Abstract
Today, we can buy a book from a vending machine, like soft drinks and snacks. Germinal and an Ice-Tea have the same value. Culture, in a wider sense, has been taken over by the "spectacular-merchandizing-society", for which everything, from a book to an iPod, has a trade value. The recent evolution of capitalism has changed our perception of the world. The society of consumption has reified our relationship to the world; we perceive the world as a market and we thing-ificate our social relations. Culture has been absorbed too by the spectacularization of every value that was outside the market. The proletarian culture has been replaced by mass culture subjected to the market.
For these reasons, it is interesting to question the contemporary significance of culture, particularly in our capitalist societies, in the era of mass consumption. Is culture different from other mass market products and what can we do to find our primeval relation to culture?
