Regret, Postmodernism and the Critique of Mass Culture مقاله

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14 The next requirement is to adopt a more positive view of consumption, in the sense that we consider it a real reward in return for the deprivations resulting from production material and manual labor, and in this case, we remain safe from the implicit puritanism of the critique of mass culture; this is the same argument presented in the book Body and Society. Critical theory implicitly contains a kind of nostalgic invitation to the past, meaning to a state where society and values were one, and this invitation is a means to formulate a critique against the death of mass culture, the culture industry, and contemporary forms of consumerism. Nietzsche understood and analyzed various types of nihilism in modern society; these types included the harmful effects of the German state and its ideologies, the continuation of Christian philosophy and the denial of life by it, the ideal of asceticism, and the emergence of decadence in art and culture, whose main representatives were Wagner and Baudelaire. 21 Nietzsche's solution was the revaluation of all values, the reunification of life against the individuality of people, valuing the human sensation-seeking body against its intellectual rationality, refusing the passage of society instead of the "Christian God," and finally placing aesthetics above everything; Nietzsche considered art to be the only valid reason for living. It has been said that this form of mass culture critique was both elitist and mournful, longing for a past in human history where there was greater solidarity between life and art, emotion and thought.