Mass markets for cultural goods and services create 'mass culture' though, no doubt, the same effect could be achieved by conquest, coercion, religious or ideological conversion, or widespread Tardean mimetics- i.e. imitation of a specific social superior.
Speaking generally, whereas there may be financial or political or military crises, in the realm of culture one sees lysis- gradual decline. This is not to say that there can't be fads or fashions which have a brief boom before vanishing for all time, but culture is robust. It is 'anti-fragile'. A particular type of culture may pass through long fallow periods and brief bursts of intense experimentation and innovation.
Hannah Arendt took a different view-
THE CRISIS IN CULTURE Its Social and Its Political Significance
There was no crisis. There had previously been a moral panic about the supposed depraving influence of 'modern art' and Jazz and so forth, but that was over. Nobody objected to the Andrews sisters- America's sweethearts- singing the salty Calypso song 'Rum & Coca Cola' about local prostitutes taking up with American G.Is.
FOR more than ten years now, we have witnessed a still growing concern among intellectuals
i.e. shitheads
with the relatively new phenomenon of mass culture. The term itself clearly derives from the not much older term "mass society"; the tacit assumption, underlying all discussions of the matter, is that mass culture, logically and inevitably, is the culture of mass society.
Of which we aren't part because we are edumicated- right?
The most significant fact about the short history of both terms is that, while even a few years ago they were still used with a strong sense of reprobation implying that mass society was a depraved form of society and mass culture a contradiction in terms they now have become respectable, the subject of innumerable studies and research projects whose chief effect, as Harold Rosenberg pointed out, is "to add to kitsch an intellectual dimension."
Poorer, entrepreneurial, Jews first contributed to mass culture with films and songs and stand-up comedians, then, their richer, better educated cousins, paid a grudging tribute to their talent. But then, it may be, the 'University wits' had at first looked down upon that 'upstart crow' William Shakespeare.
This "intellectualization of kitsch" is
Nonsense. Kitsch was German and third rate- like Hitler's paintings. What Yiddish New York and the Catskills gave America was schmaltz- a flavour enhancer- added to virtuosity, energy, innovation and dynamism of a rare order. Jazz, it must be said, didn't need schmaltz. It had soul and soon outgrew Tin Pan Alley.
justified on the grounds that mass society, whether we like it or not, is going to stay with us into the foreseeable future; hence its "culture," "popular culture [cannot] be left to the populace."
Which is like saying Feminism is too important to be left to women.
However, the question is whether what is true for mass society is true for mass culture also, or, to put it another way, whether the relationship between mass society and culture will be, mutatis mutandis, the same as the relation of society toward culture which preceded it.
Mass society can gain economies of scope and scale and thus can afford quantitatively and qualitatively better provision. However, as the opportunity cost of leisure rises, competitive pressure may compress, abridge, or render subliminal much of any given cultural inheritance.
The question of mass culture raises first of all another and more fundamental problem, namely, the highly problematic relationship of society and culture.
This is not problematic at all. Humans live in societies. Societies have cultures.
One needs only to recall to what an extent the entire movement of modern art started with a vehement rebellion of the
young against the old. That's how everything modern always starts.
artist
groups of artists
against society
against older groups of artists who controlled the existing 'Royal Societies' or other such Institutions.
as such (and not against a still unknown mass society)
Edgar Allan Poe's 'Man of the Crowd' came out in 1840. But ancient Rome had a higher population than any European City till the nineteenth century. There had been mass society and mass culture in antiquity and there was mass society and mass culture as transoceanic commerce knit together the old world and the new. One consequence was that cultural entrepreneurs and producers produced a more standardized product for an audience eager for broader horizons and a less parochial view of things.
in order to become aware how much this earlier relationship must have left to be desired and thus to beware of the facile yearning of so many critics of mass culture for a Golden Age of good and genteel society.
No. Mass culture's promoters had such an ideal in mind. Its critics felt art should be edgy, it should Épater la bourgeoisie, it should promote insurrection and subvert existing pieties. This was fine, so long as the tunes were catchy, the dances gave scope to the athleticism and energy of youth, and the fashions showed off their figures to advantage.
