"...the usual gang of academic lintheads and popcult apologists display their usual confusion of values by mistaking something of social interest for something of artistic significance."-- Gary Groth meditations on Superman, 1988 AMAZING HEROES whose number I don't care to look up.
'If there is one thing that especially distinguishes postmodernism from modernism, according to [Linda] Hutcheon, it is postmodernism's relation to mass culture. Whereas modernism "defined itself through the exclusion of mass culture and was driven, by its fear of contamination by the consumer culture burgeoning around it, into an elitist and exclusive view of aesthetic formalism and the autonomy of art" (Politics 28), postmodern works are not afraid to renegotiate "the different possible relations (of complicity and critique) between high and popular forms of culture" (Politics 28).'--Modules on Hutcheon at:
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/English/theory/postmodernism/modules/hutcheonpostmodernity.html
Recently I cited the second quote in the comments-section of Curt Purcell's incisive new essay on Grant Morrison's FINAL CRISIS, but the quote may prove equally applicable to both Curt's concerns and my recent discussions of Comics' Greatest Elitist, Gary Groth.
The above summation of Linda Hutcheon's concepts, authored by one Dino Felluga, dovetails with my incomplete reading of one of Hutcheon's works, THE POETICS OF POSTMODERNISM, where I recall Hutcheon discoursing on how modernism was essentially tied to a realistic paradigm not appreciably different from that of representational realism, and that post-modernism was in essence a reaction against that realistic paradigm. Obviously, this approximate summation taken from memory may prove incorrect. Fortunately Curt cites a direct authority, Steven Pinker, whose views on the interactions of "high and low art" may serve as a gloss to those of Hutcheon on the postmodern project:
"The problem for artists is not that popular culture is so bad but that it is so good, at least some of the time. Art could no longer confer prestige by the rarity or excellence of the works themselves, so it had to confer it by the rarity of the powers of appreciation. As Bourdieu points out, only a special elite of initiates could get the point of the new works of art. And with beautiful things spewing out of printing presses and record plants, distinctive works need not be beautiful. Indeed, they had better not be, because now any schmo could have beautiful things."
If Hutcheon is correct on the above points, then post-modernism (or "pomo") may have come about because its artists wished to explore other conceptions of existence beyond those offered by the realistic underpinnings of early 20th-century modernism.
For instance, for all the brain-torturing phantasmagorias that stream out of Joyce's characters, "real reality" in Joyce's world is still there: res extensa basically unaffected by res cogitans. But it's questionable whether "real reality" goes so unaffected by its viewers in the works of Borges and Pynchon.
Similarly, for the High Modernist author it's entirely appropriate to excoriate the viscerally-appealing, often-nonsensical fantasies of pop fiction for not living up to "reality," as one can see in a work like Nathaniel West's DAY OF THE LOCUST. A "content elitist" like Gary Groth essentially echoes this High Modernist preference by reducing the fantasy of SUPERMAN down to something that has no "artistic" value in itself, but is only "of social interest." For Groth, as for the Frankfurt School elitists he emulates, popular fiction exists only as a quasi-scientific datum by which one demonstrates how shitty the world of pop fiction is, and how much a good reader needs to possess finely-tuned "powers of appreciation." Hutcheon's postmodernism, in contrast, suggests that its authors are more "finely tuned" in terms of negotiating the relations between high and low on more complex grounds than simple exclusionism.
To my knowledge Gary Groth has never uttered a kind word about the Man of Steel. However, he has tacitly admitted, via his many public encominums on Jack Kirby (a popular artist if there ever was one), that popular culture can be "good," if not "good" in quite the same way as the fine arts. Groth's only way out of this paradox is to invoke the auteurist theory that evolved in 1950s film criticism: Jack Kirby's not a fine artist, but he puts forth his popularly-derived visions with the force and integrity of a fine artist, and so doesn't deserve to be lumped in with lumpen-types like Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.
At base the auteurist theory is just a way for the High Modernist to defer the question of What to Do When You Find Good Stuff in Popfiction. The question is deferred because it's impossible to answer within the scope of any species of elitism, as I've noted here. That's why I continually emphasize the need for a pluralist criticism that recognizes (1) that different forms of art generate different sets of artistic values, and (2) that such a recognition is not, as Groth has it, a "confusion of values" but a deeper elucidation of them.
As Groth is a "content elitist," most popular fiction is "bad art" just by reason of its bad content, so that Jack Kirby isn't really separable from Siegel and Shuster. "Art" in Groth's world signifies High Art alone.
