As I have already suggested, if Kitsch were nothing more than a series of messages emitted by the culture industry to satisfy certain demands without palming them off as art, there would be no dialectic relationship between Kitsch and the avantgarde. According to some, to consider mass culture a surrogate for art is a misunderstanding that circumvents the real question. And, indeed, if we considered mass communication to be the intense circulation of a network of messages that contemporary society needs for a complex number of reasons, one of which is the satisfaction of a certain taste, then we would no longer find any relationship—any scandalous contradiction between art and a news broadcast, a TV commercial, a road sign, or an interview with the President.9
This sort of misunderstanding is common among those who decide to elaborate an «aesthetics» of television without bothering to distinguish between television as a generic medium of information, a service, and television as a specific medium of communication with artistic pretensions. What would be the point of debating whether the effect produced by a road sign, whose purpose is to caution motorists, or by a commercial, which aims at the diffusion of a particular product, is in good or bad taste? This is not what is at issue in either case. In the case of the road sign, the issue is civic and pedagogical; psychological pressure is used in order to achieve an end approved by an entire society, for a situation in which, given the psychological state of the average driver, a more rational message would not suffice. In the case of the commercial, the issue is moral, economic, and political, since it concerns the legitimacy of using psychological pressure in order to make a profit.
But the question of the dialectics between Kitsch and the avantgarde is not solved by eschewing all aesthetic evaluation in favor of more serious concerns such as the ones considered above. Quite the contrary, for not only does the avantgarde emerge as a reaction to the diffusion of Kitsch, but Kitsch keeps renewing itself and thriving on the very discoveries of the avantgarde. While the latter, refusing to serve as an experimental laboratory for an ever-growing cultural industry, is constantly concocting new forms, the former, relentlessly stimulated by the new ideas of the avantgarde, keeps processing, adapting, and diffusing these according to its commercial standards, in the process changing them from procedural forms which try to direct the audience’s attention to the causes of their being, into effectproducing formulas.
From this particular standpoint, the anthropological situation of mass culture would seem to hinge on a perpetual dialectic between innovative ideas and acceptable adjustments, in which the former are constantly betrayed by the latter, since the greater part of the public is convinced that it is enjoying the first, whereas it is actually enjoying the second.
Midcult
But the dialectic between the avantgarde and Kitsch is not nearly so simple as this. Theoretically speaking, the formulation of the problem may appear persuasive enough, but before we accept it we should look at a few concrete cases. Let’s examine, for instance, some of the lowest examples of mass culture, such as the production of funerary or votive lamps, porcelain knickknacks representing little sailors and sultry odalisques, comic book heroes, detective stories, B westerns.
In all these cases, we have a message that aims at the production of an effect (excitement, escape, melancholy, joy, and so on) and assumes the formative procedures of art. In most cases, the most skillful authors will borrow new elements and unusual solutions from the higher culture. And yet, generally speaking, the addresser of the message does not expect the addressee to consider his communication a work of art; nor does he wish that the elements he has borrowed from the avantgarde be recognized and appreciated as such.
He has used them only because he thought they might serve his purposes. This does not mean, however, that in creating his porcelain odalisques he may not have vaguely felt the influence of a decadent movement, or responded to the lure of archetypes ranging all the way from Beardsley’s Salome to Gustave Moreau’s; just as, responding to similar references, his customer may well end up placing the knickknack in the middle of his living room as a token of culture, a status symbol, a mark of «higher» taste, etc. But when an adman borrows some avantgarde proce dure to pitch a particular drink or a new car model, or when Tin Pan Alley transforms Beethoven’s «Fur Elise» into a dance tune, the use of the cultural product is meant for a consumption that has nothing to do with, and does not pretend to have anything to do with, an aesthetic experience.
On the other hand, it is possible that while enjoying such a product the consumer may catch on to a particular phrase, a stylistic element that has kept some of the original’s nobility. Even though he may not know where the phrase comes from, he might enjoy its formal arrangement, its function, and in the process take delight in an aesthetic experience which, however, does not claim to replace other, «higher» experiences. These examples open up a different set of issues (the legitimacy of advertising, the pedagogical and social functions of dance) that have little or nothing to do with the problematics of Kitsch. We are dealing with mass products that aim at the production of effects without pretending to be art.
The keenest critics of mass culture have realized this. And, in fact, they have viewed all such «functional» products as phenomena unworthy of being analyzed (since these phenomena do not concern problems of aesthetics, they can have no interest for the cultivated mind) and have instead turned their attention to a different level of cultural consumption: that of the «middle.»
According to Dwight MacDonald, the lowest level of mass culture (which he terms «Masscult») finds in its very banality a deep historical impulse, a savage strength similar to that of the early capitalism described by Marx and Engels. It is a «dynamic, revolutionary force, breaking down the old barriers of class, tradition, and taste, dissolving all cultural distinctions. It mixes, scrambles everything together, producing what might be called homogenized culture . . . Masscult is very, very democratic.» (In other words, in its thoughtless functionality, Masscult, even though it might follow the models of the avantgarde, never even bothers to refer to a «higher» culture, nor does it bother its audience with it.)
This is certainly not the case with Midcult, Masscult’s pretentious bastard, a «corruption of High Culture, which has the enormous advantage over Masscult that, while also in fact ‘totally subjected to the spectator,’ it is able to pass itself off as the real thing . . . Midcult has the essential qualities of Masscult—the formula, the builtin reaction, the lack of any standard except popularity but it decently covers them with a cultural figleaf.» To understand what MacDonald means by «Midcult,» it is worth following him in his cruel but keen analysis of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.’
It is indeed possible to follow the dialectics between Kitsch and the avantgarde just by examining Hemingway’s opus: at the beginning, his writing is very clearly a means of discovering reality, but by and by, and despite a seemingly unaltered appearance, it bends to the demands of an audience that wants to have access to such an exciting writer. MacDonald quotes the beginning of one of Hemingway’s first short stories, «The Undefeated,» a bullfighting story he wrote in the 192os when «he was knocking them out of the park»: «Manuel Garcia climbed the stairs to Don Miguel Retana’s office. He set down his suitcase and knocked on the door. There was no answer. Manuel, standing in the hallway, felt there was someone in the room. He felt it through the door.» Vintage Hemingway. Only a few words—the situation is rendered through the attitudes of its characters. The theme is that of an oldtimer getting one last chance. The beginning of The Old Man and the Sea also introduces us to an oldtimer getting one last chance:
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eightyfour days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week.
It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.
MacDonald notes that the passage is written in the fakebiblical prose Pearl Buck used in The Good Earth («a style which seems to have a malign fascination for Midbrows»), with all those «ands» replacing the more usual commas so as to lend the prose the rhythm of an old poem. The