This yearning is much more widespread today in America than it is in Europe for the simple reason that America, though only too well acquainted with the barbarian Philistinism of the nouveaux-riches,
Not really. The American plutocrat hired experts to buy the best antiquities. Moreover, their sons, though all College men, tended to keep their nose to pretty technical grindstones. In other words, they were Gramscian 'organic intellectuals' who saw how modern art could itself be used to market the produce of modern science and industry. One may call Peter the Great barbaric. If he and his retinue stayed in a house for a month, the place would have to be burnt to the ground to get rid of the stench. But if the premier meat-packer of Chicago took a lease on your Belgravia mansion, the place would be returned to you in a wholly sterile condition.
has only a nodding acquaintance with the equally annoying cultural and educated philistinism of European society,
The European aristocracy set little stock on education. Some could ride almost as well as cowboys. Where they shone, however, was in having an almost infinite capacity to be bored out of their tiny skulls.
where culture has acquired snob-value, where it has become a matter of status to be educated enough to appreciate culture; this lack of experience may even explain why American literature and painting has suddenly come to play such a decisive role in the development of modern art and why it can make its influence felt in countries whose intellectual and artistic vanguard has adopted outspoken anti-American attitudes.
No. What explained American hegemony was the extraordinary manner in which higher education took off in that country. Essentially- between about 1911 and 1938- the entire country gained High Schools were almost everyone could receive an education which fitted them for College. The explosion in first rate teaching and research institutions in the inter-War years took the Germans by surprise. In 1921, to leave Berlin for Princeton would have been unthinkable for a mathematician or physicist. By 1931, the situation had changed utterly. Hitler merely speeded up an inevitable process. America always had homegrown geniuses but now they cropped up thick and fast while the smartest people from every country gravitated there even despite racist immigration restrictions. C.V Raman got the Nobel, but his nephew settled in Chicago. After the Communist takeover, America also benefitted from the influx of Chinese mathematicians and physicists. Meanwhile, its own proletariat, thanks to the GI Bill and Pell grants and so forth continually revitalized and brought new blood into all sorts of novel STEM subject fields. Sadly, some useless nutters who babbled nonsense about Hegel or Heidegger too gained academic preferment. But it is no bad thing to say that America had to import stupidity. It is a backhanded compliment.
It has, however, the unfortunate consequence that the profound malaise which the very word "culture" is likely to evoke precisely among those who are its foremost representatives may go unnoticed or not be understood in its symptomatic significance. Yet whether or not any particular country has actually passed through all stages in which society developed since the rise of the modern age, mass society clearly comes about when "the mass of the population has become incorporated into society." 2 And since society in the sense of "good society" comprehended those parts of the population which disposed not only of wealth but of leisure time, that is, of time to be devoted to "culture," mass society does indeed indicate a new state of affairs in which the mass of the population has been so far liberated from the burdfen of physically exhausting labor that it too disposes of enough leisure for "culture."
Culture is 'recreation'. The aristocrat does plenty of physically exhausting hunting and shooting. But his evening recreation ensure his mind remains as sound as his body- unless elite culture has degenerated into boring shite.
Hence, mass society and mass culture seem to be interrelated phenomena,
because societies have cultures
but their common denominator is not the mass but rather the society into which the masses too have been incorporated.
see above.
Historically as well as conceptually, mass society was preceded by society, and society
was preceded by the ethology of whatever type of ape we evolved out of
is no more a generic term than mass society; it too can be dated and described historically; it is older, to be sure, than mass society, but not older than the modern age.
It is much older. Rome had a million inhabitants 2000 years ago. But Carthage had half a million in 300 BC. Edo actually had the largest urban population- 1.3 million people- in 1730.
In fact, all the traits that crowd psychology has meanwhile discovered in mass man:
they could as easily have found in a herd of cows.
his loneliness and loneliness is neither isolation nor solitude regardless of his adaptability;
his sociability and sociability is neither social nor is it sodomy regardless of his rectum.
his excitability and lack of standards;
I knew a terribly excitable cow once. It lacked standards and would shit on anything.
his capacity for consumption,
that cow ate a fuck ton of hay
accompanied by inability to judge, or even to distinguish;
the cow couldn't tell a Picasso from a Pissarro.
above all, his egocentricity and that fateful alienation from the world which since Rousseau is mistaken for self-alienation all these traits first appeared in good society, where there was no question of masses, numerically speaking.
They also appeared amongst animals.
Good society, as we know it from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, probably had its origin in
Italy's emporia cities. Culture is about adding value by the application of highly cultivated skills. But the highly skilled are mobile. They will go where there is more security and a better market thanks to more extensive linkages of trade and finance.
the European courts of the age of absolutism,
Nope. Conquerors are absolute. Their successors become less and less so. Henry VIII was more absolute than any French King. He could break with Rome and chop off the heads of wives from powerful families. But English material culture lagged behind that of the great emporia cities of Italy. Thus, the first English novel- The unfortunate traveller, about the very unfortunate Henry Howard, is mainly set in 'the Sodom of Italy'. The French it must be said were not far behind the Italians but it was the burghers of Calvinist Holland who nurtured what was most remarkable in that age. Markets matter. Despots and magnates may live like brutes.
especially the court society of Louis XIV, who knew so well how to reduce French nobility to political insignificance by the simple means of
getting English help against the Spanish backed Fronde uprising.
gathering them at Versailles, transforming them into courtiers, and making them entertain one another through the intrigues, cabals, and endless gossip which this perpetual party inevitably engendered.
