cultureon

[cultureon]

Disneyland is in Every Thought

With this post I want to outline a series of articles divided into 3 parts. In the content of them I want to describe some historical, cultural and social phenomena that, in my opinion, have the most significant impact on the formation of our contemporary. I don’t deny that this selection is relative and reflects my subjective opinion, as well as that I limit myself to the Western European model to consider the historical development.

What happened? According to Walter Benjamin.

The first half of the 20th century. Europe had not yet recovered from the shock of the First World War, although Germany, under the influence of political disorder, had already embarked on the fascist path. 

Walter Benjamin, who had emigrated to France because of the persecution of Jews in Germany, undertook to write one of the most influential essays in the history of art and media  - "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". With an avant-garde style influenced by the crisp air of Parian freedom, Benjamin was able to capture the foreshadowing of a technological revolution that transformed social attitudes and cultural space forever. 

Through the transformation of industrial technology, the notion of the “work of art” changed not only its external form but also its semantic context. From the unique print on glass (Daguerreotype) to photographic film, from the unique theatrical performance to the mechanical reproduction of film, cinema and photography have replaced the classical notion of the “original” with the modern notion of the “copy”. 

Benjamin observes:

“With the invention of cinema and photography, the meaning we put into the notion of uniqueness has become irrelevant. It is meaningless to demand originality from something that itself can exist only as a copy." 

Meanwhile, under the pressure of the spirit of the time (Zeitgeist) the concept of “Genius” as of the mediator between spiritual and profound, and the idea of “Intrinsic value of art“ were effectively sent into oblivion without a farewell parade, namely subjected to secularization.

Not without a strained enthusiasm, Walter writes:

“For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual’.

In the process of this turn, art, under the pressure of social transformation, leaves the realm of purely aesthetic relations and becomes a mode of transformation of the perception within the political context of the social dynamic. 

This change in the human-artwork relationship was imbued with hopes for a better future and a change in the course of human history. Hopes that unfortunately were never fulfilled.  Even Waller Benjamin by the irony of the hard fate, fell victim to the Nazi, which, through the glitter of new forms of art reproduction, was covering up a political crime against humanity, i.e. used the very “emancipated art" for its own political purpose -  to propaganda of the regime of national-socialism.

Why did it happen? A first critical assessment from Adorno and Horkheimer

Only 12 years after the publication of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, and 7 years after tragic death of Benjamin, the highly respected founders of the “Frankfurt School“ of critical philosophy - Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their work ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” described the changes of the culture industry based on Hegel's philosophical concept of dialectical unfolding of the history.

In this book Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer compare the new time of mass reproduction with the stage of Enlightenment. Period of the Enlightenment also became a force that changed social relations in the 18-19 centuries. It was centered around the transformation of public education and around the figure of Imanuel Kant, with his project, outlined in the Critique of Pure Reason, namely the victory of the rational over the religious. 

Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters”. 

Under the influence of Enlightenment, human beings for the first time went beyond the mode of identity given to he/she within a social role and developed new self perception. Self-evident dedication to family and conformity to other individuals fell into decline, making way for a sensible individualism that contributed to the rise of culture. This shift often calls - change from the mode of sincerity to the mode of authenticity. 

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, we were witnessing the new twist in identity mode - decline of authenticity. Culture has ceased to be a force for empowering individuality and in fact became an industry that fosters the creation of fake identity based on mass culture. The artist has been downgraded to employee of the business industry, and intellectual property has been reduced to a product of general consumption. 

"Today the order of life allows no room for the ego to draw spiritual or intellectual conclusions. The thought which leads to knowledge is neutralized and used as a mere qualification on specific labor markets and to heighten to commodity value of the personality.”. 

Thus Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in spite of their aggressive but necessary criticism, legitimize the society of mass consumption as the process of historical necessity that took its place in our recent past. 

The view on culture in the context of emancipation no longer had its sublime naivety of Benjamin hope, but is characterized by a critical view towards validity.

“What we had set out to do was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism”. With these words Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer characterized their book which became a classic example in exposing the sweet glow of the mass consumer society.

The result of fusion and Marcuse's one-dimensional man. 

In 1964, during the golden years of capitalism, Herbert Marcuse published his highly controversial and scandalous book, entitled “One-Dimensional Man”. There, through an insightful form of critical reflection, he delineates from the individual to the collective level of the spiritual, intellectual and cultural phenomena that till today defines our social and political relations. 

These days, 17 years after publication of the “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”, capitalism has thoroughly conquered its place in the Western society and within the pressure on post war Europe and Third World countries, began its mission to make the whole world a better (more profitable) place. 

“The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form” - says Marcuse. 

