The same factors produced somewhat similar results as commercially viable sound recordings came on the scene from the late 1890s. Edison’s gramophone became commercially available in the 1880s, like moving pictures appealing at first more for its novelty than for any particular content, and often to be found in the same kinds of places. In Europe the most important early pioneers of recorded music were the Pathé brothers who also played a role in the history of cinema; fascinated by their first encounter with one of Edison’s machines they bought one to exhibit at fairs and in the bistro that was their original business, before beginning to make models of their own. From this they moved on to selling recorded cylinders and later discs; soon they were offering a catalogue that ranged from popular performers such as Bruant (modern remakes of his recorded performances can still be heard and bought) to eminent high cultural figures likely to have a wide appeal, including Caruso. From early on, therefore, classical music was closely associated with its popular counterpart in regard to efforts to add distant audiences to local ones through recordings; because the economic logic was the same for both, the distinction between the levels lost some of its prior relevance. In order for reproduction to become part of the new economy of culture the technical problems of how to reproduce sound had first to be solved, but one of the things that made facing up to them worthwhile was that a body of performers existed who could be expected to appeal to diverse audiences in widely separated places. This in turn rested on the expansion of musical culture we considered earlier, consisting in the establishment of stable orchestras, large-scale public concerts, and the aid given to traveling virtuosos by impresarios and agents. It was the reputations performers were able to acquire through these networks of communication that made investment in making their recordings available by entrepreneurs such as the Pathé brothers worthwhile. As these networks continued to develop, and as new technical innovations and improvements (radio, later long-playing records) came on the scene, the multiplication of listening opportunities would come to be at the very center of the relations between music and its audience. Already in the period between the wars there were composers (Maurice Ravel chief among them) and conductors (notably Alfred Cortot and Pierre Monteux) who saw records as an important element in the future of serious music and worked to produce a repertoire that would make it widely available.
As with cinema so in music the barrier between cultural levels was at once weakened and strengthened by these developments. The Pathé brothers included both popular and art music in their catalogue, but the audiences for the two were never identical (to be sure they were and have remained overlapping), and the divisions between them were heightened by the simultaneous expansion of both. Like culturally ambitious film, art music spawned its own organizations and periodicals, but with the difference that perception and commentary became more individualized and fragmented than with movie-going, because recordings could be played in private, and different versions of the same work compared. This possibility spurred the appearance of record collectors for serious music even before World War I, a phenomenon that spread to jazz as it acquired a large following during the 1920s. The letters columns of specialized periodicals created spaces where people with a strong interest in some kind of music, but no official credentials for speaking about it, could participate in written exchanges about styles, pieces, and performers, producing an active public discourse on music. The individuation of musical taste that began with the changing behavior of audiences from around 1800 now acquired new dimensions, but in a situation that replaced the relatively rare and therefore particularly intense kind of encounters called up by Wackenröder with ones that could be more quotidian and diffused, based on the larger and more stable public presence of both classical and popular forms from the last decades of the century. Ludovic Tournès highlights the “polycentricity” of these reactions, and the “multiplicity of norms of appreciation” that emerged out of them, features that gave a not always recognized quality of flexibility and independent choice to the cultural world brought to life by the spread of modern means of communication. Far from an undifferentiated mass, the expanding audience for cultural products included individuals and groups able to seize on new means for dialogue with cultural producers and with each other, bringing to light a variety of different ways to respond and relate to cultural objects and messages, and on a smaller scale foreshadowing similar phenomena that would emerge later on, in the Internet.38
To be sure, these anticipations of later developments were still strictly limited. As with separate gender spheres and moral puritanism, the more rigid separation between cultural levels long retained much force; in all three cases the 1960s brought far deeper disruptions than seemed possible earlier. But the motion toward dissolving these rigidities, and with them many of the far older oppositions on which they were based, had clearly begun, fostered by the continuing extension and deepening of the same networks that had earlier served to render traditional distinctions more strict. Even the special role that young people and cultural forms intended especially for them would play in the later period was clearly adumbrated earlier. In 1908 the first French comic-strip paper, L’Épatant began publication (originally as a supplement to the Petit Journal); one of its readers would be a young Jean-Paul Sartre (born in 1905), much to the dismay of his staid grandfather. Thumbing its nose at classical culture and the values conveyed by formal education, the paper (in Jean-Yves Mollier’s words) “appealed to young people to constitute themselves as a distinct category, with its own codes and tastes, taking pleasure in seeing fictional characters subvert the rules of the social game.” The paper’s distance from traditional culture helped make way for an association between its subversive spirit and that of the bands of young “Apaches” whose criminal but colorful behavior attracted much attention in the press at the time; the resulting sense of connection between popular cultural forms and alternatives to existing social life would be one that certain of the paper’s young middle-class readers would carry with them later.39