Plainly this definition doesn't help one suss out what "art" is in the more general sense of the word. My working definition is that art is anything that is made with what I'll term "open functionality." For example. a jug that holds water and does nothing else (i.e., has no pictures on its surface) has a closed, purely denotative functionality. A jug decorated with pictures of horses or maidens or whatever would have open, connotative functionality in that the jug is still meant to hold water but now the pictures on it are meant to entertain anyone of a mind to be entertained by them.
For me, then, the aspects of the "visceral" and the "physical" that Groth finds so objectionable in the Superman myth are no less art for so being, for they still fall within the sphere of an open and connotative functionality.
Nothing demonstrates this more than my own essays on early Siegel-and-Shuster SUPERMAN stories. In "OCD on a Hotplate," I expressed my own reservations on the quality of work put out by the early SUPERMAN stories. And yet, even if this work wasn't as well executed as some later iterations of the character, it did show certain glimmerings of a symbolic complexity going beyond the demands of the "visceral."
In conclusion, post-modernism as defined by Hutcheon is an ideal means by which one might come to grips with the different narrative worlds implied by different literary forms, and so is all but covalent with the aims of a pluralist criticism.
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8 comments:
Jesus, you're like a Beckett hero when it comes to a mention of Groth. Anyway,
For Groth, as for the Frankfurt School elitists he emulates, popular fiction exists only as a quasi-scientific datum by which one demonstrates how shitty the world of pop fiction is, and how much a good reader needs to possess finely-tuned "powers of appreciation."
The Frankfurt expats were very much opposed to the scientistic approach to life. It was the reduction of art to scientific model of mass appreciation (polling and the subsequent demographic targeting of art to fit the audience model) back in his radio research days that led to many of Adorno's critical topics. Anyone who knows anything about the early development of radio and TV programs would have to agree with him on their development if not that it's an entirely bad thing.
I prefer to be an Ibsen hero, as in "The majority [of elitist critics] is always wrong."
Nothing I've read about the Frankfurters suggests that they had any antipathy about regarding so-called "mass culture" through a scientistic lens. I'm sure they did think "real art" shouldn't be reduced to scientistic, demographic-calculatin' manipulations of the kind they thought all "mass culture" could be reduced down to. But that's not an evaluation supported by evidence, whether the attack is mounted either by Adorno or by Gary Groth. So it's wrong, wrong, wrong, and they're guilty, guilty, guilty.
It's the producers of mass art who are the ones doing the reducing, not Adorno. From "Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America":
"The phenomena with which the sociology of the mass media must be concerned, particularly in America, cannot be separated from standardization, the transformation of artistic creations into consumer goods, and the calculated pseudo-individualization and similar manifestations of what is called Verdinglichung -- 'reification' -- in German."
Art as mere data, its reduction and determination by administrative research (e.g., to fit the biggest target audience) is precisely the methodology against which Adorno (and Horkheimer) privileged the role of theory:
"Whether one proceeds from a theory of society and interprets the allegedly reliably observed data as mere epiphenomena upon the theory, or, alternatively, regards the data as the essence of science and the theory as a mere abstraction derived from the ordering of data -- these alternatives have far-reaching substantial consequences for the conception of society."
That is, one of these consequences is the culture industry's production of mass art as such. What you've done is mistakenly taken the object of their critique for their own position.
As always, stop relying on simplistic dismissals of Critical Theory. Try engaging it on your own, rather than looking for an easy refutation through someone else's (mis)understanding.
Dude. Do you really not get that I'm using the term "art" inclusively rather than exclusively, as Groth uses it? I thought my agreement with Pinker re: the high quality of some popular art, and the implications of that quality for the fine arts, should've made that clear.
Let me spell it out:
The
Frankfurt
Paradigm
of
Mass
Art
Is
Wrong
In
Every
Respect
It is impossible for "mass art" as conceived by the Frankfurters to account for the many variations of "quality" in so-called "mass art." Ergo, it is they who are forcing a false scientistic paradigm onto the creation of an artform which they simply don't understand, and which they have chosen to view as adroitly-concealed social manipulation.
That's not some interpretation I've picked up from somewhere else. It's my interpretation, and the various people I quote in support are just that. I can point to any number of essays where I've taken valuable items from Campbell while disputing something else he said, or taken items from Frye without subscribing to everything he stated. You have no basis for imputing slavishness to me.
