AMERICAN TELEVISION CHAPTER V THE FIRST CRITICAL MASS CULTURE Bibliography Armand and Michèle Mattelard, History of communication theories , 1995, F Barbier C. Lavenir Bertho, F. Barbier, Media History . A Colin
When at the beginning of the twentieth century is a culture of popular entertainment (movies music hall radio), the elites do not realize they only partially control the content. The latter is developed by close of business environment shows and advertising professionals. Men of letters feel that the new conditions of reproduction and alter works of art and threaten the humanist culture. Some are alarmed by the appearance of what they call the "masses" and shape the terms of mass culture and mass media. The criticism comes from groups occupying different positions in society. We take turns
Concern "Men of Letters" and the Marxist point of view that develops the concept of alienation.
I. Concern "men of letters"
The analysis of new mass media by the men of letters written in 1930-40 must be understood according to their position and culture of scholars steeped in the academic culture of the time.
a. The crowd of criminal mass
The concept of crowd / mass is originally developed by an Italian jurist, Scipio Shigella, which publishes The crowd criminal in 1891 in Turin. It is copied / translated by Gustave Le Bon (French psychopathology). He wrote in Group Psychology , (1895, reissued 1939, p. 50):
"The crowds can not think in pictures, not away from them as images. Only the latter terrify or seduce them and become motives of action "and" Nothing strikes the popular imagination more than a play. The whole room feels at the same time the same emotions. "
Their theory is that crowds are particularly suggestible and easily influenced. It will have some success in politics in the thirties. At the beginning of the century Sigmund Freud in Psychology masses , 1921, takes up the question. He develops the idea that working together in a crowd, men are more likely to fall prey to their impulses and slaves of tumultuous passions and uncontrolled. For many commentators of the 1930s the attitude of the crowds against Mussolini and Hitler seems to agree with these authors.
b. Threats to cultural elites: Jose Ortega Y Gasset
The conservative men of letters are also in new media a threat to traditional culture, threatened by "the barbarians" from the inside greedy welfare, supported by State and childhood tastes. Jose Ortega Y Gasset think as "high culture" will be engulfed in the mass market. He wrote in The Revolt of the Masses , published in 1930:
« Partout l’homme-masse a surgi (…) un type d’homme hâtivement bâti, monté sur quelques pauvres abstractions et qui pour cela se retrouve identique d’un bout à l’autre de l’Europe। (…) Cet homme-masse , c’est l’homme vidé au préalable de sa propre histoire, sans entrailles de passé, et qui, par cela même, est docile à toutes les disciplines dites « internationales ». (…) Il lui manque un «dedans », une intimité inexorablement, inaliénablement sienne, un moi irrévocable. Il est donc toujours en disponibilité pour feindre qu’il est ceci ou cela. Il n’a que des appétits And it does assume the rights and he does not believe bonds. "
c. Georges Duhamel: resistance humanist
qualified physician and academician, Georges Duhamel is representative of humanist thought of the 1930 classic. The website of the French Academy is his book, scenes of future life in context:
"... a modern humanism marked by a denunciation of the excesses of mechanical civilization whose two outstanding titles are Possession of the world (1919), and scenes of future life (1930). "
This humanism permeates the novels mistress Duhamel Chronicle Pasquier. Duhamel has a culture of human rights center. He is a columnist for Candide in 1931, then to Figaro in 1935, and implement a time for reconciliation with Germany. But he denounced in 1939 pacifism and the Munich agreement and under the occupation, his work is prohibited. It therefore falls to the National Committee of Writers, but the liberation was soon to resign in 1946, disapproving the excesses of the purge. Academician, he died in 1966.
Duhamel considers that only makes the book thinking, back, the conference singular reader and text. He thinks he is above the image that seduces, fascinates and abolishes the critical sense. There is little case of the film because he has requested effort.
"Never," he writes, met no invention, from its dawn, more general and more fervent. The theater is still in its infancy, I know, but the world made him credit. The cinema has from its start, fired the imagination, gathered enormous capital, gained the cooperation of scientists and crowds, raises, employee, Spent countless talents, varied, surprising. It already has its martyrology. It consumes a staggering amount of energy, courage and invention. All this for a tiny reward. I give the entire film library in the world, including what tradespeople pompously call their "classic" for a Molière play, for a Rembrandt painting, for a Bach fugue.
All works that have held some place in my life, all works of art whose knowledge has made me a man, initially represented a conquest. I had to fight high tackle after a fervent passion. There is no reason, until further order to conquer the film. She did not submit our mind and heart to no test. It tells us immediately what she knows. It is no mystery, no detours, no depths, without reservations. It strives to meet us and always gives us a painful sense of dissatisfaction. By nature, it is movement, but it leaves us immobile, heavy, like paralysis.
Beethoven, Wagner, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Giorgione, Vinci - I quote pell-mell, I called six, there are a hundred - that's really art. To understand the work of these great men, to express, smell the juice, I did, I always make efforts to raise me above myself, who are among the most joyous victories of my life. The film entertained me sometimes, even moved, he never asked me to challenge myself. This is not an art, not art. "Georges Duhamel
scenes of future life (Mercure de France)
d. Walter Benjamin, Reflections on "mechanization."
