ANGELS ALSO DIE WHEN LIBERALS INDULGE IN WISHFUL THINKING

This isn't really a sequel proper to this June 2015 essay; I just liked the title enough to use it with slight alterations-- though all the same distinctions between liberal and ultraliberal remain.

_____________

On this CBR Community, I made the following post, to see if anyone there could give me examples of conservative readers misrepresenting comics-stories or characters, to counter the many examples of liberal misrepresentation I've covered on this blog.

Since the days of Frederic Wertham, with his comment on Superman's "S" ("we should be glad, I suppose, that it does not read 'SS'"), there have been any number of dumb readings of comic books by persons with a liberal or quasi-liberal agenda (however you want to define that).
But are there examples of comics that have been actively misread by conservatives-so-called? I'm not thinking so much of reviews that complain about sex and violence-- you get those in liberal quarters too-- but instances where someone says, "X stands for good conservative values" and the artist comes back with, "That was not what I meant at all."
Obviously there have been creators who actively courted conservatives, like the troika of Capp, Caniff and Gould, but that wouldn't be a misreading.

I didn't get too many on-topic responses, but one of the posts deserves some extended rebuttal.

There are not many artists who are conservative, and it seems that conservative readers sometimes grasp at straws to find support in the arts when it really isn't there.
We had a discussion about this on the Green Lantern Corps message board a while back, and I came to the conclusion that the arts tend to be about the opposition to power, which usually doesn't jibe with conservative thinking. 
When conservatives do produce art, it tends to be about righteous revenge or the triumph of a strong leader. Or maybe religious in nature.

Now, keep in mind that if the poster actually read all of the original post, he's just seen me mention three of the leading creators of the Golden Age of Comic Strips-- Al Capp, Milt Caniff, and Chester Gould-- and yet he's prepared to state that "there are not many artists who are conservative."

Further, he and some other posters decided across the  board that "the arts tend to be about the opposition to power, which usually doesn't jibe with conservative thinking."

I've come across a lot of extremely politicized analyses of comics-work, obviously on HOODED UTILITARIAN, in which critics have argued that the only *worthwhile* art is art with an avowed liberal stance. But, amid all of HU's superficial excoriations of talents like Dave Sim and Frank Frazetta, I've never got the sense that any of the pontificators on that site believed that "opposition to power" defined art. On the contrary, HU was a lot like the old TV game-show CAN YOU TOP THIS.
Contestants on the game-show tried to top one another by getting the highest score on a "laugh meter." With HU it was more along the lines of an "indignation meter," with each critic trying to top one another by showing, over and over, the shameful prevalence of Evil Conservative Ideals throughout culture, be it Charlie Hebdo or an unpublished drawing by Frazetta.

I, of course, don't think art is defined by any political stance, or any political program. Capp's creativity is not defined only by his silly, liberal-baiting satire of Joan Baez, but also by his creation of the Schmoos, just as Gould is defined not solely by his parroting of "law and order" rhetoric but also by his gallery of Dick Tracy fiends. Art, as I've noted elsewhere, is first all about play, not converting others to follow the "right" political program. There's nothing wrong with saying, "I don't like Milo Manara's politics," but it's a sign of intellectual laziness to interpret the size of Spider-Woman's butt as an inevitable expression of those politics.

I recently came across a considerably more famous source of wishful thinking, in my first-ever reading of Betty Friedan's THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE. If I were the conservative that I've been accused of being, I wouldn't be able to say that Friedan's work remains a classic of political insight. Whatever the later abuses of Second-Wave Feminism in later years, there can be no question that Friedan's book drew national attention to an inequitable aspect of American culture. The opening sections of the book are among the strongest, for Friedan had ample experience in the world of women's magazines. I have no difficulty believing her, when she averred that men coming back World War II had in essence usurped early feminism's emphasis on the ideals of "career women," and produced in its place the ideal of a "feminine mystique" that revolved around women finding fulfillment in the home.

But, like many activists on both sides of the political spectrum, Friedan's reach exceeds her grasp. (One of these days I've got to excoriate the legacy of Michael Medved, who may be one of the most famous "conservative misreaders" of all time.) In Chapter 11, entitled "The Sex Seekers," Friedan attempts to prove that the rise of sexy entertainment in the 1950s-- backed up by a study by psychologist Albert Ellis-- was rooted in the marginalization of the career woman. Friedan writes:

But of all the strange sexual phenomena that have appeared in the era of the feminine mystique, the most ironic are these: the frustrated sexual hunger of American women has increased, and their conflicts over femninity have intensified, as they have reverted from independent activity to search for their sole fulfillment through their sexual role in the home.

