Cultural Passions

Fans, Aesthetes and Tarot Readers

Elizabeth Wilson

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857733580
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

Elizabeth Wilson is one of our most radical cultural critics. In "Cultural Passions" she transcends the division between 'high' and 'low' culture, exploring the emotional commitment people bring to the books, performances, objects and rituals in which they find meaning and challenging an enduring suspicion of the pleasure of the aesthetic. Ranging from Marcel Proust to tarot readings, from urban planning to interiors, Elizabeth Wilson investigates an underlying Puritanism in critical commentary on matters as wide ranging as Roger Federer and C S Lewis, Surrealism and fashion and the relationship of religion to fan culture. She questions why pleasure appears suspect, even as consumer society incites it and turns life into entertainment. She questions why there is such fear of elitism when at the same time the fans of mass culture are held in contempt. Subverting conventional views, her oblique point of view provides startling insights on both familiar and marginal cultural experiences.

PART ONE

Cultural Diseases

1	Introduction

The Roman theatre in Orange with its towering back wall of ochre stone, the only one to survive in Europe, was once an entertainment centre for the flourishing colonial colonies of southern France. I sat on the top row, where the rabble used to sit, and listened as the disembodied voice from the audio guide told me that at first the Romans had followed the Greeks and Etruscans, performing serious drama, but later they grew tired of tragedies, preferring jugglers, clowns and gymnasts. Later still, the shows were devoted entirely to pornographic displays, until the early Christians came along, smashed up the theatres and banned all secular entertainment. Distant in time though these events might be, they seemed tellingly to prefigure a possible future for contemporary culture. As pornography floods the internet and celebrity culture swamps the global media, perhaps it is only a matter of time before Evangelicals or Islamists bring a decaying Western culture crashing to the end it deserves.

Late Roman culture was in fact by no means entirely given over to trash any more than is our own. After the Romans, with their mosaic flooring, central heating and vineyards, left Britain, the island took 500 years to recover. Today, innovative culture and learning flourish in all sorts of places. Religious fundamentalists have certainly denounced contemporary Western consumer societies as decadent. However, a society is not a single organic entity like a vegetable marrow, but is a complex conglomeration of multiple systems and formations. Some may be flourishing, others in decay. Sometimes new forms grow from the dead, just as the florid vitality of a cemetery’s ivies and flowers draws nourishment from human remains. Contemporary culture is diverse and contradictory, yet even if the Western world avoids being plunged into a new dark ages in the near future, a sense of anxiety and melancholy pervades cultural comment. Pundits and politicians alike view the society of consumption with ambivalence.

Consumption was a vernacular nineteenth-century term for tuberculosis, then an incurable wasting disease. It would be tempting to suggest that we do in that sense live in a society suffering from consumption. The individual suffering from consumption experienced periods of exaltation and sometimes creativity. John Keats and Emily Brontë owed the intensity of their writing in part to their fatal illness.

By the time they were writing, markets were already developing for the commercial provision of the arts and ‘entertainment industries’. This produced a division between what came to be seen as ‘high’ art and ‘mass’ culture. That division continues to set the terms of cultural debate.

In the following chapters, I focus on the emotional commitment audiences and users bring to the objects of their desire and to the performances in which they find meaning. By focusing on this, I hope to transcend the division between ‘high’ and ‘low’. In practice, the tastes of many, perhaps the majority of individuals, do cross this boundary, yet the division between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture continues to set the terms of debate.

Figure 1: The Roman theatre at Orange in the eighteenth century.

Figure 2: Today the Roman theatre is once again the arena for opera and other spectacles.

This divide has always been moral and political as well as aesthetic. Two well-established positions set the parameters. On one side stand those who bewail the ‘dumbing down’ of culture. This was the position taken by Frank Furedi in his Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?, published in 2004. Furedi argued that the role of the intellectual and respect for the figure of the intellectual have been undermined as education has been transformed from a search for truth to a managerial training. Students are to be inducted into a role in which they will not question the utilitarian status quo – the idea, for example, that the chief goal of society is economic expansion. Furedi further argued that contemporary society is characterised by a deep philistinism – a philistine being an individual ‘devoid of liberal culture and whose interests are material and commonplace’. He illustrated this philistinism with the words of former British education minister, Charles Clarke, who expressed the opinion that the teaching of history and indeed any sort of ‘education for education’s sake’ was ‘a bit dodgy’. Furthermore, suggested Furedi, ‘democracy’ in the allegedly democratic societies is little more than a façade masking deep social inequalities. This façade is partly created precisely by the philistine and supposedly ‘anti-elitist’ suspicion of the pursuit of learning, and includes a preference for mass culture over high art. Traditional ‘high art’ is also, after all, ‘a bit dodgy’.¹

