philosopher Antón Barba-Kay has called “a president of immediacy” or, as another commentator has put it, the “Uber of politics.” As far as his aesthetic sensibility might seem to be from that of Abramović and Knausgård, his presidency promised its supporters a similar direct access (“I am your voice”); authenticity that cuts through middlemen, gatekeepers, and conventions (“telling it like it is”); and, perhaps most importantly, daily, visceral drama and immediately consumable, emotionally charged entertainment that takes as its premise a zero-sum war between aggrieved tribes (“we’re all victims”).

Is there an antidote? Kornbluh offers some reasons for hope in the thinkers and cultural products (like the prestige TV show Succession) that still embrace the third person and “thickening mediation.” But because she seeks immediacy’s sources only in recent economic developments, she tends to neglect the historical scope of the tendency she’s identified. (For one thing, a full accounting of disintermediation should start with Luther, not Uber.) This focus on the recent past also leads her to overestimate our prospects for remediation through simple re-mediation—more reflective cultural production that works through emotions and conflicts rather than simply feeding them to us.

Roy’s book is similarly light on prescription, but his diagnosis that “we are living through…a true crisis of humanism” gets closer to the root of the problem than Kornbluh’s does. It’s not just a cultural style that needs to be combatted but a deterioration of more basic human affordances. Immediacy is just one symptom of a broader crisis that has shorn things of meaning and context, reducing them to their most basic stereotypical “content.” But as Musil’s novel suggests, that crisis goes back further than Roy himself recognizes. Heavily influenced by Nietzsche, Musil considered modernity to be in crisis because the successes of science and technology—which are “morally and spiritually inert,” as Philip B. Payne puts it in a book on Musil—have left us bereft of meaning and on the brink of nihilism.

Taking a longer historical view can help us guard against the midcentury nostalgia to which Roy’s book remains vulnerable. As Roy himself suggests, some of the same forces—liberalism, individualism, science, technology—that opened up the possibility of meaningful inner experience and expanded its scope can also help isolate it, exploit it, deprive it of meaning, and subject it to coded conformity and unreflective immediacy. Unfortunately, this paradox may not admit of a solution. The challenge is to foster what is valuable in these developments without succumbing to the dangers they present. Beating back a scientistic understanding that places “neurotech findings” over individual experience and tries to offload thinking onto AI agents incapable of even meaning what they say will require a new faith in the human capacity to make meaning.

For his part, this is what Musil was trying to do in the unfinished novel to which he gave the last twenty years of his life. Creative writing, he wrote:

is giving meaning. It is an interpreting of life.… Meaningful insight into things is different from sober comprehending. It is not only a structure of understanding but, in the first instance, a structure of feeling. To give things meaning is, at any rate, also to give them inner life. It is, without question…related to religious experience; it is a religious undertaking without dogma, an empirical religiosity.

The Crisis of Culture Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms Oliver Roy Translated by Cynthia Schoch & Trista Selous Oxford University Press $29.95 | 232 pp.

Immediacy Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism Anna Kornbluh Verso $24.95 | 240 pp.