I wouldn't have objected to the statement that the social changes behind the "feminine mystique" could have CONTRIBUTED to the alleged hyper-sexualization of the 1950s decade (always a matter of degree, since some of Friedan's examples, like the novel "Peyton Place," seemed pretty tame even by the end of the 1960s). But like most activists, Friedan is a monocausalist. She ignores numerous other factors upon the alleged hyper-sexualization-- not least the very thing she mentions in other contexts; the effect of male GIs returning from the war-- because she's trying to flog her concept of the feminine mystique. Further, her jeremiads against the "increased preoccupation with sex" begins to sound like yet another replay of Theodor Adorno's rants against the culture industry, which in their turn very probably influenced the anti-pornography stance of Frederic Wertham.  And that's company that no good liberal should ever "wish" to associate with, even conceptually.

WORKING VACATIONS

I recently posted this simplified summation of my work/play concept on a forum-thread dealing with the question of whether or not superheroes were intrinsically juvenile.

"Escapism" is an important concept here, because on occasion (not necessarily on this thread) people sometimes conflate it with all things juvenile, which is not the case.

On my blog I've frequently contrasted two modes of literature which can be constructed for both juvenile and adult audiences. There's "escapism," which I consider "the literature of play," and "realism," which is "the literature of work."

Playing games means accepting a prescribed set of rules and limitations that aren't based on real-world means and ends, even if they might be loosely patterned after them (RISK, STRATEGO). But there's no real-world benefit from playing games. In a way, the player accept the game's fictional limits as a means of escaping the real world of limitations like inconvenient death, romantic loss, etc.

Work is all about means and ends, and the literature of work, "realism," is all about getting its audience to come to terms with mortal limitations. We may think of juvenile works as being only about escapism. But if someone writes a book for kids, aimed at coming to terms with the loss of loved ones, then that's both a "realist" work and a juvenile work.

Not that one has to be only within a naturalistic world in order to be "realistic." Lewis's Narnia books are aimed at kids, but their intent is to give the young audience a simplified grounding in the author's ideas of Christian philosophy. That's aimed at achieving a particular end by a particular means, and so I consider Narnia "realistic" in its thematic sense, even though it's a fantasy-- just as I do WATCHMEN and a handful of other "mature superheroes."

I've also occasionally asserted that the literature of thematic escapism functions as a "vacation from morals," moral prescriptions being the primary cultural manifestation of limitation: of what a member of a society must or must not do to remain a viable member of that society.

Early in THE ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, Northrop Frye discusses the ways in which types of melodrama-- he mainly references the detective story and the "thriller"-- can invoke in their audiences feelings of moral indignation, which might under different circumstances might involve the ideal of work in its sense of "means and ends."

In melodrama two themes are important: the triumph of moral virtue over villainy, and the consequent idealizing of the moral views assumed to be held by the audience. In the melodrama of the brutal thriller we come as close as it is normally possible for art to come to the pure self-righteousness of the lynching mob.

We should have to say, then, that all forms of melodrama, the detective story in particular, were advance propaganda for the police state, in so far as that represents the regularizing of mob violence, if it were possible to take them seriously. But it seems not to be possible. The protecting wall of play is still there. 

Frye was IMO completely correct in assuming that the violent aspects of these "thrillers" is insulated by "a wall of play." However, he was wrong is assuming that it was "not possible" for critics to take violent melodramas "seriously" enough to believe that they were indeed "advance propaganda for the police state." About thirteen years prior to the publication of Frye's ANATOMY, Marxist Theodor Adorno attacked all products of the so-called "culture industry" as manifestations of a new fascism, though his analysis of the relation of violence to its audience may sound more Freudian than Marxist:


In the very first sequence [of a story] a motive is stated so that in the course of the action destruction can get to work on it: with the audience in pursuit, the protagonist becomes the worthless object of general violence. The quantity of organized amusement changes into the quality of organized cruelty. The self-elected censors of the film industry (with whom it enjoys a close relationship) watch over the unfolding of the crime, which is as drawn-out as a hunt. Fun replaces the pleasure which the sight of an embrace would allegedly afford, and postpones satisfaction [until] the day of the pogrom. Insofar as cartoons do any more than accustom the senses to the new tempo, they hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment.