Walter Benjamin wrote The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in 1933 will be interested, too, the particular characteristics of new media and not just à leurs contenus.
C’est un intellectuel allemand anti-fasciste réfugié à Paris dans les années 1930. Il s'installe à Paris où l'Institut de Recherche Sociale l'accueille comme membre permanent en lui assurant la publication, dans la Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung de ses textes les plus importants. En 1939, il tente sans succès d'émigrer à Londres. l’année suivante Horkheimer lui procure un visa d'émigration aux U.S.A. mais l'occupation de la France ne lui laisse plus que la frontière espagnole comme porte de sortie. Tracassé à la frontière, il se suicide de crainte de se voir livré à la Gestapo.
Il a été proche de Bertold Brecht and sociologists of the Frankfurt School and its text The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction written in 1933 is a kind of Marxist response to a search to find another angle of analysis new media.
He explains that works of art at the time they were "unique" enjoyed an "aura", taking the sacred quality. Reproduced in thousands of copies, films and discs have lost this "aura" for several reasons.
First reproduction destroys the "here and now of the work:
"In even the most sophisticated reproduction of a work of art, a factor is still missing: the here and now, its unique existence at the place where it is located. On this unique existence, exclusively, practiced in its history. We mean all the changes it may undergo in its physical structure, the constantly changing property by which it could pass. The trace of the first can not be detected by chemical analysis it is impossible to operate on reproduction, while the latter are the subject of a tradition that the recovery should take its starting point at the place where the original "
Now this unique existence was the guarantor of its authenticity:
" The here and now of the original format the content of the concept of authenticity, and the latter is based on the representation a tradition that was handed down today as the object remained the same to himself. The components of the authenticity refuse any breeding, not just the mechanical reproduction. The original, next to the manual reproduction, which was easily the product appear to be false, preserved all its authority, yet this location changes next of Mechanical Reproduction. "
Moreover, the mass reproduction undermines the" tradition ":
" The technique of reproduction - this could be the general formula - the thing shown off in the field of tradition. By multiplying its reproduction, it puts in place its unique existence and its existence in series, allowing the reproduction of offer in any situation to the viewer or listener, it will update the thing reproduced. These two cases lead to a mighty upheaval of the thing passed, disruption of the tradition that is just the reverse of the current crisis and renewal of mankind. These two cases are closely connected with the contemporary mass movements ... "
It leads to" massive liquidation of cultural heritage:
"Their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, even considered in its most positive feature, is inconceivable without this function destructively catharctique: liquidation value of traditional cultural heritage. This phenomenon is particularly visible in the larger historical films. It integrates its field ever new areas. And if Abel Gance in 1927, exclaimed with enthusiasm: Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will Film ... All legends, all mythologies and all myths, all founders of religions and all religions themselves ... awaiting resurrection light, and the heroes are scrambling to come to our doors, he unwittingly invites a broad liquidation. "
The mass audience is in itself a problem:
" The mass is the matrix which, at present, the attitude engendered "new vis-à-vis the work of art. The quantity is transformed into quality: the much larger masses of participants produced a transformed mode of participation. The fact that this mode appears first form decried must not mislead, and yet he did not fail to attack with passion in this superficial aspect of the problem. "He cites
Georges Duhamel, who said he has reason to despise the film but thought that it must go further in the analysis:
" Among these, Duhamel has expressed as The most radical. The main complaint is that the film is the mode of participation it generates among the masses. Duhamel sees in the film entertainment islets, a pastime of illiterate, miserable creatures, bewildered by their work and their concerns ..., a show that requires no effort, which requires no further action in ... ideas, arouses in hearts no light excites no hope, if not that, silly one day be "star" in Los Angeles
"We see continued Benjamin, c ' is basically the same old complaint that the masses seek only to amuse themselves, while art requires contemplation. It is a commonplace. Remains whether it is able to solve the problem. Whoever ponders the artwork plunges: it enters as the Chinese painter who disappeared in the flag painted on the bottom of its landscape. For cons, the mass, by its very distracting, collects the work of art within it, she sends her lifestyle, she embraces the waves. "
II. The Marxist perspective and alienation
By the 1930s, Germany, theorists are reassessing the concept of alienation Marx developed in light of the development of cinema and radio.
a. - Bertold Brecht rubs the cinema for the film alleging Opera 4 under.
Producer B. Brecht wants to change his film 'The Opera of 4 as' to' take account of public taste. " In its response it is assumed that the film is only apparently different from the old representation of the world imposed by the bourgeoisie. Classical culture seems to go down with the modern media but what replaces it has the same relations of domination.