Hannah should have gathered all the Nazi Gauleiters in her pantry and transformed them into a knitting circle. Then she would have been the absolute ruler of the Third Reich. I suppose she was too busy fucking Heidegger to take this salutary course.
Thus the true forerunner of the novel,
is entertaining satire with some magical or other fantastical element to appeal to the imagination- but also to keep the author safe. After all, it's just a story- right? The 'Golden Ass' or the Satyricon, or, in English, 'Beware the Cat', are novels. Shite about what the Duchess said to the Archbishop is neither cultured nor of any great literary merit. Still, the prose may be considered refined and may become a target for Tardean mimetics. But the same may be said of pulpit eloquence or the rhetoric of a leader of the bar or a great voice in the Senate.
this entirely modern art form, is not so much the picaresque romance of adventurers and knights as the Memoires of Saint-Simon,
Who had read the Princess of Cleves. There was a market for that sort of thing just as there was a market amongst the rising merchant class for the fashions and fripperies of the Court.
while the novel itself clearly anticipated the rise of the social sciences
whereas Margaret Cavendish's novel anticipated the rise of Margaret Thatcher
as well as of psychology, both of which are still centered around conflicts between society and the "individual."
as opposed to the conflict between Society and the stars of the Milky Way.
The true forerunner of modern mass man is
a fucking French Duke- in the opinion of a stupid Kraut.
this individual, who was defined and indeed discovered by those who, like Rousseau in the eighteenth century or John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century, found themselves in open rebellion against society.
Rousseau did go mad. Mill didn't. He retired from the East India Company and did quite well in Parliament. He was boring but eminently respectable. Arendt thinks he liked dressing up as a prostitute and trying to knife Gladstone.
Since then, the story of a conflict between society and its individuals has repeated itself time and again in reality no less than in fiction;
No. There is no conflict between society and any individual. There is conflict between different individuals, or groups of individuals, who want to direct the course that Society- or a particular portion of it- will take. But this involves doing deals and cooperating with each other. Even a rebellion requires a lot of coordination.
the modern, and no longer so modern, individual forms part and parcel of the society against which he tries to assert himself and which always gets the better of him.
The same may be said of cows and the herds they belong to- not to mention the slaughter house at which they end up.
There is, however, an important difference between the earlier stages of society and mass society with respect to the situation of the individual.
In a mass society, most peeps don't have a Mummy or a Daddy.
As long as society itself was restricted to certain classes of the population,
High Society still is. This doesn't mean poor peeps don't have Mummies and Daddies same as posh peeps do. Moreover, speaking generally, those who declined in wealth, power and influence, tended to fall out of the Upper Class while a 'butcher's boy' like Cromwell might rise up and become an Earl.
the individual's chances for survival against its pressures were rather good;
Fuck off! In a small society, to be ostracized, even for something wholly inconsequential, can be a sentence of exile, if not one of death. In a mass society, nobody gives a fuck.
I suppose, a school girl with little idea of the beau monde may well believe the sort of things Arendt believed. Yet, when writing this, Arendt wasn't a school girl. She was a refugee seeking to make a living in a new country. Perhaps she thought its citizens were stupid and infantile. Or perhaps she was seeking to engage their sympathy by appearing to be a particularly retarded and provincial maiden aunt of advanced years who had been sent packing from the old country.
Wherever people judge the things of the world that are common to them,
they are either paid to do so or they are gratuitously imposing a cost or constraint on themselves.
there is more implied in their judgments than these things.
If I spend my time judging the beauty of women, but am not paid to do so, I'm a fucking creep. Kick me in the slats by all means.
By his manner of judging, the person discloses to an extent also himself, what kind of person he is, and this disclosure, which is involuntary, gains in validity to the degree that it has liberated itself from merely individual idiosyncrasies.
In other words, if you are a judgmental little shit, people will start thinking you are a judgmental little shit. Fewer people will want to transact business with you. You will become more dependent on a narrow coterie.
Now, it is precisely the realm of acting and speaking, that is, the political domain in terms of activities, in which this personal quality comes to the fore in public, in which the "who one is" becomes manifest rather than the qualities and individual talents he may possess.