The two phases of widening and then narrowing of the distance between elite and popular culture were in part chronologically separate, but partly overlapping too, since “high” culture took on the more organized forms (permanent professional symphony orchestras and agents, new-style picture dealers) that made its separate existence seem so firmly established just in the years when less exalted kinds of cultural expression were beginning to acquire this new presence and energy. One result of the growth of popular literature, the mass press, and cinema was greatly to enlarge the body of people employed in various cultural occupations. David Blackbourn reports that by early in the twentieth century as many as 100,000 Germans “supported themselves from writing, music, the theater, and related activities, not including white collar occupations like box-office staff.” Overall, he notes, the result of these changes was a general blurring of “the formal distinctions between various kinds of culture.”40
The confusion contributed to making the decades just before and after World War I a moment of especially sharp conflict over how to respond to newly prominent means of popular expression and what they portended. The acrimony was heightened in Germany by the enactment of the so-called Heinze Law in 1900. Sponsored by Catholics and political rightists, the bill restricted the distribution not just of “obscene” pictures, texts, or theater productions, but of anything deemed “capable of giving offense through gross injury of feelings of shame or morality.” Threatening those convicted with imprisonment, the legislation produced widespread protests and a confusing set of alliances. Some anti-modernist but secular Bildungsbürger joined with Catholics to support controls over expression in the name of morality, while many social democrats, whose fears about the power of “capitalist trash” to corrupt workers drew them closer to conservatives than to liberals, were moved by opposition to censorship to join with the latter in the “Goethe League” founded to protest and combat the Law. The debates revealed that the powers attribut
ed to the new forms of expression and communication led people of all stripes to project either intense fears or outsize hopes onto them. On the one side were predictions of the end of civilization, made by people whose image of popular culture shared much with those who saw it as robbing the working-class of its revolutionary vocation. On the other were what today can only seem exaggerated expectations that print and the movies (later radio) could serve to diffuse education and traditional culture among those untouched by it hitherto, alongside utopian visions of the same media as tools for the production of revolutionary consciousness (views worked out in various ways by such figures as Berthold Brecht and Walter Benjamin). Until the outbreak of World War II and even beyond similar fears and hopes were expressed in France, some of them entering for a time into state policies, although (except during the Occupation) restriction and censorship never reached the same level as in Germany.41
Overall, there is much reason to agree with a recent German historian that the heightened presence and profile of popular culture brought forth an exaggerated sense of its potency on all sides, creating false expectations that large-scale media could be used to direct popular opinion, taste, or behavior along one or another desired or feared track. In the years between the Wars these views contributed to the theories about the power of the “culture industry” to defuse working-class radicalism developed by members of the Frankfurt School, and later to opposite visions of popular culture as a vehicle of radical liberation, given expression in a vocabulary developed by post-structuralists. What both sorts of theorists failed to recognize was precisely the “polycentricity” and multiplicity of reactions evident in regard to both music and film by the 1920s, and that recalls the earlier impossibility of directing or knowing in advance what uses readers would make of newly available printed materials.42 No doubt there were and remain many passive consumers of what various media bring to them, but they occupy one place on a broad spectrum of responses. Others navigate the world of popular culture in ways closer to the paths Michel de Certeau portrayed people taking as they make their way through cities, finding unpredictable routes, turning the goods offered to new uses, injecting their own meanings into the scenes and images they find around them. The more the world of popular culture expands the less we know what directions it will take or what ways people will find to make some novel use of its contents.43
14 Bourgeois life and the avant-garde
Fluidity, energy, and the promise of transformation
The opposition between cultural innovation and the bourgeoisie has become so ingrained in accounts of modernity and its history that the argument of this chapter may well surprise some readers. It is that beneath all the declarations of mutual hostility between artists and writers on the one hand and bourgeois life on the other, there lay a series of deep and revealing interconnections, and that the substance of these ties provided much of the ground on which the modernist avant-garde would mount its challenges to established forms of life and culture in the years before and just after World War I. The energies on which vanguard movements and figures sought to draw were ones generated by society at large, particularly in the selfsame commercial spheres from which aesthetic rebels sometimes felt most distant, and the pattern by which successive innovations in culture rose up to push aside their predecessors was intricately interwoven with what Joseph Schumpeter called the “creative destruction” that characterized typical bourgeois activities.