In 1949, Gershon Legman self-published his book of essays, LOVE AND DEATH, which in part assailed comic books as institutionalized fascism, virtually duplicating Adorno's argument about how it served the ends of an implied "police state" that wanted citizens to fantasize about venting violence on scapegoat victims so that said citizens would then accept any punishment the government dished out.

And of course, there's the debbil-doctor himself:

Superman (with the big S on his uniform—we should, I suppose, be thankful that it is not an S.S.) needs an endless stream of ever new submen, criminals and "foreign-looking" people not only to justify his existence but even to make it possible. It is this feature that engenders in children either one or the other of two attitudes: either they fantasize themselves as supermen, with the attendant prejudices against the submen, or it makes them submissive and receptive to the blandishments of strong men who will solve all their social problems for them—by force.


And, lest anyone reading think that these views no longer have currency, here's reliable Noah Berlatsky, from the comments-thread in which I recently participated, taking the POV that all superheroes are essentially cops, representatives of a police state:

 superheroes function as a kind of paramilitary right wing law and order force; they’re doing the dirty work of justice that even the police can’t do. That’s a lineage that goes back to the KKK; I don’t think it gets out of the dynamic I discussed. I think that applies to a lot of the lone badass against the system narratives too. 


What all of these individuals have in common is that they have refused to give the melodramatic entertainments they attack the credit for being "play." Thrillers, comedy cartoons, and superheroes are all defined by the "work" that the culture industry wants them to do, whether it's to create admiration for the forces of law-and-order or to provide "bread and circuses" so that the citizens won't notice how beaten-down they are by the forces of authority. Escapist melodramas might provide vacations from whatever morality these elitists tout as superior, but since the melodramas are working for authority, they only supply "working vacations."

Clearly I'm with Frye in believing that the consumers of these fantasies, violent or not, have the awareness to know that they're engaging a playful activity that doesn't represent the way the real world works. It can be fairly stated that concerns of "realism" do appear in any work, no matter how "escapist," be it a story set in the audience's own world or in some "Dungeons and Dragons" universe. But the element of play generally takes precedence, though permutations do arise in both the escapist mode and the realistic mode, as discussed more fully here.

The biggest problem of the "heroes are fascist" argument is that it soon becomes entirely tautological, like Freud. In Freud's opinion the Oedipal theory was validated whether or not  a man did or didn't marry a woman like his mother. A man who married a woman like his mother confirmed Freud's theory directly; a man who married a woman completely unlike his mother was undergoing "displacement," which in some roundabout way still validated the Oedipal theory.

Similarly, most of the "heroic fascist" arguments fall into the same circular arguments seen above. Does the hero work directly for the government? Then he's a fascist. Does the hero work on his own, reporting to no authority? Then he's "a kind of paramilitary right wing law and order force." Is the hero a badass fighting against the system, like (say) Snake Plissken? The argument will admit of no meaningful exceptions: the badass fighting the system is a fascist too. In other words, everything proves what the theory's proponent wants to prove, and the few exceptions the advocate may provide, if he provides any, simply happen to appeal to his or her particular moral system.

CASSIRER AND POPULAR FICTION

I don't have anything further to say about the assorted pluses and minuses of Edward Skidelsky's Cassirer book, but I should note that the following quote raised my eyebrows a bit.

Man is held fast, even more inexorably than by the mechanism of work, by the mechanism into which he is thrust by the mechanism into which he is thrust by the products and proceeds of technical culture, and in which he is thrown, in a never-ending frenzy, from appetite to consumption, from consumption to appetite.-- Cassirer, "Form und Technik."

I didn't need Skidelsky to point out the similarities to doctrines propounded by uber-Marxist Theodor Adorno.  Adorno and Cassirer were both German-Jewish intellectuals who fled Nazi Germany to the bosom of the United States.  In one of Adorno's most famous works, he too took aim at the "never-ending frenzy" of America's consumerism and technological standardization:

A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself. Automobiles, bombs, and movies keep the whole thing together until their leveling element shows its strength in the very wrong which it furthered. It has made the technology of the culture industry no more than the achievement of standardisation and mass production, sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system.-- Adorno, DIALECTICS OF ENLIGHTENMENT.