In the content of the book "One Dimensional Man", Marcuse wants to make us realize that the media and entertainment industry has transformed itself into an absolute form of power over society. This became possible through control over human desires. By creating demand for goods that are not necessary but desirable, capitalism, through the media industry and the subtle psychological manipulations, mastered by Sigmund Freud's nephew Edward Bernays in the 1930s, has extended its influence over the public opinion. 

The publicly endorsed consumption of mass-produced goods made it possible to replace the pursuit of long-term and tedious goals (e.g., changing the social system through the interaction and cooperation of individuals) with short-term gratification (shopping, smoking, movies) as a form of social control. This new way of life of modern man was supported by an uncriticizable belief in progress as a necessity to which the human world is subjected. Speculating on the philosophical doctrine of Positivism, which asserts that the source of true knowledge is available only through empirical research, the world of technological progress has no longer remained an object of criticism and reflection, but has turned into a self-fulfilling given. 

Marcuse asserts:

“Rationality and productivity guide our life and death. We know that destruction is the price of progress just as death is the price of life, that the prerequisites for satisfaction and joy are renunciation and hard work, that business must go on at all costs, and that alternatives are utopian."

In the conditions of progress as a necessity, Marcuse notes that the tendency to tolerance and the maintenance of diversity in society is implementing only if the generally accepted norms, as the culture of mass consumption, are not criticized, and the realm of socially accepted consumer activity recognized as the best of all possibilities for the existence of society. This ensures that thinking remains flat, one-dimensional and self-preserving. If the new emerging thought does not obey the rule of correlation with the system - it automatically forfeits its privilege of being tolerated and becomes the result of “Savagery” and therefore not subject to review or discussion. "It is obvious that in the realm of Happy Consciousness no place for feelings of guilt, the concerns of conscience have taken over the calculation. When the fate of the whole is at stake, no act is considered a crime except the rejection of the whole or the refusal to defend it" - writes Marcuse. 

However, Marcuse does not leave us without hope. In spite of the one-dimensionality of modern man, he asserts that there is an accessible act of breath of the fresh air that takes place in pure creativity. Which I find still relevant today. Even though it's obvious that with the development of new technologies and social media, this act of pure creativity is becoming increasingly difficult to accomplish. 

And that's what Marcuse also predicted:

“The absorbent power of society depletes the artistic dimension by assimilating its antagonistic contents.”

Summarize

During the time spent reading this compilation we drew a historical parallel and learned that the forms of technical enrichment have changed not only the forms of the production of goods, but also the meaning of cultural concepts, of the work of art, the forms of human self-perception and the way of thinking/living of the individual, which to this day are under compulsion to either conform to technical progress or be excluded from social dynamics.

[cultureon]

Introdaction

Perhaps it is a little ironic that I am beginning to write this blog at a time when in Germany, amidst the financial crisis, the government is drastically cutting the budget for culture. At the same time, I cannot escape the thought that this circumstance of culture in its dialectical existence is inevitable and inherent. Culture, as a form of play, is not a product of vital necessity, but rather of intellectual existence. And as we know, the development of intellect as well as of secondary sexual traits in animals is the result of the wealth and luxury of nature. As for culture, it is no longer directly dependent on nature, but rather on social dynamics, i.e. the artificially created but no less important environment. The wealth or poverty of a society, both its intellectual (education) and physical (money) status, directly affects culture. Although the wealth of both does not guarantee cultural prosperity. As a thinker, I cannot take seriously the assertion of those who believe that in our time we are choking on the result of cultural liberalization, which has undoubtedly led to its prosperity. Perhaps this is so for those who, in a complex pattern, are unable to grasp the patterns?

Although this process of influence is not one-sided. Culture, on its behalf, makes its inevitable contribution to the formation of society as well. This only confirms how complexly these systems interact, sometimes without providing an opportunity to separate one from the other.

In hard times culture does not disappear. Sometimes hard times are the prevention of culture, and with it the prevention of society's disasters. Thus, once again I’m getting convinced that the human concept of what is good, what is bad, what is evil and what is good is, sadly, subjective and irrelevant to the all-embracing reality. 

On this note, I am initiating this project to outline those necessary conditions of culture's existence that I find significant for a general understanding of the state and progress of culture in the 21st century. I believe that uncovering these phenomena will help shed light on those parts of the state of culture that, because of their proximity, the contemporary suffers from an inability to be registered by the observer. This conceptualization of what is happening will help to look at the contemporary as from above, and to grasp the intertwining, contradictory, confounding phenomena, to create a distance from them. And at the moment of returning to the flow of modernity, which is inevitable, this distance, this view from above will help us to change this experience of being in the present to a better, more conscious state of being.