Re: Kulturindustrie

[Ralph Dumain <rdumain@xxxxxxx>]

Briefly:

Christopher Lasch is suspect on several counts, but THE MINIMAL SELF was
brilliant, a prophetic diagnosis of the vicious survivalist mentality that
was to come to prevail in the USA in the 80s and was already making itself
felt at the end of the 70s when the politics and psychology of austerity
were coming into play.  I believe there is also a chapter on avant-garde
art in this book which is also revealing about the psychology of
dehumanization.  I suppose it is the chapter you cite.

That the whole structure of feeling and response could be affected by a
highly organized, mediated socialization of the hapless individual is
indeed the terror of our time.  Also the total mobilizations of populations
for war and their effects on the artistic expression of entire nations
constitutes a real problem even for alleged democracries.

In the USA Abstract Expressionism began as a form of dissent of sorts, in
reaction to the patriotic mobilization of art with its regionalism,
"uplifting" themes, etc.  (Who knew that the upstarts would later become
hegemonic and displace and marginalize the very art that marginalized them?)

When it comes to the mass media, one has above all the popularity of the
movies, characterized by larger-than-life personalities, the star system,
and a rather narrow framework for content.  There is clearly something
fascistic about this, though there are other ways of looking analyzing the
popularity of this stuff.  CLR James had a somewhat more optimistic
interpretation (see AMERICAN CIVILIZATION, some chapters in THE CLR JAMES
READER, some commentary in SPECIAL DELIVERY), in which he sees the
situation as a compromise between classes (termed by Andrew Ross a sort of
collective bargaining agreement in an essay in RETHINKING CLR JAMES).
Spmetimes James is seen to be gung ho on pop culture like the Cultural
Studies people now, but that's not quite so.  Still, I think James
underestimated the extent to which the masses were adversely affected by
such large-scale cultural mobilization.  (In fact sometimes I think he was
full of crap.)  This has to do with his West Indian background; he
approached the threat of totalitarianism from a whole different vantage
point than where it was reaching its fruition in Europe; James assumed that
totalitarianism had to lose, whereas it scared the shit out of everyone else.

Now when it comes to music, the situation is much more complex.  What does
one say about centralization and concentration of power?  Well, there's the
power of doggerel coming out of Tin Pan Alley, but as I've said before,
creativity can still be accomplished under severe restrictions of form.
And when it comes to jazz, or more to the point, big band music, it's the
battlefield of race that counts.  There was more to it even than racial
segregation and the eclipse and exploitation of black talent in favor of
watered-down white imitators or even good white musicians.  Lest anyone
accuse me of racial essentialism: it's also the case that there were white
musicians who did or wanted to play in a "Blacker" style and also to
associate with black musicians, but these folks were held captive by the
vagaries of the American racial order as anyone else, whether it was a
question of the taste of white audiences or the straightjacket of
segregation that governed the music business.  And it's not only the music
as a listening experience, but the music as a backdrop for dance.  Still,
when I sum up the worst of what happened, I find it impossible to conclude
that somehow this form of music distorted the sensibilities of the populace
in accordance with a regimented, totalitarian mentality.  Nor was it all a
vapid, empty scene before bebop came along as a self-conscious modernist
revolution.  Sometimes formulaic, sometimes superficial, sometimes
mechanical and repetitive in a fetishistic sense, but hardly consistently
and hopelessly so.  Let's keep this in mind in the centenary of Duke
Ellington.

No, I see the aversion to jazz as a generalized reaction against American
culture, characteristic of many displaced European intellectuals who found
America as a whole too vulgar, superficial, off-putting and dehumanizing.
There was a huge distinguished company of such persons.  Einstein was one
of them.  America was not heimlich or haemische or however you say it.

As I've said before, once one assumes a different framework, one asks
different questions.  For all the efforts at standardizing taste and
manufacturing consumer markets over the past century, it's amazing how much
could still be created and appreciated, how much the culture capitalists
are dependent on us as we seem to be on them.  The question is, how much
can they manufacture real talent and engineer innovation?  The history of
the American music industry actually proves how inept they were until
recently.  They were taken by surprise by Elvis, by the Beatles.  It took a
long time for them to realize how much money there was to be made and only
afterwards did they learn to organize their business to exploit all the
possibilities.  They even screwed up in the beginning with MTV by
discriminating against black performers.  With Michael Jackson they learned
what fools they'd been.

MTV is indeed pernicious: the video age has ruined popular music, although
it was getting ugly in the late 70s already.  The fact is, for all the
efforts to standardize and control human beings, what has happened to the
younger generation exceeds all expectations and all the griping of the
past.  The "colonization of the life world" is actually a more serious and
a more total phenomenon now than it ever was, because more of life
experience is monopolized and mediated through television from birth on
than ever in human history, as communal existence and oral traditions
disappear.  I grew up on TV, but TV was boring and unreal.  TV blocked out
the real world, hence the existence of various subcultures outside of its
reach.  TV had a pernicious effect (along with some good effects--I learned
my liberal humanism from THE TWILIGHT ZONE), but the restricted sanitized
suburbanite world of TV was a separate world from the horrible everyday
life real human beings lived in.  It was only in the 1980s that the world
of the media learned how to reach in and co-opt everything including our
most rebellious & subversive impulses.  The only real art form we have left
is humor, which has reached new heights in a cynical, decrepit, and
self-parodying age.  From the standpoint of those who have a different
history and a different scale of comparison, Adorno's complaints about jazz
seem as quaint today as Breton's surrealism: by American standards these
people are all so small and tame.  It is comical for people brought up on
African and Latin rhythms to learn that rhythm is fascist.  If you want to
hear fascism, spend some time with young ghetto male riffraff listening to
their hiphop shit.  Black folks have always loved to turn up the bass,
having a taste for its percussive qualities going back to Africa, but if
you want to witness a regression in listening, just listen to these kids
crank up the bass to deafening levels drowning out everything else, and
what do you hear, not African polyrhythms, but an endlessly repetitive
CLUNK, DA-CLUNK, DA-CLUNK.  _This_, my friend, is the culture of fascism.

At 01:33 AM 5/27/99 +0000, Gelder@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>the 'public sphere' could be 'structurally changed'
>to the point that it itself could become an instrument of >domination

>What does all this have to do with aesthetics and music? Adorno
>had entered the debate as early as 1938 with his "On the
>Fetisch-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening".
>.... In it he analyses a complex of problems which was to
>preoccupy him for the rest of his life, and which is usually
>discussed under the heading of 'Ende des Subjekts'. (End of the
>Subject). I've lost track of what is and what is not available in
>English, so I refer anyone who is unfamiliar with this kind of
>argumentation to a section of Lash's *Minimal Self*: it's called
>*The
>Minimalist Aesthetic: Art and Literature in the Age of Extremity*,
>and it's an exemplary analysis of the interconnectedness of
>psychoanalytic, aesthetic and political themes.
>
>Whatever else it does, it could free one from the attitude
>of finger-wagging indignation which pervaded some of the posts on
>Bloch and Jazz. One starts to see a medium like MTV in a new
>light.