Skidelsky points out the similarity between Cassirer's remarks and similar observations by both Adorno and Martin Heidegger, but does not comment except to point out that "[Cassirer's] protest is not against social injustice so much as hedonism: his stance is not that of a Marxist but a classical moralist. Gains in efficiency cannot, for one raised on Plato and Kant, weigh against the much graver forfeit of virtue inherent in modern consumerism."

Not having read "Form und Technik," I cannot comment on Cassirer's logical arguments against modern consumerism, though I am happy to see that the quotes given are not as shrill and as poorly constructed as Adorno's argument, critiqued in detail here and here.  But I have wondered at times what Cassirer, a man raised in the high mandarin culture of the German intellectual tradition, made of American popular art when he emigrated to this country. I have occasionally argued that I felt that the logical extrapolation of Cassirer's "philosophy of symbolic forms" was one that, by logical extension, should embrace the diversity of the popular arts:

It's clear (to me at least) that one can plausibly extrapolate from this endorsement of human freedom in all its cultural forms an ethos which also tolerates all forms of literature, ranging from the great works that have endured for decades to those works that were intended only to please a particular, perhaps ephemeral audience.

And also here:

To be sure, Cassirer does not address in this book the provenance of the mythical imagination in literature.  He does address in general terms the transition from “the mythical image world and the world of religious meaning to the sphere of art and artistic expression.”  But it seems plain to me that literature functions far more through “association” than through “analysis,” and that it depends just as much as myth on creating “networks of fantastically arbitrary relations,” a phrase borrowed by Cassirer from one Hermann Oldenberg.

I've mentioned that Cassirer never wrote a poetics, though Skidelsky asserts that art and literature were Cassirer's first loves before he gravitated to the study of philosophy.  From the quotes here it seems likely that had Cassirer written a poetics, it would have been one rooted in "classical morality."  Goethe was Cassirer's literary idol, and Goethe's circle may have favorably influenced Cassirer's acceptance of myth and folklore as valid expressions of human reason.

Herder and Goethe collected popular ballads; Humboldt and Schlegel studied languages and place-names; the Brothers Grimm anthologized folktales.-- Skidelsky, p. 72.

However, though it's demonstrable that European folklore serves some or all of the same aims as modern popular culture, it seems evident that Cassirer liked the "never-ending frenzy" of the latter no more than Adorno did.  At base, though, one can speculate that both men, like Frederic Wertham, were alienated from this culture simply because it was not their own.  This is not to say that some native Americans have not also inveighed against American consumerism, Gary Groth being the outstanding proponent of Adornite philosophy in the comic-book domain.  But what is a "never-ending frenzy" to one man is a thrilling wave of creativity to another.  "Fantastically arbitrary relations" govern the worlds of popular fiction no less than the worlds of myth, and one's appreciation for the tenor of those relations depends largely on whether or not one is "tuned to hear."

THE CARE AND ESTEEMING OF LITTLE MYTHS, PART 1

In GROTHERY STORES I referenced a Gary Groth blogpost in which Groth tossed out George Santayana’s second-best-known quotation:

"Americans love junk; it’s not the junk that bothers me, it’s the love."

Now what does this statement mean, ripped as it so often has been from whatever context lay behind it?

On the bare face of it, it states the author’s disapproval that anyone should show love toward, not literal junk, but the "junk" of popular culture.  Santayana does not state what one should love rather than popular culture, but the construction implies that there is something worthier of love than mere "junky" artifacts.

Given the usual opposition of the terms “high” and “low,” it follows that if one disapproves of other persons loving what’s often termed “low culture,” then its opposite, “high culture,” may well be the missing thing that is worthy of love.  It’s not unlike the logic that says that one may sleep with a “low-class” prostitute and then cast her aside—which seems the attitude Santayana evinces toward low junk-culture—while one confers love and marital status only upon those of a higher and more seemly class.

Given the fuzziness of his statement, I do not know if this is what George Santayana meant.  Gary Groth has made statements to this effect many times, usually following the Adornite argument that high culture leads to greater and finer thought while low culture leads to mental sloth, voting Republican and herpes simplex.  He’s made so many such assertions that I hope the reader will forgive me for not bothering to ferret out an example thereof, in order to stick to the subject: what should one love?

