The Anti-Culture of Smoothness

Culture, in Rieff’s analysis, is constitutively frictional. It resists individual preferences. It demands submission to a hierarchy of values the individual did not invent. It says no to desires the individual would prefer to pursue. The resistance is not a flaw in the cultural system; it is the system’s constitutive mechanism. An anti-culture uses culture’s own forms and materials to accomplish the work of dissolution—producing objects that look like art but make none of art’s demands, scholarship that resembles scholarship but bypasses the discipline that makes scholarship formative, cultural experience that carries the prestige of genuine encounter without the authority that made genuine encounter transformative. Byung-Chul Han arrives at the same diagnosis from a phenomenological direction: the aesthetic of the smooth, which he identifies as the signature form of the digital age, is the surface that eliminates