The 20th century was a century of rebuttals and revisions to many of the assumptions inherent in European modernity. However, despite the fact that much of its legacy was thoroughly dismantled, one idea remained intact: the Enlightenment notion that culture "civilizes," liberates, or makes us better. This book, which simultaneously champions the tradition of cultural studies and a materialist analytical perspective, invites us to reconsider the validity of the bourgeois notion of culture, which is still promoted by public institutions and defines the values ​​and aspirations of a large part of society. Jaron Rowan's argument challenges the notion of culture as an inherently emancipatory and transformative agent, while also showing how it has been repeatedly used to mitigate social conflicts and block processes of political change. Culture is a means of shaping the tastes and sensibilities of the middle classes, thus becoming an important tool of social governance. By exploring forms of work, precarity, and subjectivity, while also analyzing the field of aesthetics, this book challenges many of the foundations on which the inherited notion of bourgeois culture is based, in order to open us up to new ecological paradigms of understanding, inhabiting, and living culture.