CONCEPT
Anti-Culture
Rieff's term for the negation of culture through culture's own forms — productions that look like art, scholarship, and moral seriousness while dissolving the demands that made those forms formative.
Anti-culture is Philip Rieff's name for the characteristic cultural production of the therapeutic age. It is not the absence of culture, not barbarism, not the destruction of cultural institutions from outside. It is something more insidious: the use of culture's own forms, materials, and institutional apparatus to accomplish the dissolution of culture's formative function. Anti-culture fills museums with objects that look like art but make no demands on their viewers. It fills universities with texts that look like scholarship but have not undergone the discipline that makes scholarship formative. It fills churches with language that looks like theology but transmits no commandments. The surface appearance of cultural achievement conceals the absence of the thing that made culture matter: the capacity to place binding demands on individuals, to form character through prohibition, to shape people into something more than the sum of their therapeutic preferences.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept emerged in Rieff's later work, particularly My Life Among the Deathworks