Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and the critique of pop culture
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Does the Internet put a different spin on what a culture is? Instant and ubiquitous transmission around the globe flattens distinctions among cultures, but constantly emerging countertrends oppose the current culture reducing its longevity. 21st century culture is in constant ferment, "pop" cultures have a much shorter, and less distinguished, shelf life.
The idea of an "aura" emanating from a Rembrandt has merit, though comparable art of current era has hardly any value in the cultural or commercial marketplace. Instead, as pointed out, the aura is granted to celebrities in all domains, appearing and leaving, and unlike Rembrandt, there's no museum to view them 400 hours or years after fading from the scene.
The shame is there is no value to assign if a thing can't persist. How do we preserve our artifacts that will tell who we were to people 100 years from now? Those living today can't know what will be important, or called valuable, a century down the road, and we should not try to decide ahead of time because we can't.
IOW our self-evaluation of contemporary culture is hampered by impossibility of seeing what is invisible. The value of the things we produce, of present culture itself, won't be decided for 50 to 100 years from now, if any trace is still around. The jury is out and we won't be around to hear the verdict.
As opposed to when? When William Randolph Hearst ruled the press? Dickensian England? Even Big Media of my 90s youth.
Culture is always monolithic because it is shared behaviour. Go back to the salons of Europe or Ancient Greece and you would have this exact same argument. Misanthropy posing as a noble cry for utopianism, in my mind.
In the article, the idea most interesting to me was about how traditional "high" culture (books, plays, opera) are still considered elitist when it's the mass culture of celebrities which comprise the elites. It was a passing idea and I'd like to hear more about that.
Hah! Imagine telling a developer at Twitter that they were conspiring to create a vacant vacuous idiot society! Imagine meeting someone at a bar and when they said they worked at Facebook letting them know that they were making the world a worse place!
Yeah, culture is not what it used to be, and even highly educated people read less and read less substancial works when they do read.
Nothing to do with the inherent quality of Benhjamin or Adorno's work.
Roland Barthes' death of the author? Seems spot on to me! Twitter and Facebook have ended the hegemony of the narrative and replaced it with a billion people all shouting at once. We end up with emergent and algorithmic storytelling that is truly not created by any single author.
Jean Baudrillard's Hyper reality? Memes are a great example. The original context is so far gone that all we're left with is an endless procession of signs and signifiers and the next page on /r/AnimalAdvice.
Marshall McLuhan's medium is the message? Artists of all kinds suffer as their creations are digitized and removed from the economy while the entities that own the digital faucets at Google and Apple make record profits.
None of these guys are very easy to read, I'll admit that, but there are some amazing insights especially when you consider they were writing this stuff 30-50 years ago.
A lot of non-European people complain that they are indiciferable or garbage just because they are not accustomed to their language and cultural references, which is not totally unlike Blub programmer complaining about the difficult LISP or Haskell concepts.
That and the anglo-saxon mentality on philosophy is radically different (not necessarily better, as its proponents claim).
(As for stuff like the Sokal affair, nobody batted an eye or called CS, physics, biology etc "bullshit" when when tons of Markov-chain generated "papers" were published in hard science peer-reviewed journals -- here's one such incident for reference: http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120... ).