Damning (Yet Desiring) ...

[Dave Monroe]

Edward Rothstein, "Damning (Yet Desiring) Mickey and
the Big Mac," NY Times, Saturday, March 2, 2002 ...

"Why do they hate us?" One answer to that now familiar
question may be its opposite: "Why do they love us?" 

American popular culture, American film, American pop
music, American fast food and American television
manage to inspire both love and hate, as if the two
passions were inseparable parts of a single whole,
evoking the video image last fall of Osama bin Laden
wearing what appeared to be a Timex Ironman Triathlon
watch. So while the Taliban tried to quash the
cultural influences of the West - hanging televisions
from trees like electronic corpses - Afghan women were
risking their lives by secretly going to Western-style
beauty parlors.

One explanation for this repulsion and attraction has
become fairly common: American popular culture is
capitalist culture. In capitalism commodities are
produced that will spur desire for still more
commodities. Capitalism seduces through sheer force of
marketing and sheer promise of pleasure. What
fundamentalist society would not be horrified by the
ways in which traditions and rituals are subsumed by
the filthy lucre of the marketplace? 

This view of popular culture has a long heritage. In
"The Communist Manifesto" Marx and Engels described
capitalism as intrinsically unsettling, disrupting
social conditions, creating "everlasting uncertainty
and agitation." Attacks by intellectuals on popular
culture in the 1940's and 50's expanded this view. In
1953 Dwight Macdonald wrote in his famous essay "A
Theory of Mass Culture" that mass culture was "imposed
from above," that it created "passive consumers." 

"Like 19th-century capitalism," Macdonald wrote, "Mass
Culture is a dynamic, revolutionary force, breaking
down the old barriers of class, tradition, taste, and
dissolving all cultural distinctions." It is a kind of
cultural indenture imposed by what he called the
"Lords of kitsch." The philosopher Theodor Adorno also
argued that mass culture was an instrument of
oppressive power. He believed that it had a
totalitarian dimension; television, he said in a 1954
essay, was "a medium of undreamed-of psychological
control." 

Those ideas have now become unquestioned axioms,
elaborated on by other critics and analysts. Oddly,
those views are also not that far from what Islamic
fundamentalists themselves believe, or, for that
matter, what the antiglobalization activists believe:
pop culture succeeds because it is imperialist. 

The problem is that these images of passive victims of
the capitalist maw, enthralled by a cavalcade of
meaningless commodities, bears very little
relationship to most people's experiences and does
little to explain the allure of popular culture. The
connection between popular culture and capitalism is
hardly as definite as it may seem. As the sociologist
Daniel Bell has pointed out, traditional capitalism,
with its requirements for restraint and planning, is
not easily reconciled with the unbounded desires and
ambitions of popular culture. Capitalism has changed
in response to culture just as culture has changed in
response to capitalism. 

In addition, acceptance of capitalism does not require
acceptance of popular culture. Fundamentalist
governments and nondemocratic countries like China may
seek the prosperity created by modified capitalism
without changing their views of American cultural
influence; capitalist France and Canada have, at
different times, made cultural resistance national
policy. 

So capitalism offers limited explanations. More
powerful influences shape culture. Alexis de
Tocqueville, for example, argued in "Democracy in
America" that there was a fundamental difference
between the artistic culture of an aristocracy and
that of a democracy. In an aristocracy, members of the
nobility form a small class with fixed interests,
inspiring a uniform style among artisans and creators.
Attention is paid to detailed craftsmanship, and
artistry is a form of service. 

But in a democracy, Tocqueville said, there are no
restrictions of class or guild on either artisans or
their public. Styles are less firmly defined; social
arrangements are more fluid; human aspirations vary
widely. So artisans offer what Tocqueville called
"imperfect satisfaction" for diverse audiences rather
than perfection for the few. Tocqueville also
accurately anticipated the nature of pop culture:
democracy, he wrote, shifts the preoccupation of art
from the soul to the body, from the ideal to the real.


Similar characteristics were described by John Stuart
Mill in "On Liberty" as he heralded the growth of
liberal culture. With equality and mobility, he wrote,
citizens "now read the same things, listen to the same
things, go to the same places, have their hopes and
fears directed to the same objects, have the same
rights and liberties, and the same means of asserting
them." 

With this expansion of attention to the same things
and
places, commercial culture has also become more vital.
Marshall McLuhan once recalled in a 1947 essay an
American Army officer's pondering the difficulty of
democratizing fascist Italy after World War II.
"Democratic freedom," the officer argued, with tongue
partly in cheek, required not worrying about politics
but "worrying about the means of defeating underarm
odor, scaly scalp, hairy legs, dull complexion, unruly
hair, borderline anemia, athlete's foot, and sluggish
bowels." Once relieved of concerns about caste and
material need, the individual is free to address other
issues. 

McLuhan argued that these material concerns were not
to be condemned. Rather, the "luxuriant and prurient
chaos of human passions," he wrote, are unavoidable.
These passions were acknowledged by the American
founding fathers, McLuhan said, and the recognition of
those desires helped shape both the realism and the
utopianism of American culture.

So American popular culture offers a powerful promise.
Luxuriant and prurient passions are partially
satisfied; desires for autonomy are offered
fulfillment; material pleasures and possibilities
become palpable. Choices are freely made. Who can
resist such a siren song? But there is a cost to this
shedding of restrictions; there is something
inherently disruptive about popular culture. It
undermines the elite values of aristocratic art,
displaces the customs of folk culture and opposes any
limitation on art's audiences or subjects. It asserts
egalitarian tastes, encourages dissent and does not
shun desire.

"Mass Culture," Dwight Macdonald wrote, "is very, very
democratic: it absolutely refuses to discriminate
against, or between, anything or anybody." This is
also a reason for intellectuals' fear of its
onslaught. As the art critic Clement Greenberg pointed
out in the 1940's when these issues first reared their
heads, "all the verities involved by religion,
authority, tradition, style, are thrown into
question." With the coming of "universal literacy," he
argued, came a debased form of art: kitsch. And
kitsch, he uncannily observed, was going "on a
triumphal tour of the world," creating what he called
"the first universal culture ever beheld." 

This is even more true now than it was a half-century
ago. Popular culture has become the standard-bearer
for
modernity, heralding its transformations. But for
fundamentalists and many terrorists, that is the very
problem. Even among mainstream intellectuals, some
effects of popular culture are scorned. Popular
culture may be hailed by left-wing critics for its
liberating energy, but it is also condemned by others
as an opiate; among conservatives, it is feared for
its nihilistic influence on tastes and morals. 

What then, if anything, can or should be done, since
the triumph of popular culture seems so inseparable
from the virtues of democratic culture? Is there any
way both to promise liberty and the pursuit of
happiness while preserving some discrimination among
desires and differences among cultures? Or are disgust
and desire doomed to be intertwined? Answers are not
likely to appease Islamic totalitarianism, but they
are increasingly important for the evolution of
American democracy and culture.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/02/arts/02POP.html?ex=1016080278&ei=1&en=d278ab95ff28b7d2

Apparently, the Times just figured all this out.  The
cutting edge of cultural criticism.  Sheesh ...

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