To do well in politics, you need to be all things to all men though, no doubt, you may strategically display certain types of chauvinism. If you are an actual chauvinist or a judgmental little shit, you will be pumped and dumped by actual politicians.
In this respect, the political realm is again opposed to the domain in which the artist and fabricator live and do their work
No. Both the artist and the politician cobbling together a manifesto, or platform, are entrepreneurs even if they aren't actually businessmen. They take a risk and combine what was previously available in a novel manner. They may gain reputation, influence, or power and pelf by doing so. But, equally, they may end up in prison or a lunatic asylum.
and in which ultimately it is always quality that counts, the talents of the maker and the quality of the thing he makes.
Quality does not matter. Fitness for purpose may do so.
Taste, however, does not simply judge this quality. On the contrary, quality is beyond dispute, it is no less compellingly evident than truth and stands beyond the decisions of judgment, beyond the need of persuasion and wooing agreement,
a school girl might think so. It may be no bad thing for Convents to sow such illusions in breasts which might otherwise be entirely preoccupied with fisting themselves.
although there are times of artistic and cultural decay when only few are left who are still receptive to the self-evidence of quality.
Arendt thought she herself was one of those special people. She wasn't. She was as stupid as shit.
Taste as the activity of a truly cultivated mind cultura animi comes into play only where quality-consciousness is widely disseminated, the truly beautiful easily recognized; for taste discriminates and decides among qualities.
Nope. Taste is just taste. What really matters is what is nutritious and better fit for purpose.
As such, taste and its ever alert judgment of things of the world
is useless unless you are making money as a wine taster or something of that sort. No doubt, the uglier girls at the Convent School might want to believe that having good taste and 'alert judgment' will compensate them for never getting quality dick- or, because dick is overrated, a husband who could pay them a fuck-ton of alimony.
sets its own limits to an indiscriminate, immoderate love of the merely beautiful;
not to mention an indiscriminate use of an industrial strength vibrator.
into the realm of fabrication and of quality it introduces the personal factor, that is, gives it a humanistic meaning.
as opposed to a porcine meaning
Taste debarbarizes the world of the beautiful by not being overwhelmed by it;
No it doesn't. Taste begins to pall on those who have it when they realize that all they can afford for supper is baked beans.
it takes care of the beautiful in its own "personal" way and thus produces a "culture."
No it 'doesn't.'
Humanism, like culture, is of course of Roman origin;
Coz them guys invented crucifixion, right?
there is again no word in the Greek language corresponding to the Latin humanitas.
Nonsense! Paideia and philanthropia are equivalent. Cicero was a great admirer of the Greeks.
It will not be inappropriate, therefore, if to conclude these remarks I choose a Roman example to illustrate the sense in which taste is the political capacity that truly humanizes the beautiful and creates a culture.
Nero fiddling while Rome burned?
There exists an odd statement of Cicero which sounds as though it were deliberately framed to counter the then current Roman commonplace: Amicus Socrates, amicus Plato, sed magis aestimanda veritas.
The phrase, preferring Truth even it conflicts with Plato's view, was considered a paraphrase of a passage in the Nicomachean Ethics. Cicero said he'd rather stand with Plato even if the truth was with the Pythagoreans. Errare mehercule malo cum Platone...quam cum istis vera sentire
This old adage, whether one agrees with it or not, must have offended the Roman sense of humanitas, of the integrity of the person as person; for human worth and personal rank, together with friendship, are sacrificed here to the primacy of an absolute truth.
Nonsense! We have our loyalties and preferences though, once the truth comes out, we may be obliged to confess we were mistaken.
Nothing, at any rate, could be further from the ideal of absolute, compelling truth than what Cicero has to say; Enare, mehercule malo cum Platone . . . quam cum istis (sc. Pythagoraeis) vera sentire. I prefer before heaven to go astray with Plato rather than hold true views with his opponents."
Nothing wrong with that. I'd prefer the truth to be like my pal says it is. On this side of the grave, we don't know what the truth is. Still, we are entitled to our own hopes and dreams.
The English translation blurs a certain ambiguity of the text; the sentence can mean: I would rather go astray with Platonic rationality than "feel" (sentire) the truth with Pythagoreanirrationality, but this interpretation is unlikely in view of the answer given in the dialogue: "I should not myself be unwilling to go astray with such a man" (Ego enim ipse cum eodem isto noninvitus erraverim), where the stress again is on the person with whom one goes astray.
The stress is on the fact that the truth is not known. Cicero wrote well. Plato wrote well. Cicero knows Plato may be wrong but, absent clinching evidence, would rather be wrong, in good company, rather than agnostic alongside the odious.
