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 so 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 you 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.
they lay in the simultaneous presence within the population of other non-society strata into which the individual could escape, and one reason why these individuals so frequently ended by joining revolutionary parties wasthat they discovered in those who were not admitted to society certain traits of humanity which had become extinct in society. This again found its expression in the novel, in the weE-knownglorifications of the workers and proletarians, but also, moresubtly, in the role assigned to homosexuals (for instance in Proust) or to Jews, that is, to groups which society had never quite absorbed The fact that the revolutionary elan throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was so much more violently directed against society than against states and governments is not only due to the predominance of the social question in the sense of the twofold predicament of misery and exploitation. We need only to read the record of the French Revolution, and to recall to what an extent the very concept of le peuple received its connotations from an outrage of the "heart" as Rousseau and even Robespierre wouldhave said against the corruption and hypocrisy of the salons, to realize what the true role of society was throughout the nineteenth century. A good part of the despair of individuals under the conditions of mass society is due to the fact that these avenues of escape are now closed because society has incorporated all strata of the population. Here we are not concerned with the conflict between the individual and society, however, although it is of some importance to note that the last individual left in a mass society seems to be the artist. Our concern is with culture, or rather with what happens to culture under the different conditions of society and of mass society, The Crisis in Culture 201 and our interest in the artist, therefore, does not so much concernhis subjective individualism as the fact that he is, after all, the authentic producer of those objects which every civilization leaves behind as the quintessence and the lasting testimony of the spirit which animated it. That precisely the producers of the highest cultural objects, namely works of art, should turn against society, that the whole development of modern art which together with the scientific development will probably remain the greatest achievement of our age should have started from and remained committed to this hostility against society demonstrates an existing antagonism between society and culture prior to the rise of masssociety. The charge the artist, as distinguished from the political revolutionary, has laid to society was summed up quite early, at the turn of the eighteenth century, in the one word which has since been repeated and reinterpreted by one generation after the other. Theword is "philistinism." Its origin, slightly older than its specific use, is of no great significance; it was first used in German student slang to distinguish between town and gown, whereby, however, the Biblical association indicated already an enemy superior in numbers into whose hands one may fall. When first used as a term I think by the German writer Clemens von Brentano, who wrote a satire on the philistine bevor, in und nach der Geschichte it designated a mentality which judged everything in terms of immediate usefulness and "material values" and hence had no regard for such useless objects and occupations as are implied in culture and art. All this sounds fairly familiar even today, and it is not without interest to note that even such current slang terms as "square" can already be found in Brentano's early pamphlet If matters had rested there, if the chief reproach leveled against society had remained its lack of culture and of interest in art, the phenomenon with which we deal here would be considerably less complicated than it actually is; by the same token, it would be all but incomprehensible why modern art rebelled against "culture" instead of fighting simply and openly for its own "cultural" interests* The point of the matter is that this sort of philistinism, which 202 Between Past and Future simply consisted in being "uncultured" and commonplace, was very quickly succeeded by another development in which, on the contrary, society began to be only too interested in all these so-called cultural values. Society began to monopolize "culture" for its ownpurposes, such as social position and status. This had much to dowith the socially inferior position of Europe's middle classes, which found themselves as soon as they acquired the necessary wealth and leisure in an uphill fight against the aristocracy and its contempt for the vulgarity of sheer moneymaking. In this fight for social position, culture began to play an enormous role as one of the weapons, if not the best-suited one, to advance oneself socially, andto "educate oneself" out of the lower regions, where supposedly reality was located, up into the higher, non-real regions, wherebeauty and the spirit supposedly were at home. This escape fromreality by means of art and culture is important, not only because it gave the physiognomy of the cultural or educated philistine its most distinctive marks, but also because it probably was the decisive factor in the rebellion of the artists against their newly foundpatrons; they smeLled the danger of being expelled from reality into a sphere of refined talk where what they did would lose all meaning. It was a rather dubious compliment to be recognized by a society which had grown so "polite" that, for instance, during the Irish potato famine, it would not debase itself or risk being associated with so unpleasant a reality by normal usage of the word, but would henceforth refer to that much eaten vegetable by saying "that root/' This ancedote contains as in a nutshell the definition of the cultured philistine. 