C. Ubiquity (1) PDF

harlots, and plebeian violence. Relying on satire, Hogarth’s view of life is dominated by 29 growing, urban London. His series of eight paintings, A Rake’s Progress (1733-34), tells a story and teaches a moral lesson in its depiction of the rise and fall of Tom Ra...

harlots, and plebeian violence. Relying on satire, Hogarth’s view of life is dominated by 29 growing, urban London. His series of eight paintings, A Rake’s Progress (1733-34), tells a story and teaches a moral lesson in its depiction of the rise and fall of Tom Rakewell. All the 30 while, Hogarth makes us feel that we are in a theatre gazing towards an illuminated stage. This is an eighteenth century that English schoolbooks portray as a chaotic mess waiting to be cleaned up by the “Age of Reform” which set in from the 1820s. Conversely, there is the eighteenth century conjured up by Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), more aristocratic and naturalistic. Whilst inspired by many a continental artist (Ruisdael, Rubens, Watteau, Murillo, or Van Dyck ), Gainsborough portrays comfortably-off gentry with their wives, offspring and 31 the odd servant who gaze complacently at us from their family portraits. We are no longer staring at an illuminated stage. It is the reverse that is happening now. The characters are staring at us. In the background of Gainsborough’s paintings, we can catch glimpses of a country house, and perhaps another out-of-frame, background, where the process of intercontinental commerce and imperial expansion are taking place: an eighteenth century, essentially which could be portrayed as the cradle of modernity. The pose of Mr and Mrs Robert Andrews is a clear illustration of this. The “problem” with these two perspectives is to create an accurate view of eighteenth-century England where Hogarth’s and Gainsborough’s worlds coexist. Both artists, living approximately at the same time, express a quintessential 32 Englishness in their own separate ways. Much the same could be said of music. A contrast between the operatic gaiety of John Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan and the more cerebral music of Edward Elgar shows equally sharp contrasts whilst expressing Englishness of the most unique kind. C. Ubiquity portée Culture concerns the entire ambit of a society’s activities – increasingly associated with mass phenomena (a). It further has an anthropological deepness (b). a). Mass Culture (Mass Phenomena) Alan Bloom’s definition (supra) fails to take into consideration the popular dimension of culture. Indeed, our approach to world of culture should not be limited to the lofty realms of “high-brow” expression of the arts. It concerns the population at large. “Mass culture is a 33 29 Many of William Hogarth’s works are Internet available on the website of the Tate Museum at http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ArtistWorks?cgroupid=999999961&artistid=265&page=1 (visited September 1, 2020). 30 The eight paintings for the series “A Rake’s Progress” may be ssen in the house and Museum of Sir John Soane, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. 31 On his deathbed, Gainsborough brought Joshua Reynolds, with whom he had quarreled, to his bedside. He is said to have whispered to him: “We are all going to heaven, and van Dyck is of the party”, in J.B. Priestley, The English, op. cit., at 131. It shall be recalled that Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), born in Antwerp and a pupil of Peter Paul Rubens, settled in England where he became a leading court painter under the reign of King Charles I. 32 Examples can be multiplied ad infinitum: the culture of turn of the century France viewed by Zola or by Marcel Proust…. 33 A turning-point in contemporary art consisted precisely in removing the lofty “aura” of paintings and bringing the viewer in a position to interact with the art. Marcel Duchamp is notable in this respect with 12 machine for showing desire”, Roland Barthes wrote. The relationship between what happens 34 in everyday life and culture in the vast sense of the word was nowhere more apparent than in the work left by the German Jewish philosopher, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). Benjamin – 35 a blogger avant la lettre – took trivia seriously and read the modern era from its trash, toys, lunch bills, shopping arcades, snippets of just about anything. As Benjamin wrote: 36 “There are people who think they find the key to their destinies in heredity, others in horoscopes, others again in education. For my part, I believe that I would gain numerous insights into my later life from my collection of picture postcards, if I were to leaf through it again today”. Benjamin’s biographer and translator, Esther Leslie, notes: “There may be more artworks ‘inspired’ by Benjamin than by any other thinker”. Indeed, almost anyone who studies 37 everyday contemporary life is a follower of Benjamin, whether they like it