Should George Santayana “love” the play HAMLET, so often heralded as a high point in Western culture?  And if he did love it, as the phrase goes, why didn’t he marry it?  To extend my prostitute/wife analogy, surely no one would disapprove of such a high-minded marriage, even if he did keep some low-culture doxy on the side.  Maybe, while expousing his love of HAMLET to all and sundry, he kept a set of John Buchan books in a cubbyhole somewhere, taking them out only to use them for some quick unearned gratification, though always taking care that the neighbors should never find out.

Now, by my lights one *should not* love either HAMLET nor BATMAN (to choose a pop-culture icon better known than anything George Santayana might’ve read).  It should seem ludicrous to love either the high-culture or the low-culture icon, for the simple reason that no icons, or any of the works in which they appear, can ever love anyone back.    

Of course human beings do, against all logic, express vivid affection for all manner of fictional works and characters, or even for certain kinds of nonfiction (one thinks of Nietzsche’s recollections of his first exposure to the work of Schopenhauer).  But I suspect that the affection people feel for the phantasms of fiction and philosophy are akin to what Herman Melville termed “the shock of recognition.”  Melville claimed that upon reading Hawthorne, he recognized a spirit akin to his own in the works of the older author.

It could be argued that, whatever similarities existed between the two men, there may have been far more differences.  But even admitting this, Melville’s experience of “shock” is not invalidated.  Melville saw in Hawthorne’s works not the spirit of Hawthorne, but the spirit of Melville himself, reflected by the work of Hawthorne, as in a mirror.

The notion of intersubjectivity explains much of the appeal of fiction.  Elitists like Groth generally insist that the difference between good and bad fiction is a matter of highflown sophistication; that which lacks sophistication is perforce bad.  Yet even elitist critics differ among themselves over what is good or bad in Shakespeare just as much as comics-fans do about the proper depiction of Batman.  The arguments themselves may be more sophisticated, but the response for or against any given work spring from the extent to which the work mirrors the subjectivities of critic, fan, or general audience-member.  But subjectivity doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and so we must speak of intersubjectivity as a way of understanding how persons from all walks of life can see reflections of themselves in the works of strangers, often strangers from other times and cultures. Thus, when we feel affection for the works of Shakespeare or of Bill Finger, what we “love” are shadows of our own tastes and personalities.

Yet we need not dismiss this sort of “love”—which, when examined more fully, might be better termed “esteem”-- as mere solipsism.  Even as people with wildly differing tastes and personalities can work together to produce civilization, all forms of literature can and do play off one another to create a greater whole.  (And yes, the verbal contrast of “working together” vs. “playing off one another” is no coincidence.)  Northrop Frye, from whom I derived my own “shock of recognition” despite his being one of many intellectual-mentors-whom-I-never-met, viewed this whole as possessing the integrity of archaic myth.  To any reader of this blog, it should be more than clear that I do as well, whatever disagreements I have with Frye (see here).  In part 2 I’ll address the proper way to show esteem for literary myths, be they of noble or base extraction.  

SPECTACULARLY WRONG

In this comments-section Charles Reece declined to respond to my criticisms of Adorno and the Frankfurt School, but mentioned that he had done an essay adapting some of Adorno's thought for an essay. Certainly I've no reason to respond to his essay if he doesn't respond to mine, but I will review one sentence from his brief meditation on GHOST WORLD here:

'Just like the rest of us, Enid was born into the media-saturated “Society of the Spectacle,” which makes it damn hard to distinguish the real from its image (“spectacle”).'

Shortest possible response:

Speak for yourself, Charlie.

Elitist critics to the contrary, the "Society of the Spectacle"-- in large part just another take on the term "mass culture," which Reece also uses in the essay-- has always been coterminous with human society. The real elitist objection to this supposed "society" is that because of the rise of a marketplace for popular culture, "spectacle" becomes more central to culture as a whole once the less educated classes are able to choose what cultural artifacts they will support. This is why Adorno and his fellow travelers sought to marginalize the contemporary articulation of popular culture into a "mass culture" supposedly forced upon the masses from above.

And yet, even though Aristotle's POETICS rated "spectacle" as a marginal element of narrative art, scarcely any famed author of the pre-industrial periods-- when aristocratic patronage usually filled in for the mass market-- really scorned the use of spectacle. An author like Jonathan Swift, whom I assume Reece would find agree antedates the rise of Adorno's mass culture, certainly earned his greatest fame by channeling his satire into spectacular forms.