If anything, it's the Frankfurters who are slavish devotees of a monolithic theory, influenced principally by Marxist eschatology and early 20th-century "crowd theory." Sorry you can't see that.
it is they who are forcing a false scientistic paradigm onto the creation of an artform which they simply don't understand, and which they have chosen to view as adroitly-concealed social manipulation.
What is this scientistic paradigm they're forcing on mass art?
It's my interpretation, and the various people I quote in support are just that. [...] You have no basis for imputing slavishness to me.
I didn't say anything about you being slavish. What I said was that you've never read these guys, and instead choose to only find negative reactions to them, because they poo-pooed the type of industries that make some stuff that's related to things you like. I suspect that's why you continually get their arguments wrong.
"What is this scientistic paradigm they're forcing on mass art?"
You said it yourself:
a "scientific model of mass appreciation (polling and the subsequent demographic targeting of art to fit the audience model)"
You claim that this is "the object of their critique." I claim that it is their slanted position that "demographic targeting" and its consequent use in manipulating the viewers constitutte the essence of popular/mass culture. Those Frankfurters who are direct followers of Adorno, as well as fellow travelers like Frederic Jameson (whom you might recall I reviewed here) have, like the blind men in the fable, taken a part of the elephant for the whole thing. "Demographic targeting" is at best the elephant's tail, and has no power to wag the elephant.
Now, they may have exerted considerable intellectual energies on analyzing the dimensions of the tail, the weight of the tail, and how many flies the tail can keep off the elephant's rear end in a given time. But when all's said and done, they still don't know shit about the elephant.
Here's a defining quote from Adorno:
"Under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through. The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art."
This is Adorno and his Adornites doing nothing but proclaiming the philosophy that they think stems from studying the elephant's tail.
It's a good quote because it shares the same blinkered view seen in the Groth quote: that only Fine Art is Art, and everything else is just the rest of the elephant in someone else' room that we don't want to talk about.
More on your other accusation in a moment.
"What I said was that you've never read these guys, and instead choose to only find negative reactions to them, because they poo-pooed the type of industries that make some stuff that's related to things you like. I suspect that's why you continually get their arguments wrong."
Way back on the Comicon.com days you attempted to recommend an online section of Adorno to me, from which I took the earlier quote:
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm
I told you then and I will tell you again: I had already read it. I may never bother to read the whole DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT, but given that I regard everything in the "culture industry" chapter to be nonsensical hogwash, I really don't think the rest of the book is going to prove any better reasoned. Any chapter of a book ought to stand on its own in terms of how well it's reasoned, and I've already told you that I find even this one argument rife with poor logic and inadequate research.
Here's an example:
"The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities. It is stronger even than the rigorism of the Hays Office, just as in certain great times in history it has inflamed greater forces that were turned against it, namely, the terror of the tribunals. It calls for Mickey Rooney in preference to the tragic Garbo, for Donald Duck instead of Betty Boop."
Would you care to tell me what the fuck this is alleged to mean? Better yet, tell me what sort of *research* Adorno and Horkeimer performed in order to "prove" that some alleged increased popularity of Mickey Rooney and Donald Duck means what they think it means about the alleged love that the "common people" (felicitous phrase!) have for their conquerors.
I'll tell the firm I think they got their findings from: the firm of Jack and Squat.
I've read other bits and pieces from the original Frankfurters and it's always the same: adjust the evidence to fit the rhetoric and then claim that it's a scientific observation. So I say I haven't gotten a thing wrong about the general project of the Frankfurters. In lieu of plowing through more of Adorno I have read dozens of lockstep Frankfurt School analyses of films and comics that have also done nothing to impress me with the School's legacy; there have been no Nietzsches following Theodor "Schopenhauer." It's a shame Gary Groth bought into this particular farm, but if nothing else his embracing of their mediocre logic has given me hours of pleasure, since it's so easy to refute their sloppy thinking.
Not unlike your argument here.
A last point:
"Try engaging it on your own, rather than looking for an easy refutation through someone else's (mis)understanding."
I do consider this to be you imputation slavishness to me in that it assumes that I knew nothing of the School's fundamental concepts and that apparently I just picked out of the air some unspecified refutation that I chose to agree with because I didn't like the implications of the Frankfurt philosophy:
"they poo-pooed the type of industries that make some stuff that's related to things you like."
This was bullshit when you said it on Comicon.com and it still is.
You're a believer in scientific evidence, Charles. Have you got any evidence for this hypothetical "someone else" on whom I'm depending? Someone more specific than just, I don't know, every writer I've read who *isn't* a Frankfurter?
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