"Trying to defend" our rights "in a real and very specific case, we took the word a precise bourgeois ideology and we have to find fault with the practice of courts. We conducted a trial in us noisily prevailing representations that are not ours, but we were to assume they were those of the courts. It is losing the trial that we found in these courts representations of a new type that does not conflict with bourgeois practice in general. They are in contradiction with the old shows (those, precisely, all of which constitutes the great classical bourgeois ideology). Would they then abandoned all their representations of the ancient species? They have abandoned the practice level, not at the level of ideology. They put their ideology into practice off, while retaining the "otherwise". And what is funny is they (rightly them!) Could no longer exercise their practice, or whether they abandon their ideology, or whether realization. What
dark with them, this species is small bourgeois whose descendant this ideological construct called "man".
Brecht wrote elsewhere:
".... Suppose that the metaphysical comments about the film that our newspapers publish in the few pages that are not intended to be filled with ads, add physics, c ' is to say a vision of the mechanisms themselves, why and how the film (it is not possible, in fact, that film is only the product of the diligence of a few financiers willing philanthropic to publicize the latest discoveries in technology and the finest minds of poets), so that we pass on this "backwards" so widely spread on the front that is illuminated this "front" so anxiously concealed rear, and the film presents as a firm (in poor condition) that is stuffing pump amorphous audience, unimaginable, enormous, to serve him regularly, immutably, his unvarying diet of distractions, this not allow us more than the old methods of metaphysics than eliminating absolute obstacle to any progress called "public taste". Public taste, this complicated thing that costs and relates to both, is impeding progress. There is no doubt that the influence of buyers on the shaping of the product is growing and it has consequences reactionary. It therefore becomes necessary to fight for our progressive influence that this film represents buyers, these organizers provincial market. In looking more closely, these people allow themselves to exercise a function that should return to the press and our metaphysical dramas of choosing what is good for the consumer. Must So fight them, because they are reactionary, and then our metaphysicians have no trouble finding them: they are in the back room of their leaves in the pages of ads. The public taste for them is the thing that costs and relates the true expression of actual needs of the masses films. It therefore establishes empirically, and these people with sharp instincts, which are materially dependent of the correctness of their analysis, act exactly as if the roots of taste were buried in the social and economic picture of the masses, as if the buyers really bought something, as if the item purchased was determined by the location of the buyer, so that taste as if it could be altered by being aesthetic or by prémâchage juicy and noisy so successful that our Kerre Diebold and others [1], but at best a real and profound change of the situation "
b. Adorno and Horkheimer: the terror in front of America
Forced to leave Frankfurt two German intellectuals are hosted in the U.S. where they will do research university. Theodor Adorno refuses to cooperate in the work of Columbia's Office of Radio Research on receipt of the music on the radio because he disapproves of the presuppositions. It publishes The cultural industry (1951). His lyrics express a genuine awe at the cultural industry in the USA.
"Nowadays when the consciousness of leaders begins to coincide with trends in wider society, the tension between culture and kitsch is disappearing. Culture continues to lead his opponent to follow him she despises, she supports it. By administering the whole of humanity, it operates at the same time the rupture between humanity and culture. Even the coarseness the stupidity and narrowness imposed objectively oppressed are handled with subjective sovereignty in humor. Nothing could more accurately define this state in both full and antagonist that incorporation of barbarism. Yet in doing the will of the manipulators can invoke the universal will. Their mass society has not only produced junk for customers, she produced the customers themselves. They were hungry for cinema, radio and magazine, some dissatisfaction has ever left them in the order that they take without giving in return what it promises, it has continued to burn for the jailer to remember them and finally offers his left hand to the hungry stones on which the right hand refuses bread. Without the slightest resistance, the citizens of a certain age - who should have known something else - falling from a quarter century in the arms of the entertainment industry who knows so well capitalize on hungry hearts. "
Conclusion These different views show how the intellectuals of European descent approach the issue of mass culture. United States and in Great Britain from different perspectives s’expriment cependant. On considère d’une part que les medias de masse apportent aux consommateur des plaisirs et des gratifications qui les distraient des difficultés du quotidien et atténuent les tensions induites par la vie urbaine et la vie moderne. Le loisir lié aux industries de la culture est considéré comme l’envers nécessaire de la recherche de la productivité au travail. La sociologie expérimentale et les travaux des sociologues appartenant à « l’école de Chicago » conduisent par ailleurs à s’intéresser de façon empirique à l’audience et à la façon dont le discours porté par les mass médias (information ou fiction) est absorbé et transformé par les groupes sociaux.
Les défenseurs des medias de masse développent les arguments suivants:
1. William Ogburn dans un livre intitulé Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature adopte une approche qui n'est pas centrée
sur les relations de la culture de masse avec la « culture cultivée ». Il identifie des « besoins » qu'il juge fondamentaux pour les êtres humains vivant dans les grandes villes modernes tels que gagner l’estime de soi, éprouver des formes de peur et les surmonter. Il pense que ces affects et ces pulsions sont réprimés dans le monde moderne et qu'ils ne trouvent à s'exprimer by games or drama of the mass media.
2. The English sociologist Denis Hardy believes that cinema is a means to broaden the experience of each, he can share emotions, it forms a bridge between peoples.
3. The Scrutiny Review and popular education movement Angalis Worker's Education Association Racing launch studies that should replace the value judgments.
