A Case of Cultural Criticism 107should be fighting. Symbols (which the hippy consumes frenetically)
are therefore no longer reactive meanings, polemical forces, nor are
they critical weapons that we appropriate from a well-off civilization that
conceals its image of overnourishment by constant referral to it and
that tries to make overnourishment’s signifiers look glossy; if we think
of them as being positive, these symbols become, not a game, or a
higher form of symbolic activity, but a disguise, a lower form of cultural
narcissism: as is demonstrated by linguistics, the context overturns the
meaning, and the context here is that of economics.
So here is the dead end for a critique of culture that is cut off from its
political argument. But what’s the alternative? Could we conceive of a
political critique of culture which is an active form of criticism and no longer
a simply analytical or intellectual one, which would operate beyond the
ideological conditioning by mass communications, in the very places,
both subtle and diffuse, where the consumer is conditioned, precisely
the places where the hippies play out their (incomplete) clairvoyance?
Could we imagine a way of living that was, if not revolutionary, at least
unobstructed? no one since Fourier has produced this image; no figure
has yet been able to surmount and go beyond the militant and the
hippy: the militant continues to live like a petty bourgeois, and the hippy
like an inverted bourgeois; between these two, nothing. The political
critique and the cultural critique don’t seem to be able to coincide.
Notes
1 Published in Communications 14 (nov.) 1969, 97–9; Oeuvres complètes
vol. 2, 544–6.
2 [Editors’ note: there seems to be a play on words here by Barthes—‘droite’
could mean both ‘direct’ or ‘right wing’.]