Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986.
Huyssen comes 'back' to an idea found in Adorno/Horkheimer and in Benjamin, the call for art for art's sake, and he does it from within the context of a discussion of the avantgarde (which he spells as one word presumably in deference to German grammatical rules) and its forceful separation from politics.
A&H contend that art for art's sake is a position of powerlessness.
I've already discussed their position, but as a brief reminder:
“As long as art does not insist on being treated as knowledge, and thus exclude itself from praxis, it is tolerated by social praxis” (25). Essentially, art can embrace exclusion from the totalizing system and proudly claim that it doesn’t have a demonstrable utilitarian value (a concept that is equated with being measured in money) and that its purpose is, quite specifically, to be useless. This alternative attempts to escape the totalizing view, but “the use that is made of the work of art […] is largely that of confirming the very existence of the useless” (128). Such a stance manages to create a space for art, but that space is pre-defined as that which is without meaning or purpose or value. It’s an entirely impotent position.
Huyssen is somewhat in agreement with this stance, but with the kinds of Möbius-shaped caveats that only a 'dialectician' can create. "During the 19th century the increasingly categorical separation of art from reality and the insistence on the autonomy of art, which had once freed art from the fetters of church and state, had worked to push art and artists to the margins of society. In the art for art's sake movement, the break with society―the society of imperialism―had led into a dead end […]" (7). As A&H said before him, and whom he quotes at length, 'art for art's sake' is an attempt at freeing art from institutional controls, either governmental or religious.
However, this move for freedom backfires. Instead of creating a space from which art can comment on the world free from censorship, it creates a space in which art cannot say anything about anything other than itself; if it exists only for its own sake, then, logically, it cannot function as social or political commentary.
However, a different possibility exists that Huyssen doesn't quite state directly, but which is contained within his dialectical reading of the art/life cultural split, which Huyssen sets in parallel with the more commonly perceived high/low culture split. 'High' art becomes that which is separate from 'reality'; it exists 'for its own sake,' as I've already said. The "failure of the avantgarde to reorganize a new life praxis through art and politics resulted in precisely those historical phenomena which make any revival of the avantgarde's project today highly problematic, if not impossible: namely, the false sublations of the art/life dichotomy in fascism with its aesthetiziation of politics, in Western mass culture with its fictionalisation of reality, and in socialist realism with its claim of reality status for its fictions" (8).
In these examples, Huyssen argues, the avantgarde's original mission was "to reorganize a new life praxis," which is to say, to intervene in life and art in order to resist hegemonic institutions, such as government, church, and corporation. Instead, that resistance turned into different kinds of hegemony. Fascism tried to turn the very tools of domination into art-as-beauty, claiming that 'war is beautiful,' for example. Mass culture presents fiction as if it were reality, and thus imposes its version of reality in the minds of the mass audience, which Adorno and Horkheimer describe in detail. Finally, Socialism, in a move very similar to post-colonialism, insists that its fictions must be realistic, and thus blocks from them the transformative possibilities of fantasy, among other things. In all three cases, 'art' is perceived as existing in an inherently different space than 'life,' much as 'high-philosophical' quandaries are dismissed in professional politics as inapplicable to 'real-world' situations.
Two things call this analysis into question, however. First, from a dialectical perspective, the high/low relationship isn't a 'split': "More often than not it [the high/low, art/life relationship] has appeared in the guise of an irreconcilable opposition. […] Yet this opposition […] has proven to be amazingly resilient. Such resilience may lead one to conclude that perhaps neither of the two combatants can do without the other, that their much heralded mutual exclusiveness is really a sign of their secret interdependence" (16). Like many oppositional forces that appear to battle each other, they actually define each other. They are part of the same social continuum. Even if you choose up sides, you're still playing the same game. There is still the very real, very important question as to who has more power in that relationship, though, which leads to the second argument against the idea that art for art's sake is inherently impotent.
Huyssen, following Adorno and Horkheimer, argues that "art's aspirations to autonomy, its uncoupling from church and state, became possible only when literature, painting and music were first organized according to the principles of market economy" (17); therefore "It was the culture industry, not the avantgarde, which succeeded in transforming everyday life in the 20th century" (15). Hidden within that cultural analysis is the (ostensible) fact that art, as implemented by the culture industry in the form of popular music, film, and eventually television, did "reorganize a new life praxis." It simply didn't institute the praxis that the avantgardists wanted. If that analysis is accurate (I'm willing to at least provisionally accept it), then art absolutely can intervene in everyday life, and what we're talking about is strategy, not possibility. So, how did the culture industry manage to intervene where the avantgarde didn't?
I've already mentioned that "according to Fisk, Barthes points out that the readerly text will always be more popular because the writerly text, the avant garde, requires that the reader learn a whole new set of 'givens' in order to get anything out of it. The corollary is that the readerly text [I.e., the culture industry's text] will always be popular because it is the 'givens' that popular readers already know" [new emphasis]. However, that doesn't quite address the idea that the culture industry didn't just maintain the givens, but actively changed them in order to create a consumer society, as opposed to producer society (see Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen's Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness for more historical information on that transformation).