Although he did not live to encounter the figures and movements who constituted the avant-garde in the fin-de-siècle, Marx was well aware of these connections. In The Communist Manifesto he and Engels credited the bourgeoisie with revealing that humanity possessed previously unrecognized powers. “The bourgeoisie has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.” The economy was the sphere in which these forces were rooted, but the impact of their unleashing was felt in every corner of life, most notably in the realm of consciousness and culture. In order to survive and carry on in the world it was creating, the bourgeoisie had constantly to be “revolutionizing the means of production”; these repeated upheavals deprived things as they were of the stability that hitherto veiled the human capacity to alter them, revealing the true nature of social relations and their future. “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face, with sober senses, his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.”1 The notion that bourgeois activity bore this power to uncover hitherto unrecognized truths underlay Marx’s belief that his theory of revolutionary social transformation was “scientific,” that is, based on actual observation of the developing conditions of modern life, in contrast to the “utopian” socialisms merely dreamt up by thinkers in the past.
Marx’s pronouncement has often been noticed, but two things about it have not. One is that he was by no means the first person to regard radical fluidity as a defining quality of modern life, and that some of his predecessors were not moved to recognize it by any commitment to revolutionary change; we will look at some of them in a moment. The other is that by the end of the nineteenth century appeals to such fluidity were seldom voiced in Marx’s realm of socialist activism, where the development of large-scale organizations fostered a vision of social transformation predicated on stable structures rather than on their dissolution (on this Lenin and Bernstein agreed); they had migrated to the modernist avant-garde, where finding ways to release deep and often hidden human powers to remake consciousness and through it life itself had become a central goal. Some of the figures who pursued this aim were leftists and revolutionaries, Louis Aragon for instance, but others such as Marcel Duchamp were not. One clear thread tied this avant-garde project to Marx’s formulation regardless of politics, however, namely that it shared his recognition that the bourgeois life it aimed to overcome was itself a major source of the energies it sought to employ against it. What defined the transformed state of existence that vanguard practices hoped to usher in was precisely the fluidity to which Marx appealed, and this fluidity arose at the very heart of bourgeois modernity, in the kinds of relations to everyday objects and experiences that modern networks of consumption and communication fostered.
Of Marx’s predecessors in recognizing unremitting fluidity as an essential feature of bürgerliche Gesellschaft the most immediate was Hegel, who identified civil society (in his Philosophy of Right) with “flux, danger, and destruction.” These qualities he associated with the natural linkage between commerce and the ever-restless sea, which as “the greatest means of communication … creates commercial connections between various countries,” bringing cultural ties too.2 Still earlier the eighteenth-century Scottish writer Adam Ferguson, in his Essay on the History of Civil Society, cited the activities of people in countries with developed commercial relations as testimony to the human capacity for repeated change and innovation. Arguing against Rousseau that human beings had no original “natural” state, and that whatever mode of existence they created for themselves was natural to them, he attributed to humanity in general (in his language “man”) a creative power comparable to that of artists: “He is in some measure the artificer of his own frame, as well as of his fortune, and is destined, from the first age of his being, to invent and contrive.”3 Human creativity was of a particularly restless kind, because human satisfactions were passing and momentary, giving rise to ever-new desires: “the object of sanguine expectation, when obtained, no longer continues to occupy the mind: A new passion succeeds, and the imagination, as before, is intent on a distant felicity.” Civil society thus revealed human beings to be creatures who found pleasure more in activity than in its
products, leading them ever onward to new endeavors. The last point in particular was one Ferguson shared with his friend Adam Smith, who noted that people were moved to work and engage in activities that improved both social life and culture by the desire to acquire objects and positions whose presence in other people’s lives they saw as a means of increasing happiness. Experience shows that having such things – houses, furniture, clothing, social status – seldom succeeds in making us content, but we continue to desire them all the same, and to expend our energies on attempts to come by them. “It is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind … which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts.”4
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