Contempt for learning as an end in itself is one aspect of a rhetoric that claims to speak for the majority, presenting this as democratic, when it is in fact merely populist. The populist is an important ally of the philistine, aiming to speak for and include ‘ordinary people’, to cater to and share the tastes of the mass public and to respect the authenticity of the ordinary. There would be nothing wrong with that – on the contrary – were it not that it slides into the rejection of anything that is assumed to be above the heads of ‘ordinary people’: the patronising assumption that they are too thick to enjoy anything complicated. A love of classical art is cynically denounced as snobbery. Minority tastes for complex works are viewed with suspicion as pretentious and ‘highfalutin’.

Such a position can masquerade as progressive in speaking for the majority. Yet surprisingly often it is related to a second ‘progressive’ view that deems cultural works acceptable only when they produce the right attitude of mind in their audiences. For example, in March 2004 another former education minister (and, like Clarke, a member of the Labour Party), Estelle Morris, was invited, when she became Minister for the Arts, to guest edit the cultural section of the left of centre magazine The New Statesman. As minister, Morris understandably focused on issues surrounding state provision. Predictably too, the articles she commissioned privileged ‘inclusion’: a review of a play performed by children with learning difficulties; an assessment of changing attitudes towards black and minority performers; a debate about the value of the Arts Council. She needed, she thought, to ‘cover everything: each of the art forms, nothing too London based, a balance of men and women, and a proper acknowledgement of the diversity of the arts sector’. All perfectly acceptable, if rather bland, and speaking for all sections of society – and displaying the right social attitudes. The minister’s choices illustrated not that ‘political correctness’ is wrong in promoting neglected sections of society, but in censoring out anything deemed too unacceptable, effectively too radical.

But as Hans Arp, the Swiss Dadaist sculptor, once said: ‘Art just is.’ It cannot automatically be recruited to a progressive – or for that matter a conservative – agenda. The Estelle Morris agenda is not culture; it is social engineering. Also, as Furedi suggested, the well-meaning intentions of the Estelle Morrises of this world succeed only in being very patronising. As an Afro-Caribbean student once expressed it after a lecture on modernism: ‘why have we been excluded from all this?’

The populist critic takes for granted that the ‘ordinary people’ can never warm to works that he (himself almost certainly the product of advanced higher education and with a doctoral degree) has designated as ‘elitist’. But if whole sections of the population have never been to an art gallery or listened to Beethoven this is at least partly because the educational system and commercial pressures act to keep them away. A crippling sense of ‘it’s not for the likes of us’ is reinforced by a narrow idea of ‘relevance’: the belief that what is designated as high culture can never mean anything to working class or ethnic minority students.

Frank Furedi was equally critical of a relativism that rejects any cultural hierarchy – the idea that some cultural works could be better than others. Yet the origins of cultural relativism were in themselves intended as progressive or potentially progressive.

Until the 1950s a strong boundary between ‘high’ art and popular culture was maintained, along with an assumption that ‘great art’ was to be the more valued. F. R. Leavis, for example, was a leading advocate, both before and after the Second World War, of culture, specifically literature, as a realm in which there were absolute standards of excellence, and which expressed absolute moral values. In the 1930s he warned of the dangers arising from the massification and commercial exploitation of culture and in his critical works on English literature he defended many of them as great moral texts. Above all, great art taught universal values. It had to have a universal character. The plays of Aeschylus (or indeed of Seneca) were as relevant today as they had been when written.

The 1960s saw the rise of cultural studies in universities. This pioneered the analysis – not necessarily the uncritical endorsement – of popular forms. Going beyond television and film to include the study of ‘subcultures’ such as teddy boys and later punk, the new cultural research sought to explain their appeal and investigate their social meanings. This project not only discovered new objects of research but also had different goals, being more interested in the effects on audiences of mass culture and what new forms said about the society in which they appeared than in the quality of paint or the humanistic moral message of a given work. This was a step away from the detachment that had long been considered the proper stance when confronting a work of art. The new generation of cultural researchers were interested in how the audience felt.

This emphasised the subjective element in the reception of culture and it followed from this that the new researchers effectively broke with universalism. Frank Furedi defended the idea of universal truth and criticised the way in which this was abandoned in favour of relativism – the idea that there is no ‘truth’ but only a plurality of ‘truth claims’, all or none of which may or may not be valid (but which even if they are not may somehow still be emotionally valid). The development of relativist views – one aspect of what came to be loosely termed postmodernism – by influential writers, perhaps most of all Michel Foucault, was essentially an attack on the whole Enlightenment project, the belief in reason and progress, and in particular on its Marxist variant. In view of the history of the twentieth century such disillusionment is understandable, but to abandon all effort to find common ground and a common cause, and to reject also the idea that any one assertion can be truer than any other, is in the end to endorse a Hobbesian view of human life as the war of all against all, and to reproduce at the level of thought and cultural production the competitive anarchy of capitalism.