Thus, it seems safe to follow the English translation, and then the sentence clearly says: It is a matter of taste to prefer Plato's company and the company of his thoughts even if this should lead us astray from truth.
No. A person with no literary taste may still like something about Plato- e.g. the stress he put on learning Math or the fact that he was of gentle birth- and choose his side.
Certainly a very bold, even an outrageously bold statement, especially because it concerns truth; obviously the same could be said and decided with respect to beauty, which for those who have trained their senses as much as most of us have trained our minds is no less compelling than truth.
Nope. I may say 'South Indian girls are the prettiest' even though I have been repeatedly barred from competing in the 'Miss Teen Tamil Nadu' Beauty contest. True, when I say this, Mum always chimes in with 'Darling, if they let middle aged men compete, you would be sure to win the prize.' Still, my point is that Beyonce would not have to have good taste to find me ravishing. I'm not saying she's a lezza or anything of that sort. It's just that we could be best friends for ever and ever and she could sleep over and we would have pillow fights in between doing each others' hair and nails. Rihanna will be jelly.
What Cicero in fact says is that for the true humanist neither the verities of the scientist nor the truth of the philosopher nor the beauty of the artist can be absolutes;
Nonsense! The dude was a lawyer and a statesman. If a judgment went against you, or your side lost a war, there was little point arguing the toss. You can't write yet more Phillipics after your head and hands have been cut off.
the humanist, because he is not a specialist, exerts a faculty of judgment and taste which is
useless. That's why the humanist defers to the superior knowledge of the STEM subject guy or the professional lawyer, accountant, soldier, horse-trainer or whatever.
beyond the coercion which each specialty imposes upon us.
Einstein was constantly coercing Arendt. That's the only reason she didn't disprove his General Theory of Relativity.
This Roman humanitas applied to men who were free in every respect,
The term for a Roman senator was patres conscripti- 'conscript fathers.
for whom the question of freedom, of not being coerced, was the decisive one even in philosophy, even in science, even in the arts.
Nonsense! No one coerces us to fart. Sadly, some coercion is necessary to get kids sufficiently literate and self-disciplined to seek to rise in the sciences and the arts- or even the stupidity that is philosophy.
Cicero says: In what concerns my association with men and things, I refuse to be coerced even by truth, even by beauty.
Did he also refuse to let his head and hands be chopped off? Perhaps. But that refusal, too, was useless. The plain fact is, neither Truth nor Beauty have coercive power as opposed to some attractive quality.
This humanism is the result of the cultura animi, of an attitude that knows how to take care and preserve and admire the things of the world.
Like Nero? Arendt forgets that the aesthete can also be a fucking psychopath.
As such, it has the task of arbitrating and mediating between the purely political and the purely fabricating activities, which are opposed to each other in many ways.
No it doesn't. Arbitrageurs- i.e. market makers- do the mediating.
As humanists, we can rise above these conflicts between the statesman and the artist
Eisenhower was constantly getting into fist fights with Elvis Presley- right?
as we can rise in freedom above the specialties which we all must learn and pursue.
Not if we want to get paid for pursuing them. Still, pretending to 'rise in freedom' or 'Godliness' or some other such abstraction might be part of one's patter. After all, a sucker is born every minute.
We can rise above specialization and philistinism of all sorts to the extent that we learn how to exercise our taste freely.
Also we will be able to levitate and to shit on the heads of those fucking philistines whom Arendt had it in for.
Then we shall know how to reply to those who so frequently tell us that Plato or some other great author of the past has been superseded; we shall be able to understand that even if all criticism of Plato is right, Plato may still be better company than his critics.
Why wait till then? The thing is easy enough to do for anyone right now. If you say to me, 'dude, fax machines have been superseded. Just get a smart phone.' it is easy for me to reply, 'I'd rather be a heterosexual man with a fax machine rather than a fucking rent-boy like you with your fucking Apple i-phone and your ear-buds.'
At any rate, we may remember what the Romans the first people that took culture seriously the way we do thought a cultivated person ought to be: one who knows how to choose his company among men, among things, among thoughts, in the present as well as in the past.
Some Romans chose to take their company amongst Christians in the catacombs. They were on the right side of history. Sadly, that history did culminate in the killing of a heck of a lot Christ's own people. Sadly, Arendt herself wasn't one of them. That is because she got the fuck away from European good taste and high culture and settled in the land of the almighty Dollar. If the Hamburger and the Frankfurter could sell well in the American mass-market why not Heidegger's warmed up sick? After all, a girl's got to eat.
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