or not. Returning to the Anglo-American world, there is more to English culture than Paradise Lost by John Milton or Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray. The irrepressibly prolific American artist, Robert Rauschenberg (1925 – May 12, 2008) built on the legacy of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) by obscuring the lines between art and life. Most notably, Rauschenberg considered that just about anything, including junk on the street, could be the stuff of art and that it could be the stuff of an art aspiring to be beautiful – that there was a potential poetics even in consumer glut. “I really feel sorry people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly”, he once said, “because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable”. In terms of sculpture, “Canyon” consists of a stuffed bald eagle attached to a canvas. “Monogram” was a stuffed goat girdled by a tire atop a printed panel. “Bed” entailed a quilt, sheet and pillow, slathered with paint, as if soaked in blood, framed on the wall. All became icons of postwar modernism. In any event, we can make two further remarks at this stage… In the first place, high-brow culture is undeniably nourished at one stage or another by popular culture. There is no clear demarcation line: see the British composer Edward Elgar (1857-1931) and his Pomp and Circumstance March N°1 (with the popular tune “Land of Hope and Glory” that developed into a jingoistic song that Elgar himself grew to hate…) Furthermore, so called “bad” culture is perhaps good for us all. In a book entitled Everything Bad is Good for You: How Popular Culture is Making Us Smarter (London: Allen Lane, 2005), Steven Johnson contends that far from rotting the minds of modern youth, video games, television, films and the Internet actually increase cognitive skills and contain strong educational values. The author concedes that there is a lot of bad mass entertainment, but he his famous Fountain. Duchamp’s American heirs include Andy Warhol, Roy Liechtenstein, or Rauschenberg. 34 Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse – Fragments (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010)(tr. Richard Howard), at 136. 35 Walter Benjamin died in September 1940 in mysterious circumstances. He walked across the French Pyrenees towards the Spanish border carrying a briefcase, and never came back. He died in the border twon of Portbou, probably killing himself with morphine tablets to elude the Nazis. He received a Catholic funeral under the name of Dr. Benjamin Walter. 36 Benjamin precisely wrote a work on Parisian shopping malls entitled The Arcades Project. 37 Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin (London: Reaktion Books, 2008). For French studies on Walter Benjamin, cf. Antonia Birnbaum, Bonheur Justice Walter Benjamin (Paris: Payot, 2009). See also Bruno Tackels, Walter Bejamin. Une vie dans les textes (Arles: Actes Sud, 2009) 13 provocatively points out that: “Nearly every extended sequence in Seinfeld or The Simpsons … will contain a joke that makes sense only if the viewer fills in the proper supplementary information – information that is deliberately withheld from the viewer”. Unarguably, the Simpsons represent a cultural artefact of our age that reflects and plays with philosophical ideas. The Simpsons, like Monty Python, is an Anglo-American take on existentialism. By way of illustration, In the episode, “Homer the Heretic”, Homer gives up church and decides to follow God in his own way… Homer throws out different – controversial – observations in this episode. “What’s the big deal about going to some building every Sunday, I mean, isn’t God everywhere?” “Don’t you think the Almighty has better things to worry about than where one little guy spends one measly hour of his week?” “And what if we’ve picked the wrong religion? Every week we’re just making God madder and madder.” Homer’s main target is not belief in God or the supernatural, but organized religions that allege they know the will of the creator. At the end of the episode, Homer’s house catches fire… God’s wrath? Divine retribution for Homer’s apostasy? No, the oaf merely fell asleep on his sofa and dropped his cigar. Is there a “lesson” to be drawn from all of this? Perhaps… Satire can provide an uplifting message on the absurdity of life, as well as an amusing, irreverent comment on modern American culture (here religion; elsewhere, Lisa’s experiences exemplify contemporary America’s ambivalent attitudes towards intellectuals; etc.). In France, such topics often bear a tragic dimension. Here, the absurd of Albert Camus is defied not by will, but mocking laughter… Steven Johnson author further contends that reality TV engages the social mind, while the social network of terrorist drama 24 is immensely more complex than that of 1970s soap Dallas: “You have to focus to follow the plot, and in focusing you are exercising the part of your brain that maps