Daffy Duck and the Upanishads

Hartwin Alfred Gebhardt hag at iafrica.com
Sat Jun 29 15:26:17 CDT 1996


Andrew Dinn writes:

>                                   I think the inclusion of pop `crap'
> serves some other purposes.
> 
> One is to reject snobbish claims for high-brow culture by showing that
[...]
> Another is to point to the difference between old traditions and new
[...]

And a third one, I'd say, is a complication of the first one. The ahistorical 
cultural consciousness of contemporary American society is a direct 
corollary of the cinematic construction thereof, and while it most 
democratically conflates high and low culture, thus denying the 
authoritative pretensions of high culture and associated political 
interests, it also allows both the increasingly effective re-creation of the 
past and the autocratically controlled creation of the present and future. 
TRP, quite aware of the fundamentally manufactured nature of myth, 
history and reality is not positing that some historical essence is lost this 
way, but rather that the power to create the myths inscribing human 
identity is increasingly concentrated in the hands of certain inanimate 
concerns. For him, there is no question of truth in myth or history; 
what matters rather is what use it is put to. TRP rejects the high / low 
culture division because he rejects the political power dynamic it represents. 
Yet he also recognizes that so-called low culture (TV, film, pop music) has 
become, (certainly post-sixties), the very control mechanism employed by 
Them to first configure and then control the preterite. In a society where 
strict class divisions and accompanying upper class priviledges are maintained 
by the gun, preterite culture is a clear expression and indictment of that 
oppressive social devide, and also a possible refuge from the political 
realities maintaining that gap - because of both the persistence of subversive 
ancient mythologies and the fairly chaotic nature of the generation of preterite 
culture. Now, though (i.e. in Vineland's eighties) the power of the media has 
become the main engine of cultural manufacture - and the tube has no 
revolutionary agenda.

hg
PS. If this sounds a little, er, formal, don't worry - it is meant 
to.
hag at iafrica.com





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