Malgosia Askanas wrote:
>It seems to me that it is this kind of circulation [between high and low
>culture] >that has now broken down.
>This breakdown, I think, has to do with the immense development of the
>recording and broadcasting industry as the de-facto creator of popular
>culture. So that popular culture has become an artifact of an industry
>which is capable of massive propagation of an aesthetic which is not
>in continuous traffic with the traditional "high" aesthetic. This is not
>one-sided, of course: the "high" aesthetic, too, has become more insular.
>
>Under these circumstances, traditional aesthetic standards find themselves
>in a pickle, because they no longer can tacitly assume some kind of
>inherited validity for popular culture. One's aesthetics are very much
>shaped by what they one is exposed to from early on. In a society where
>a small bunch of people is exposed to Chopin and a large majority derives
>their aesthetics from muzak and Bruce Springstein, the small bunch would
>have to take a very militant stance for -- what? Massive aestethic regulation
>of popular culture? -- if they wanted to effect any change.
I'm not sure whether what follows will shed much light on the discussion
that's been going on here (parts of which I am afraid I have missed), but
let me try this:
It might be worth noting that Horkheimer and Adorno's concept of the
"Culture Industry" seems to have been designed to avoid the more familiar
distinction between "high" and "popular" culture (though the distinction
may slip in through the back door with the category of autonomous art).
Remember that in the discussion of the Culture Industry in Dialectic of
Enlightenment, the industry churns out products for both "low" (swing
music) and "high" (Toscanini) tastes. We tend to lose sight of the latter
side of the culture industry because it is nowhere near as heavily marketed
today as it was in 1940s, when the NBC Symphony broadcasts reached a rather
large audience and there was money to be made by convincing people that
they needed to become musically "cultured" (see Adorno's wickedly pointed
essay on the "Musical Appreciation Hour" for a discussion of this point).
Adorno's point (and it is his, more than Horkheimer's) is that - contra
Benjamin - the mechanical reproduction and mass distribution of "high" art
leads to a regression in the ability to appropriate it. So, being exposed
to Chopin rather than Springsteen doesn't really amount to much: if I
understand Adorno correctly, all this involves is a question of where the
profits are entered in the ledger. Since the 1940s, it has become apparent
that Chopin can't generate the income that Sprinsteen (once) did [though I
doubt Sony is raking in cash on the Ballad of Tom Joad ... but that's
another story]. For a good study of the mass marketing of "classical"
music in the 1940s that draws on Adorno's analysis, see David Horowitz book
UNDERSTANDING TOSCANINI (U Cal Press).
One further thought. Since the Culture Industry embraces both "high" and
"popular" culture (e.g., both the Three Tenors and the latest pop star),
could the argument be made that the alternative, autonomous art, does the
same? Adorno would deny this (and I'm afraid that explaining why would
require more of a discussion of the Aesthetic Theory than I'm up to today).
But perhaps others might want to argue differently. But notice that this
might shift the terms of the debate about allegedly "resistant" forms of
popular culture. The test, however, would not be whether they have
emancipatory content, but whether - formally - they offer the same sort of
resistance that Adorno sees as being offered by the modernist works he
discusses. This might be an impossible argument to make - I'm not sure
that there is any way of claiming that, for example, Hip Hop or Free Jazz
is anywhere near as "resistant" technically as Beckett or Schoenberg - but
it would be interesting to see somebody try to make the case. Of course,
none of this rules out simply dropping the formal structure of the work as
the criterion for resistance. But if one does that, one should be clear
that the terms of the debate have moved beyond those laid out by Adorno and
others.
James Schmidt
Boston University