social networks”. The idea behind Johnson’s thesis is “collateral learning”. In short, a child does not learn Latin or algebra at school because he will need it later. The purpose to go about these subjects is to enhance one’s cognitive faculties (through a sort of mental “workout”). These subjects teach you not what to think, but how to think. With regard to TV and radio broadcasting, the existence of popular culture also raises the issue of what-they-want versus what’s-good-for-them. Indeed, many people – particularly in the United States – believe popular taste should be untrammeled because that is the democratic way. Why show a documentary film on Shakespeare (or a news bulletin for that matter) when more people would choose to watch reality television programs (Paris Hilton’s meanderings in the American countryside, …), talk shows (Jerry Springer, …), game shows (Wheel of Fortune, …), or blockbusters (Terminator, …) ? Why shouldn’t broadcasters give people what they want? The question goes to the very heart – and existence – of public broadcasting. The other view – the good-for-them position - is that public taste can be educated. Britons thus cling to images of Kenneth Clarke delivering impeccable lessons on Civilization, or Dylan Thomas, his creative spirit temporarily redeemed by the interventions of the Third Program (now Radio 3) from alcohol. Closer to us, one has in mind Simon Schama’s account of British history or spectacular adaptations of British literature (George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, …), dramatized with the help of an Andrew Davies. 14 Besides educating public taste, the good-for-them position has something to do with the view that culture is now commanded by consumption. The debate is endless and need not be developed further here. Suffice it to quote John Lloyd: “What we need is an understanding of how we get that which we call popular, as well as that which claims the adjective ‘high’. How much comes from the people? How much rolls over them ?”. 38 The arguments in favor of “popular culture” are many. The problem nevertheless remains that the loss of dedication to “high-brow culture” can mean it can be degraded, if not altogether lost. An English philosopher, Roger Scruton, argues that is precisely what happened to the once flourishing Islamic culture. Along with this, Scruton argues against the “child-centered” 39 teaching – an approach which he sees as finding out what children will most readily put up with, and giving it to them. Instead, he makes the case for not serving the child, but serving the culture. This is the more essential, for “it is clear we have entered a period of rapid educational decline, in which some people learn masses, but the masses learn nothing at all. The thesis boils down to the creation and re-creation of elitism, arguments that would not have displeased Alan Bloom himself. Indeed, for Scruton, “If … we believe that we teach skills in order to keep these skills alive [his italics] then we shall go on stretching ourselves, singling out those best able to acquire the skills in question, encouraging them to build on what they have acquired and to enhance it … it is the principal argument for introducing a competitive element in education – that we thereby single out those best fitted to receive it, to enhance it, and to pass it on”. Scruton’s – bleak – conclusions may be countered on at least three – related – levels. On the “supply” side, there exist a vast number of contemporary writers, artists, musicians whose works open doors to worlds of beauty and imagination (to name but a few : Ian McEwan, Tom Stoppard, John Adams, Lucien Freud, …). On the “demand” side, it would be wrong to consider that the public is oblivious to “high-brow” culture. More books are read today than ever before (including classics), more plays are produced and seen, more opera and classical music listened to, and more museums and art galleries visited. Finally, it would be wrong to portray the past as a fantasized nirvana of goodliness, proper manners, and cultural bon goût. By way of illustration, in opposing the modern planning of Le Corbusier – viewed in derogatory terms – with the “genial streets” of the past, Scruton forgets that many of yesteryear’s cities were unhygienic, unsafe, and un- crossable. jadis b). Anthropological deepness Values and norms that people share. Our approach to death, love, suffering is different according to culture: 1) The Commonplace 1.1). Our attitudes towards weather, and most notably rain, are cultural. In dry places such as India or Africa, rain is often greeted with joy, if not euphoria. In the largely temperate Western world, however, rain bears a sad connotation, reflected in children’s rhymes like 38 Cf. John Lloyd, “Keep the people simply happy”, Financial Times, November 6-7, 2004. 39 Cf. Roger Scruton, Culture Counts. Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged (London: Encounter Books, 2007). 15