If it can be demonstrated that all of the societies which predate mass culture have no less a hunger for spectacle than the society that lives with a multitude of saturating media, then one must conclude that the hunger for spectacle is not something foisted upon humanity by mass media-- no matter what separate verdict one may render upon the producers of that media.

In raising once more this insubstantial spectre of mass culture's supposed effects upon one's perception of reality, Reece is certainly correct in thinking that this is what Daniel Clowes is trying to get across to his readers. What I object to, of course, is not that Reece is incorrect about Clowes' agenda but that Reece validates it as philosophically substantive.

Clowes' GHOST WORLD is certainly more readable than many of his often-overrated artcomics works, and his theme, even though it's one with which I have no sympathy, is much better expressed than one finds in the labored surrealism of DAVID BORING. But whereas a High Modernist poet like T.S. Eliot had well-articulated reasons for feeling that civilization was sliding into chaos, Clowes is all about shadows. He gives up on the quest for reality and then claims that mass culture made him do it. He's the one who's given up the "fight" that Reece mentions in his next sentence.

Damn, I just indirectly reviewed another sentence. For that I may need a second article re: caves and shadows.

To be continued, probably.

THAT DARN ADORNO, PT. 2

Second verse, same as the first:

"Cartoons were once exponents of fantasy as opposed to rationalism. They ensured that justice was done to the creatures and objects they electrified, by giving the maimed specimens a second life. All they do today is to confirm the victory of technological reason over truth. A few years ago they had a consistent plot which only broke up in the final moments in a crazy chase, and thus resembled the old slapstick comedy. Now, however, time relations have shifted. In the very first sequence a motive is stated so that in the course of the action destruction can get to work on it: with the audience in pursuit, the protagonist becomes the worthless object of general violence. The quantity of organised amusement changes into the quality of organised cruelty. The self-elected censors of the film industry (with whom it enjoys a close relationship) watch over the unfolding of the crime, which is as drawn-out as a hunt. Fun replaces the pleasure which the sight of an embrace would allegedly afford, and postpones satisfaction till the day of the pogrom. Insofar as cartoons do any more than accustom the senses to the new tempo, they hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment."

After reading brain-fried paragraphs like this one, I begin to reconsider my resolve not to bother reading any more Adorno. Most of his writing in the "culture industry" chapter of the DIALECTIC is stiff and moralistic but seems essentially sane, but this goofball paragraph makes no sense whatsoever and so provides a bit more entertainment. One thing is certain from it: the author *really* didn't like Donald Duck.

It's also interesting that in this one paragraph from a 1944 book Adorno states the central theme of Gesrhon Legman's LOVE AND DEATH, the 1949 essay-collection in which Legman accuses all comic books of promulgating a "superman ideology" as a means of keeping American audiences psychologically "beaten down." In MEN OF TOMORROW Gerard Jones provides strong if circumstantial evidence for Adorno's possible influence on Fredric Wertham, but Legman and Adorno seem much closer in tone: more Kafkaesque in their evocation of Shadowy Controllers who call all the shots. By contrast Frederic Wertham directs all of his rhetoric against mere unscrupulous human beings.

Parenthetically, the fellow-traveler status of Legman and Adorno is illustrated by this 1954 Adorno essay, in which Adorno quotes one of Legman's essays.

The main reason the Adorno paragraph is such a mess is because he declined to cite any particular "exponents of fantasy" or of "rationalism," so that it's impossible to know what he's reacting against. But again, the appearance that one phase of cartoons produced by the culture industry could actually be better than another phase emphatically contradicts his stance that the products of the culture industry are always essentially the same.

It seems likely that the issue of violence is the thing that drives all three intellectuals-- Adorno, Wertham and Legman-- into states of relative incoherence. All were either Jewish or of Jewish extraction, and for all of them the rise of fascism in Europe became a spectre that they perceived to be haunting the United States as well (this despite the fact that the U.S. gave Adorno a sanctuary from fascism). However, Adorno's critique of popular culture goes much further than those of Wertham and Legman, as one sees here:

"A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself. Automobiles, bombs, and movies keep the whole thing together until their leveling element shows its strength in the very wrong which it furthered. It has made the technology of the culture industry no more than the achievement of standardisation and mass production, sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system."

