Once upon a time there were the mass media, and they were wicked, of course, and there was a guilty party. Then there were the virtuous voices that accused the criminals. And Art (ah, what luck!) offered alternatives, for those who were not prisoners of the mass media. Well, it’s all over. We have to start again from the beginning, asking one another what’s going on.
1983
Culture as Show Business
The years 1979 and 1980 were a time when, as some ripened novelties were already being theorized, the first puzzled questions were beginning to be asked about other novelties even newer, forgive the expression. The riper novelties concerned an evident shift in the concept of spectacle: a phenomenon of the ’70’s. Slowly, the crowds, and not only the young, had emerged from the confinement of the theaters. First there was streetcorner theater, with its Brechtian flavor, and then its younger sibling, the street fair, and then happenings, then, the celebrations: theater as party, and parties as theater. . . .
All subjects on which, as I was saying, a vast theoretical literature now exists; and theoretical literature, as is well known, either kills or at least makes “respectable” spontaneous developments— which are then no longer spontaneous. Now that festivities have come under municipal management, involving all the less marginal strata of an entire city (and thus entertainment has slipped through the fingers of those who, in fact, were improvising at the margin), we will not be so snobbish as to say they have lost their flavor, but they have unquestionably become a “genre,” like the detective novel, the classical tragedy, the symphony, or square dancing. And in the face of all these new aesthetics, sociologies, and semiotics of the festa, there is nothing further to be said.
The upsetting innovation, on the other hand, came about with the appearance of something that has been labeled, with or without innuendo, “culture as show business.”
The wording is ambiguous—as if theater and festival, or the village band playing in the square, were not culture. But despite decades and decades of cultural anthropology (which has taught us that even defecatory positions are part of a community’s material culture), we still tend to speak of culture only with reference to “high” culture (literature, philosophy, classical music, gallery art, and stage theater), so the phrase “culture as show business” is meant to denote something quite specific—and to denote it in the light of an ideology (however unspecific) of culture with a capital C. In other words, the premise is that show business is amusement, faintly culpable, whereas a lecture, a Beethoven symphony, a philosophical discussion are boring experiences (and therefore “serious”). The son who gets a bad grade at school is strictly forbidden by his parent to go to a rock concert, but may attend a cultural event (which, on the contrary, will supposedly be good for him).
Another characteristic of the “serious” cultural event is that the audience must not participate. It sits and listens, or watches; in this sense a spectacle (or what was once a spectacle in the “bad” sense) can become “serious” when the public takes no active part but simply attends passively. So it is possible that the audience of Greek comedy watched while spitting out fruit pits and taunting the actors; but today, in a dutifully archeologized amphitheater, the same comedy is more culture than entertainment, and people keep quiet (and, it is hoped, are bored).
Now in the last year some disturbing events have taken place.
Cultural centers, which for years have been organizing debates, lectures, round tables, found themselves faced by a third phase. The first phase was the normal procedure up until ’68: Someone spoke, the audience, in reasonable numbers, listened, with a few polite questions at the end, and everybody was back home in the space of two hours. The second phase was ’68: Somebody tried to speak, an unruly audience contested his right to take the floor in an authoritarian manner, somebody else in the audience spoke in his place (just as authoritarian, but we realized that only gradually), in the end some sort of motion was made and carried, then everybody home. The third phase, on the other hand, proceeds like this: Somebody speaks, the huge audience is unbelievably crammed in, seated on the floor, packed into the adjacent rooms, sometimes even on the front steps; they allow the speaker to go on for an hour, for two, three hours, they participate in the debate for another two hours, and they never want to go home.
The third phase can be dismissed in a very highbrow, academic fashion. Bored by politics, the new (but also the old) generation now wants to hear “the truth”; High Culture, in fact, returns in triumph. But even the most rigid academic must feel a certain malaise, because these new masses (and I believe we can call them “masses,” even if they are not the same masses that attend sports events or rock concerts) go to cultural events, listen, and with alert attention, speak up, with observations ranging from the acute and learned insight to the howl of the soul, but they behave as if they were at a show. They don’t spit out apricot pits or strip naked, but clearly they come partly for the collective occasion, or in other words (to use an expression somewhat overworked, but worth recycling, I believe, for these experiences), to be together.
I could cite countless examples (ranging from open-air symphony concerts to debates on epistemology—all occasions where you no longer see the old, familiar crowd), but the one that most struck me (also because I was involved) was the series of lectures or encounters with philosophers organized by the municipal library of Cattolica. People have talked about it a great deal. It is surprising that a small city of a few thousand inhabitants should organize, in the off season, evenings devoted to philosophy (an ancient ghost, about to be eliminated even from upper school curricula). There was further amazement when it turned out that as many as a thousand people came to some of these meetings.
And it was still more amazing to learn that the meetings lasted up to four hours, and that the questions came not only from those who already knew everything and wanted to conduct a learned argument with the speaker but also from those who asked the philosopher his thoughts about drugs, love, death, happiness—to such a degree that some speakers had to ward off the questions and remind the questioners that a philosopher is not an oracle and mustn’t be too charismatized (who would ever have said this ten years ago?). But the amazement is bound to increase when certain quantitative and geographical calculations are made. I am speaking of my own experience. Obviously Cattolica by itself didn’t suffice to supply so many “clients.” And, in fact, many came from out of town, from Romagna, the Marches, even farther away.
I realized that many came from Bologna, the city where I teach three days a week. Why should anyone come from Bologna to Cattolica to hear me talk for less than forty-five minutes, when they can come as much as they like to the University during the year, where admission is free (whereas a trip from Bologna to Cattolica, what with gas, tolls, dinner in a restaurant, comes to more than a theater ticket)? The answer is simple: They didn’t come to hear me. They came to experience the event: to hear also the others, to take part in a collective happening.
A show? I would feel no hesitation or embarrassment or bitterness in saying yes. There have been many historical periods in which a philosophical or legal debate was also a show: In
Paris, in the Middle Ages, people went to follow the discussions of the quaestiones quodlibetales, not only to hear what the philosopher had to say, but to witness a competition, a debate, an agonistic happening. And don’t tell me that the Athenians packed their amphitheaters to hear a tragic trilogy plus a satyr play just in order to remain quietly seated to the end. They went to experience an event, where the presence of the others also counted, and the food and drink booths, and the ritual that was part of the general character of a “cultural” festival—as people went to Lincoln Center to see Einstein on the Beach, whose action lasts just over five hours and which was conceived in such a way that the audience could stand up, go out, have something to drink and argue a bit, then come back in, then go out again. Entering and leaving is not obligatory.
I presume people who go to the stadiums