3 No doubt what is at stake here is much more than the psychological state of the artists; it is the objective status of the cultural world, which, insofar as it contains tangible things books and paintings, statues, buildings, and music comprehends, and gives testimony to, the entire recorded past of countries, nations, and ultimately mankind. As such, the only nonsocial and authentic criterion for judging these specifically cultural things is their relative permanence and even eventual immortality. Only what will last through the centuries can ultimately claim to be a cultural object. The point The Crisis in Culture 203of the matter is that, as soon as the immortal works of the past became the object of social and individual refinement and the status accorded to it, they lost their most important and elemental quality, which is to grasp and move the reader or the spectator over the centuries. The very word "culture" became suspect precisely because it indicated that "pursuit of perfection" which to MatthewArnold was identical with the "pursuit of sweetness and light." Thegreat works of art are no less misused when they serve purposes of self-education or self-perfection than when they serve any other purposes; it may be as useful and legitimate to look at a picture in order to perfect one's knowledge of a given period as it is useful and legitimate to use a painting in order to hide a hole in the wall. In both instances the art object has been used for ulterior purposes. All is well as long as one remains aware that these usages, legitimate or not, do not constitute the proper intercourse with art. Thetrouble with the educated philistine was not that he read the classics but that he did so prompted by the ulterior motive of self-perfection, remaining quite unaware of the fact that Shakespeare or Plato might have to tell him more important things than how to educate himself; the trouble was that he fled into a region of "pure poetry" in order to keep reality out of his life for instance, such "prosaic" things as a potato famine or to look at it through a veil of "sweetness and light." We all know the rather deplorable art products which this attitude inspired and upon which it fed, in short the kitsch of the nineteenth century, whose historically so interesting lack of sense for form and style is closely connected with the severance of the arts from reality. The astounding recovery of the creative arts in ourown century, and a perhaps less apparent but no less real recovery of the greatness of the past, began to assert itself when genteel society had lost its monopolizing grip on culture, together with its dominant position in the population as a whole. What had happened before and, to an extent, continued, of course, to happeneven after the first appearance of modern art, was actually a disintegration of culture whose "lasting monuments" are the neo~ Classic, neo-Gothic, neo-Renaissance structures that are strewn all 204 Between Past and Future over Europe. In this disintegration, culture, more even than other realities, had become what only then people began to call "value," i.e., a social commodity which could be circulated and cashed in in exchange for all kinds of other values, social and individual. In other words, cultural objects were first despised as useless bythe philistine until the cultural philistine seized upon them as a currency by which he bought a higher position in society or acquired a higher degree of self-esteem higher, that is, than in his own opinion he deserved either by nature or by birth. In this process, cultural values were treated like any other values, they were what values always have been, exchange values; and in passing from hand to hand they were worn down like old coins. They lost the faculty which is originally peculiar to all cultural things, the faculty of arresting our attention and moving us. When this hadcome about, people began to talk of the "devaluation of values" andthe end of the whole process came with the "bargain sale of values" (Ausverkauf der Werte) during the twenties and thirties in Germany, the forties and fifties in France, when cultural and moral"values" were sold out together. Since then cultural philistinism has been a matter of the past in Europe, and while one may see in the "bargain sale of values" the melancholy end of the great Western tradition, it is still an openquestion whether it is more difficult to discover the great authors of the past without the help of any tradition than it is to rescue them from the rubbish of educated philistinism. And the task of preserving the past without the help of tradition, and often evenagainst traditional standards and interpretations, is the same for the whole of Western civilization. Intellectually, though not socially, America and Europe are in the same situation: the thread of tradition is broken, and we must discover the past for ourselves that is, read its authors as though nobody had ever read them before. In this task mass society is much less in our way than goodand educated society, and I suspect that this kind of reading wasnot uncommon in nineteenth-century America precisely because this country was still that "unstoried wilderness" from which so many American writers and artists tried to escape. That American The Crisis in Culture 205fiction and poetry have so richly come into their own ever since Whitman and Melville may have something to do with this. It wouldbe unfortunate indeed if out of the dilemmas and distractions of mass culture and mass society there should arise an altogether unwarranted and idle yearning for a state of affairs which is not better but only a bit more old-fashioned. Perhaps the chief difference