The Structure of the Public Message
The production of effects and the popularization of consumed forms: the definition of Kitsch or of Midcult seems to oscillate between these two fundamental poles. The first refers to a formal characteristic of the message; the second, to its historical «destiny,» to its sociological dimension.
The two poles can, of course, be brought together and consid ered as two corollary aspects of the same situation. When Adorno speaks of the reduction of the musical product to a fetish’s —and when he points out that this fate befalls not only the popular song but also the artistic product of nobler origins the moment it is popularized—he is trying to tell us that it is not so much a question of knowing whether, listening to a particular composition, the consumer appreciates a message because of the effects it produces in him, as whether, in fact, he appreciates it because he mistakes its obsolete form for that of the original aesthetic experience.
According to Adorno, this distinction does not make any difference, since in both cases the average man’s relationship to the commercialized artistic product expresses itself in the blind and thoughtless adoration of the fetish. Unable and unwilling to apprehend either good or bad music analytically, he accepts it as it is, as something that it is good to consume because the law of the market has decreed it to be so, thus relieving him of any need to express his own judgment.
This radically negative criticism, which we have already seen to be unproductive, turns mass consumers into a generic fetish and the object of consumption into another, unexplainable fetish, while totally ignoring the great variety of attitudes present at the level of mass consumption.
Consumption and Recovery of Artistic Messages
Any work of art can be viewed as a message to be decoded by an addressee. But unlike most messages, instead of aiming at transmitting a univocal meaning, the work of art succeeds precisely insofar as it appears ambiguous and openended. The notion of the open work can be satisfactorily reformulated according to Jakobson’s definition of the «poetic» function of language.» Poetic language deliberately uses terms in a way that will radically alter their referential function (by establishing, among them, syntactic relationships that violate the usual laws of the code).
It eliminates the possibility for a univocal decoding; it gives the addressee the feeling that the current code has been violated to such an extent that it can no longer help. The addressee thus finds himself in the situation of a cryptographer forced to decode a message whose code is unknown, and who therefore has to learn the code of the message from the message itself.»
At this point, the addressee will find him self so personally involved with the message that his attention will gradually move from the signifieds, to which the message was supposed to refer, to the structure itself of the signifiers, and by so doing will comply with the demands of the poetic message, whose very ambiguity rests on the fact that it proposes itself as the main object of attention: «This emphasis of the message on its own self is called the poetic function…» When we speak of art as an autonomous process, as form for form’s sake, we are stressing a particular aspect of the artistic message which communication theory and structural linguistics would define as follows: «The set (Einstellung) toward the MESSAGE as such, focus on the message for its own sake, is the POETIC function of language.»
To this extent, ambiguity is not an accessory to the message: it is its fundamental feature. This is what forces the addressee to approach the message in a different fashion, not to use it as a mere vehicle (totally irrelevant once he has grasped the content it is carrying) but rather to see it as a constant source of continually shifting meanings—a source whose typical structure, begging relentlessly to be decoded, is organized so as to coordinate all the addressee’s possible decodings and force him to repeatedly question the validity of their interpretations by referring them back to the structure of the message.»
What matters to us here is to prove that the addressees of a poetic message find themselves in a situation of interpretive tension precisely because the ambiguity of the message, by expressing itself as a violation of the code, comes to them as a surprise. From the very start, the decoding of this sort of message appears as an adventure into an unusual, unpredictable organization of signs that no code could have foreseen. Committed to the discovery of the new code (new because never used before, and yet connected to the common code, which it at once upholds and violates) and bereft of the support of any exterior code, the addressees have to rely on their sensibility and their intelligence to construct their own hypothetical code. Their understanding of the work is a result of this interaction.»
But once it is understood, introduced into a circuit of constantly enriched perception, the work starts to lose its interest for the addressees, who have gradually grown used to it. The way of forming that was once a violation of the code has become one of its new possibilities, at least to the extent to which every work of art can modify the cultural habits of a community and render even the most «aberrant» expression acceptable. The poetic message thus ceases to surprise its addressee, who, given his familiarity with it, can now decode it merely by applying to it its most recent interpretation, or a formula that sums it up. Its potential for information has beendrained; itsstylemeshavebeen exhausted.19
This fact should be enough to explain the phenomenon commonly known among sociologists as «the consumption of forms» and to clarify the process by which a form becomes a «fetish»— that is, ceases to be appreciated for what it is or can be and instead comes to be coveted for what it represents, for the prestige it is supposed to convey.
To love the Mona Lisa because it represents Mystery, or Ambiguity, or Ineffable Grace, or the Eternal Feminine, or because it is a more or less «sophisticated» topic of conversation («Was it really a woman?» «Just think: one more brush stroke and that smile would have been different!») means to accept a particular message not for itself but because of a previous decoding which, having now stiffened into a formula, sticks to the message like a tag. In this case, we are no longer considering Leonardo’s painting as a message whose structure is in itself worthy of appreciation, but as a conventional signifier whose signified is a formula diffused by advertising.
We could then say that the term Kitsch can be applied to any object that (a) appears already consumed; (b) reaches the masses, or the average customer, because it is already consumed; and (c) will quickly be reconsumed, because the use to which it has already been put by a large number of consumers has hastened its erosion. Phenomena such as the Mona Lisa embroidered on a pillow would only encourage this interpretation.
However, it is impossible to speak of the consumption of poetic messages the way one would speak of the consumption of ordinary messages. A message such as «Do Not Lean Out the Window,» commonly affixed below the windows of most European trains, has been repeated and decoded so many times that by now it has lost all effect. To recover some effect, the message needs to be refreshed, reiterated in a novel fashion—for instance, it could be accompanied by a list of the fines incurred by its transgressors, or sensationalized by means of an unexpected new formula, such as: «Two months ago, Mr. Jones lost his right eye to a protruding branch as he leaned out of this window.»
This is not what happens with the poetic message. Its ambiguity is a constant challenge to the absentminded decipherer, a constant invitation to cryptanalysis. No matter how popularized, consumed, and fetishized, a poetic message will still find someone who will approach it with, as it were, a virginal mind, even if this means that he or she may interpret it according to a IIC11. code that has little or nothing to do with the one initially intended by the author.
This sort of «misinterpretation» is an inevitable corollary of the «fortunes» of a work of art through the centuries. The Romantic interpretation of the marmoreal «whiteness» of Greece is a perfect example of a message that has been decoded according to an alien code.
Certainly, the reproduction of a famous classical painting bought as a fetish, a status symbol, a cultural alibi, can work for its Kitsch consumer just as the Mona Lisa does on a pillow. On the other hand, it is quite possible that, in the course of his inept perusal, this consumer will bump into an aspect of the work—one of the infinite aspects of its structural complexity—that will unexpectedly offer him a tenuous glimpse of a much richer sort of communication, thereby rescuing the work from the basest form of consumption.
Giorgione’s Tempesta, appreciated only for its most immediately referential aspects (without any of its iconographic connotations— for instance, the shepherd seen as a handsome youth and not as Mercury), Bruegel’s Hay Wagon taken merely as the imitation of a hay wagon, Manzoni’s The Betrothed read only in order to know what is going to happen to Renzo and Lucia, the Wounded Bison in the caves of Altamira enjoyed merely as a
