Iqra’i

My breath’s as bated as anyone’s for Kate’s promised post on “the cultural free market,” but one of her “clues” strikes me as a little archaic:

it is impossible to prevent the discourses of the noble society and the base society from negotiating each other.

Insofar as “culture” is being used broadly enough to include the production of cultural artifacts (art, etc.) in addition to value systems, the opposition of “high” and “low” culture has always seemed somewhat silly to me – plenty of people seem to indulge in both without too much crisis of identity, for one. But when the two do exist as separate discourses, it’s usually because “noble culture” is being used as a proxy for “elite culture.”

And with media (and discourse in general) having undergone a total renovation at the hands of the Democracy of the Internet Age, self-appointed arbiters of high culture have become terrified that elitism is tantamount to irrelevance – and have as a result taken a much more inclusionary position toward low culture, even questioning whether the distinction should exist at all. (Exhibit A — ripped from the pages of the newspaper of record! — is Cathy Horyn’s “Critic’s Notebook” column today questioning the presence of her own kind at premier fashion shows in favor of more “direct” consumer feedback via the Internet.) 

Kate has the right idea, but her language doesn’t even begin to cover it. Noble culture isn’t just being “invigorated” by cross-pollination with the heartier, more robust peasant flowers of base culture (or resistance to its bacterial influence). It’s attempting to redefine the distinction between the two entirely — though, tellingly, usually in a way that depicts elite individuals as opinion leaders, maintaining their privileged position even as their privileged space recedes into the past.

I’m not just speaking of the “dumbing down of media.” I find the snobbishness of such laments to get pretty insufferable pretty quickly. I’d much rather speak about the microdynamics of the new laws of cultural production, such as this: the tendency to use vox populi as an excuse to turn up the volume on one’s own megaphone. 

_{It should probably go without saying that just because high culture is an elitist construct doesn’t mean it should be eradicated, but I’d better point out to shore up my traditionalist cred that I have argued recently for the unabashed use of jargon in the public sphere. The prevailing campus attitude yokes “diversity” of viewpoints to universal intelligibility. “Fraternize with everyone!” indeed.}