Re: Kulturindustrie

[Ralph Dumain <rdumain@xxxxxxx>]

I have no intent of acting as a constant gadfly regarding Dr. v-G's
attempts to explicate the general ideas of kulturindustrie or to distract
from this general train of discussion, but I will inject some remarks from
time to time that may add to the discussion, and of course react to
reactions to me.

At 05:44 PM 5/31/99 +0000, Gelder@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

>Mr. Dumain has now conceded what last week he contested hotly
>and with much vitipuration: that a judgement on individual genres
>in
>the mass media is hardly credible without including the political
>background of the institutions we're dealing with. Let's see if we
>can shift him on the next principle he defended with so much verve:
>aesthetics and social psychology are two worlds, having nothing to
>do with one another.

Dr. v-G shows himself, as usual, to be a very inattentive reader.  I guess
if he thinks you're not really worth reading, he's not going to give you
much careful attention.  I presume he's much more scrupulous in the
attention he gives to the sacred texts in his Institute.

Of course I never made such assertions upon which I'm now making
concessions and reversing my positions.  My objections from the beginning
started from the premise of denying authority to those who make
macro-social judgments upon aesthetic forms while knowing little of the
forms themselves, or their social background, for that matter, and whose
general cultural mindset is not to be trusted.  All of recorded history is
full of the cultured and refined relegating to nothingness the cultural
achievements of people they never troubled to take into account.  Why
should I be overly impressed by Adorno's apprenticeship with--who was
it?--Alban Berg?  So what?

It is a known fact that Adorno and his crowd kept to themselves in the USA,
in a tight, secluded little group.  I wonder how they could have taken in a
panorama as vast and culturally diverse and so unevenly developed as the
USA with such a haughty attitude.  I guess you can feel the power of the
culture industry in New York.  However, if we take a serious look at the
country in the 1930s and 40s, the picture alters.  Consider how much of the
country was even without electricity in the 1930s.  Consider the prodigious
efforts of writers throughout the nation, given jobs by the WPA,
documenting their regional cultures for the first time, collecting and
writing up the social and cultural histories and folklore of the the most
diverse and remote areas.  And if one wants to look at the music industry,
look at how diverse that too was, and how much recording and even marketing
went on outside the purview of any centralized mass manipulators.  Whether
it's Anglo-Saxon folk music, country music, the black blues, polka,
klezmer, you name it, and not just commercial niches, but also
non-commercial attempts at documentation by John Lomax and other
researchers, and how much music was performed, recorded, and circulated in
a nearly raw state, the whole picture is so much more to take in than a
cultural mandarin hiding from the country in which he has taken refuge is
going to be able to appreciate with his nose up in the air, esp. if he
comes from a country in which "jahwohl, herr commandant!" is the most
common expression.

>small and tame? This invites psychoanalytic reflections on just
>who is, in Mr. Dumain's view, large, tough and wild.

Breton thought he was tough and wild because he could as a comfortable
bourgeois writer declare the quintessential surrealist act to fire a
revolver randomly into a crowd.  Willem de Kooning has a funny anecdote
about Breton walking the streets of New York like a scared little boy.  And
speaking of surrealism, compare the French original to the relations to and
appropriations of surrealism by writers in New World cultures, people like
Alejo Carpentier and Aime Cesaire.  The differences in cultural
trajectories and agendas are all too apparent.

Right now I'm reading Dagmar Barnouw's CRITICAL REALISM: HISTORY,
PHOTOGRAPHY, AND THE WORK OF SIEGFRIED KRACAUER.  One of the side-benefits
of reading this book is getting all kinds of tidbits about Adorno's
mentality, character, habits, and behavior.  Adorno was an upper middle
class snob from the bottom of his soul to the tip of his penis.  His social
positioning and education gave him an advantage in his synoptic bird's-eye
view of his own cultural environment, but it's also a disadvantage when he
can't get down with the rest of us and learn something new.

You can't fault people for being products of their cultural environments,
and everyone has something to contribute, but Europeans ought to know that
while they think themselves large in the scheme of things, from another
perspective and another experience, they are very very small.  And, Marx
forgive me for my germanophobia, but when it comes to _Germans_ inflating
themselves out of proportion, those are the creatures I'm most eager to
stomp on.  Why, these grisly little simians ought to be grateful I'm
studying their philosophy, while my distant relatives are rolling over in
their soap-dishes.