In the 1970s the ‘new art history’, following in the footsteps of cultural studies, ‘prioritised social and political contexts over older concerns of authorship and appreciation or connoisseurial value’.² In literature too, claims about ‘objective’ standards of beauty and perfection of technique were supplanted by the view that such objectivity was false, and served largely to prioritise the work of an elite over that produced by women, ‘minorities’ and working-class writers.

One variant of the new approach was to claim that there can be no hierarchy of art forms, that – to use a clichéd example – Beethoven cannot be judged better than The Beatles, but simply different. Yet it is quite possible to recognise the differences and the merits of both while at the same time arguing that Beethoven really is ‘better’ than The Beatles, because, for example, his music addresses a wider and deeper range of thought and emotion than the Fab Four; or, on the other hand, to criticise The Beatles’ sometimes fey whimsy, but also the clunking facetiousness of Beethoven at times.

In any case, Beethoven is today one of the most popular of all composers, while the fictions of many writers who belong to the ‘canon’ of the classics, such as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, have proved to resonate with contemporary readers, encouraged by television and film adaptations to return to the books themselves. The narratives remain fast and compelling and their meaning, if not universal, at least transcends a century or two.

It would not be difficult to develop an argument suggesting that Pride and Prejudice is better than Harry Potter, but this would be to move outside the parameters of what is polite to say. The ‘soft’ policing of cultural taste means that understandably no one wants to appear a snob. By contrast, it is fine to say that you watch The X Factor because it is so camp. Cultural positioning of this sort has nothing to do with criticism, but is a function of social fashion; which may also have been the reason for Charles Clarke’s remark about history.

The serious study of popular culture took on a systematic form when in 1964 Richard Hoggart set up the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. This was an attempt to widen the parameters of cultural debate – and to challenge not only the divide between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, but also that between the active producer and passive consumer set up by the cultural theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, discussed later. Yet by the 1980s the enterprise had too often degenerated into an uncritical endorsement, by at least some cultural researchers, of almost any popular form and an automatic self-distancing by tastemakers and social elites from anything approaching ‘elitist’ culture. ‘Elitist’ and ‘elitism’ have become simply terms of abuse, a label for those who are said to consider themselves superior to other people and who sneer at the low tastes of others, but who have no rightful claim to their positions of cultural power. This seems to be due to a confusion of two meanings of the word: ‘elite’ in the sense of individuals or groups who excel in some field – for example, a great musician or scientist, each of whom could be said to belong to an elite of the brightest and best in that field; and ‘elite’ simply in the socio-economic sense of belonging to a group in society who are privileged not on account of talent and hard work, but merely by reason of inheritance, whether of wealth or lineage.

In any case, the term elitism came originally from the idea of election. The elite consisted of persons who had been chosen, which implies a democratic process. Surely there is nothing wrong – on the contrary – in acknowledging the outstanding achievements of certain individuals; of allowing, for example, that Pavarotti was a great singer who sang better than most other singers. Yet today, to endorse ‘elitism’ is allegedly to be undemocratic. It is also old fashioned and uncool, to the extent that politicians, those weather vanes of the fashionable, might be more likely to cite Harry Potter than Trollope or (heaven forbid) Proust as their holiday reading. One can only feel satirical about these pretentions, when at the same time many cabinet ministers attended private schools and when it is virtually impossible to succeed in the media industries without an Oxbridge degree.

No one seems to have noticed that the celebrity culture to which craven obeisance is paid is also, of course, entirely elitist. It bears no relation even to a meritocracy, since individuals are shot to fame and notoriety often for no other reason than their novelty or, at best, on the basis of a charismatic personality or that most undemocratic of attributes: beauty, or striking looks. And if television programmes or sports with high ratings and huge followings crowd out the less popular, then this too is considered democratic, when it may be rather the tyranny of the majority.

So to object to the use of ‘elitism’ as a form of condemnation is not a simple reversion to the position that high culture is better than mass culture. The objection is to the bad faith and disavowal with which it is used and its lazy failure to admit that some artistic works are better than others, or at least that it is legitimate to make a case for discrimination.

Some postmodern relativists are, or were, not content simply to claim that all cultural forms are different and cannot be compared. On...