An extremely partisan position would be to claim that industry wants uniformity while the avantgarde wants freedom of choice, and it just so happens that it's easier to engineer a society of near-mindless drones than it is to engineer one of free-thinkers. Therefore, in a head-to-head competition, industry won. But as much as I have little-to-no respect for advertising, marketing, and public-relations as professions, I would never call those jobs easy, exactly. Also, such an argument fails to acknowledge the strong motivations of priviledge and money. Which is to say that industry was building, and now maintains, a power base made of wealth, while the avantgarde cut itself off from such material concerns, in no small part because it detached itself from institutions that had pre-existing power-bases (government through law, and religion through social mores, for example). It's not just a battle of ideas, but a battle of who can shout the loudest, and money will buy you a big megaphone.
The relativist position might be to point out that questioning whose 'givens' won out is an empty gesture, even a fallacious teleology. If the avantgarde had 'won,' we would simply have a different hegemonic order, ruled by a different set of signifiers, and because those 'givens' happen to be our givens, we wouldn't know the difference, much like characters in time-travel stories can't tell when history has been 'changed.' But that kind of 'everything is really the same as it ever could be' argument ignores the very real injustices that occur within our present social order. Unless we abandon a moral position entirely, we must occasionally admit that some cultural orders are more humane than others. The relativistic position also has to ignore the very real social change that has happened, and consistently happens, throughout known history. No culture has maintained total social stasis without eventually bumping into some kind of revolution. Like an Earthquake, the longer you put off that revolution, the bigger it is. The relativist position can, ironically, paint the world as 'uniformly different,' and thus eliminate the very idea of difference.
To get back to Huyssen, his original, highly dialectical, answer to this question would probably be that not only are these forces interdependent, but the style of their existence dictates which one is the more powerful tool through which to institute large-scale social change. The avantgarde occupies a small, seemingly weak position because that is how it defines itself, as an oppositional force, as a specifically anti-authoritarian force. In fact, that very position is what gives it the power that it has. If it were to become an authoritarian force, its entire ideology would become inconsistent, like 'The Party' in Nineteen Eighty-Four referring to its actions as 'revolutionary' thirty years after the revolution ended. This is not an impossible outcome, but it's a lot less likely. Similarly, the mainstream, the readerly text, and the culture industry, all gain their strength from alligning themselves with 'that which we already know to be true,' and, in a metaphorical sense, ride that current to get where they're going.
If this reasoning is at all an accurate portrayal of the world as it exists, then the most powerful source of revolutionary thought lies in subversion, in using the tools of the culture industry against itself, in hiding anti-authoritarian content in the products of that industry, in using it as a mere delivery mechanism. Only by assuming the role of the powerful side of the dialectic can we have its power.
But to execute that strategy, we would have to be the producers, and not the consumers, and the vast majority of us are consumers. That mistake, assuming we're in the writer's position, is as common as history students studying the Medieval period and assuming that they live in parallel with the nobility, and not the commoners. As a consumer, an audience member, my power lies in reinterpretation, in taking advantage of the excess, in Fisk's terms, or 'deliberately mis-reading,' in Diana Rilke's terms.
To bring this home to comics and the general culture of sci-fi/fantasy, the two positions come together in fan fiction, and in the so-permeable-it-might-as-well-not-exist barrier between 'readers' and 'artists.' The difference between the fan fiction writer and/or the fan-turned-creator, as I’m using those ad hoc categories, is that the latter works for the official institution of publication or production. As such his or her work is legally, and also socially, sanctioned. It becomes 'canon' in the universe of whatever characters or properties are in question. In fact, that is the word, with all its religious implications, that fans and creators use for stories that 'officially' or 'really' happen. In the 1950s and 60s, DC referred to a whole line of its stories as 'imaginary,' as if the others weren't (something that Alan Moore has a little fun with in his introduction to "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" the last 'official' Silver-Age Superman comic book).
The fan fiction writer's work differs stylistically; it can include content that the official institution would never approve of, for example the pornography that dominates so-called 'slash' fiction (which gets its name from stories written in the late 60s about Captain James T. Kirk and Commander Spock as lovers. The stories were called "Kirk/Spock," hence the 'slash'). By the same token, though, analogue characters, 'not quite Superman' (Moore's Supreme) or 'nearly James Bond' (Ellis' Agent John Stone in Planetary) are both officially sanctioned by a publisher and function like fan fic, reinterpreting a pre-existing character by its very existence. Analogues are a middle-ground between fan-fic and official narrative. Again, though, the fluidity of movement between fans and writers means that anyone hired to write Batman, or for that matter a new Star Trek show, is essentially a writer of fan-fic.
But the question remains: if we want to deconstruct the very economic basis of the hegemony we happen to live under, how can we possibly hope to do so by taking part in that economy? In the film The Corporation, Michael Moore claims that the profit motive is the loop-hole in the middle of corporate America. 'They will sell you the rope to hang them with' (paraphrase from memory). But if the only way to deliver your ideological 'payload' is through pre-existing economic channels, then we're back to square one, and an interdependant relationship that we can neither deconstruct nor even merely invert.
Posted by orion at July 31, 2006 4:58 PM