between society and mass society is that society wanted culture, evaluated and devaluated cultural things into social commodities, used and abused them for its ownselfish purposes, but did not "consume" them. Even in their mostworn-out shapes these things remained things and retained a certain objective character; they disintegrated until they looked like aheap of rubble, but they did not disappear. Mass society, on the contrary, wants not culture but entertainment, and the wares offered by the entertainment industry are indeed consumed bysociety just like any other consumer goods. The products neededfor entertainment serve the life process of society, even though they may not be as necessary for this life as bread and meat. They serve, as the phrase is, to while away time, and the vacant time which is whiled away is not leisure time, strictly speaking time, that is, in which we are free from all cares and activities necessitated by the life process and therefore free for the world and its culture it is rather left-over time, which still is biological in nature, left over after labor and sleep have received their due. Vacant time whichentertainment is supposed to fill is a hiatus in the biologically conditioned cycle of labor in the "metabolism of man with nature," as Marx used to say. Under modern conditions, this hiatus is constantly growing; there is more and more time freed that must be filled with entertainment, but this enormous increase in vacant time does not change the nature of the time. Entertainment, like labor and sleep, is irrevocably part of the biological life process. And biological life is always, whether laboring or at rest, whether engaged in consumption or in the passive reception of amusement, a metabolism feeding on things by devouring them. The commodities the entertainment industry offers are not "things," cultural objects, whose ex- 206 Between Past and Future cellence is measured by their ability to withstand the life process and become permanent appurtenances of the world, and they should not be judged according to these standards; nor are they values which exist to be used and exchanged; they are consumer goods, destined to be used up, just like any other consumer goods. Panis et circenses truly belong together; both are necessary for life, for its preservation and recuperation, and both vanish in the course of the life process that is, both must constantly be produced anew and offered anew, lest this process cease entirely. Thestandards by which both should be judged are freshness and novelty, and the extent to which we use these standards today to judge cultural and artistic objects as well, things which are supposed to remain in the world even after we have left it, indicates clearly the extent to which the need for entertainment has begun to threaten the cultural world. Yet the trouble does not really stem from masssociety or the entertainment industry which caters to its needs. Onthe contrary, mass society, since it does not want culture but only entertainment, is probably less of a threat to culture than the philistinism of good society; despite the often described malaise of artists and intellectuals partly perhaps due to their inability to penetrate the noisy futility of mass entertainment it is precisely the arts and sciences, in contradistinction to all political matters, which continue to flourish. At any event, as long as the entertainment industry produces its own consumer goods, we can no morereproach it for the non-durability of its articles than we can reproach a bakery because it produces goods which, if they are not to spoil, must be consumed as soon as they are made. It has always been the mark of educated philistinism to despise entertainment and amusement, because no "value" could be derived from it. Thetruth is we all stand in need of entertainment and amusement in some form or other, because we are all subject to life's great cycle, and it is sheer hypocrisy or social snobbery to deny that we can be amused and entertained by exactly the same things which amuseand entertain the masses of our fellow men. As far as the survival of culture is concerned, it certainly is less threatened by those who The Crisis in Culture 207fill vacant time with entertainment than by those who fill it with some haphazard educational gadgets in order to improve their social standing. And as far as artistic productivity is concerned, it should not be more difficult to withstand the massive temptations of mass culture, or to keep from being thrown out of gear bythe noise and humbug of mass society, than it was to avoid the moresophisticated temptations and the more insidious noises of the cultural snobs in refined society. Unhappily, the case is not that simple. The entertainment industry is confronted with gargantuan appetites, and since its wares disappear in consumption, it must constantly offer new commodities. In this predicament those who produce for the mass mediaransack the entire range of past and present culture in the hope of finding suitable material. This material, moreover, cannot be offered as it is; it must be altered in order to become entertaining, it mustbe prepared to be easily consumed. Mass culture comes into being when mass society seizes uponcultural objects, and its danger is that the life process of society (which like all biological processes insatiably draws everything available into the cycle of its metabolism) will literally consumethe cultural objects, eat them up and destroy them. Of course, I amnot referring to mass distribution. When books or pictures in reproduction are thrown on the market cheaply and attain huge sales, this does not affect the nature of the objects in question. But their nature is affected when these objects themselves are changed rewritten, condensed, digested, reduced to kitsch in reproduction, or in preparation for the movies. This does not mean that culture spreads to the masses, but that culture is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment. The result of this is not disintegration but decay, and those who actively promote it are not the Tin Pan Alley composers but a special kind of intellectuals, often well read andwell informed, whose sole function is to organize, disseminate, andchange cultural objects in order to persuade the masses that Hamletcan be as entertaining as My Fair Lady, and perhaps educational as well. There are many great authors of the past who have sur- 208 Between Past and Future vived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say. Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life. Anobject is cultural to the extent that it can endure; its durability is the very opposite of functionality, which is the quality which makesit disappear again from the phenomenal world by being used andused up. The great user and consumer of objects is life itself, the life of the individual and the life of society as a whole* Life is indifferent to the thingness of an object; it insists that every thing must be functional, fulfill some needs. Culture is being threatened when all worldly objects and things, produced by the present or the past, are treated as mere functions for the life process of society, as though they are there only to fulfill some need, and for this functionalization it is almost irrelevant whether the needs in question are of a high or a low order. That the arts must be functional, that cathedrals fulfill a religious need of society, that a picture is born from the need for self-expression in the individual painter andthat it is looked at because of a desire for self-perfection in the spectator, all these notions are so unconnected with art and historically so new that one is tempted simply to dismiss them as modernprejudices. The cathedrals were built ad maiorem gloriam Dei; while they as buildings certainly served the needs of the community, their elaborate beauty can never be explained by these needs, whichcould have been served quite as well by any nondescript building. Their beauty transcended all needs and made them last through the centuries; but while beauty, the beauty of a cathedral like the beauty of any secular building, transcends needs and functions, it never transcends the world, even if the content of the work happens to be religious. On the contrary, it is the very beauty of religious art which transforms religious and other-worldly contents and concerns into tangible worldly realities; in this sense all art is secular, and the distinction of religious art is merely that it "secularizes" reifies and transforms into an "objective," tangible, worldly presence what had existed before outside the world, The Crisis in Culture 209 whereby it is irrelevant whether we follow traditional religion andlocalize this "outside" in the beyond of a hereafter, or follow modern explanations and localize it in the innermost recesses of the human heart. Every thing, whether it is a use object, a consumer good, or a work of art, possesses a shape through which it appears, and only to the extent that something has a shape can we say that it is a thing at all. Among the things which do not occur in nature but only in the man-made world, we distinguish between use objects andart works, both of which possess a certain permanence ranging fromordinary durability to potential immortality in the case of works of art. As such, they are distinguished from consumer goods on onehand, whose duration in the world scarcely exceeds the time necessary to prepare them, and, on the other hand, from the products of action, such as events, deeds, and words, all of which are in themselves so transitory that they would hardly survive the hour or daythey appeared in the world, if they were not preserved first byman's memory, which weaves them into stories, and then through his fabricating abilities. From the viewpoint of sheer durability, art works clearly are superior to all other things; since they stay longer in the world than anything else, they are the worldliest of all things. Moreover, they are the only things without any function in the life process of society; strictly speaking, they are fabricated not for men, but for the world which is meant to outlast the life-span of mortals, the coming and going of the generations. Not only are they not consumed like consumer goods and not used up like use objects; they are deliberately removed from the processes of consumption and usage and isolated against the sphere of human life necessities. This removal can be achieved in a great variety of ways; and only where it is done does culture, in the specific sense, comeinto being. The question here is not whether worldliness, the capacity to fabricate aad create a world, is part and parcel of human "nature," We know of the existence of worldless people as we know unworldly men; human life as such requires a world only insofar as it needs a home on earth for the duration of its stay here. Certainly 210 Between Past and Future every arrangement men make to provide shelter and put a roof over their heads even the tents of nomadic tribes can serve as a home on earth for those who happen to be alive at the time; but this by no means implies that such arrangements beget a world, let alone a culture. This earthly home becomes a world in the proper sense of the word only when the totality of fabricated things is so organized that it can resist the consuming life process of the people dwelling in it, and thus outlast them. Only where such survival is assured do we speak of culture, and only where we are confronted with things which exist independently of all utilitarian andfunctional references, and whose quality remains always the same, do we speak of works of art
No comments:
Post a Comment