Though Adorno is mapping out new territories of Capital's domination, territories of which Marx probably never dreamed, the Marxist paradigm remains unchanged: "the logic of the work" is perverted by those who control the social system, the masters whose only real logic is self-interest.

It's a paradigm that *can* appeal to the emotions of anyone who has been forced to knuckle under to the illogical, self-interested demands of parents, teachers, or bosses-- that is, to anyone. Thus the Frankfurt School of Adorno and his colleagues enjoyed a vogue for some time on college campuses, despite the fact that Adorno provides so few examples, or, in some cases, radically misstates the facts.

For instance, in the section I quoted in Part 1, Adorno condemns the heartless studios for having passed over "the tragic Garbo" in their ceaseless quest for the new. This misrepresents the facts in Garbo's case. Though a story did circulate for a time that Garbo had fallen out of favor due to the failure of her last film, a closer reading of the evidence suggests that (a) said film actually made five times its cost, and that (b) Garbo walked away from the business on her own, being a somewhat aloof and perhaps depressive personality who had invested her money so wisely that she didn't actually HAVE to work.

This is not to say that many workers in all industries have not been canned by cruel and capricious bosses. Because injustices of this kind exist (and may well always exist), Adornism (my term) continues to make converts. Still, it's been said that its influence on college campuses has waned in the last decade. It could be that it's lost some currency because of its tendency to see devils where none can be proved to exist.

The comics world, unfortunately, often remains behind the curve as far as new cultural developments. In the comics world Adornism does have one bastion as yet unshaken by more measured considerations of popular culture and canonical literature.

And anyone who can't guess the name of the bastion of "advocacy journalism" to which I've referred probably needs to take refresher courses in Comics Criticism 101.

More on that in an essay due out sometime in March 2010.

THAT DARN ADORNO, PT 1

"Amusement and all the elements of the culture industry existed long before the latter came into existence. Now they are taken over from above and brought up to date... “Light” art as such, distraction, is not a decadent form. Anyone who complains that it is a betrayal of the ideal of pure expression is under an illusion about society. The purity of bourgeois art, which hypostasised itself as a world of freedom in contrast to what was happening in the material world, was from the beginning bought with the exclusion of the lower classes – with whose cause, the real universality, art keeps faith precisely by its freedom from the ends of the false universality. Serious art has been withheld from those for whom the hardship and oppression of life make a mockery of seriousness, and who must be glad if they can use time not spent at the production line just to keep going."-- Adorno and Horkheimer, DIALECTICS OF ENLIGHTENMENT.

Before proceeding to tear apart any current comics-critics as promised in my last essay, I may as well show an example of a deductive theorist who, unlike my examples of Frye and Jung, did put his foot in a whole mess o' hubris: Theodor W. Adorno. Noted Frankfurter Adorno authored DIALECT OF ENLIGHTENMENT with his colleague Max Horkheimer, but for my own convenience I will credit Adorno alone for everything I quote here, speaking as if the dark brown theory of the "culture industry" originated from Adorno's bowels alone. Certainly this essay, to which I linked earlier, gives indications that Adorno was the more vociferous opponent of what he termed "the culture industry," and so I feel justified in making him the prime devil in my scenario, much as many Journalistas focus their vilifications on Stan Lee and ignore Martin Goodman.

I will also note up front that I still have not slogged through any more of Adorno's work than the one essay I'll be quoting from. Adorno's definitive statement on the culture industry can be found on this site, which I consider a concise enough representation of the elitist cant Adorno propounded.

The work of Northrop Frye has at least one thing in common with that of Adorno: both relied heavily upon deductive arguments. Frye argues a long and involved continuity between man's early mythico-religious history and what modern people now call "art." Adorno argues that the "culture industry"-- which one may choose to view as nothing more than Marx's "Capital" as it manifests in the entertainment world-- has suborned the whole of modern culture and made it worse through its wholesale employment of soul-killing "mechanical reproduction."

Neither author privileges the inductive method to start: neither starts from a collection of raw data and weighs it until arriving at a conclusion. Once Frye has deduced the outlines of his theory, however, he brings to bear a tremendous amount of specific examples to prove the various fine points of his theory.

What examples does Adorno bring forth to prove his theory?

Given that Adorno is lamenting the tragedy of the decline of "serious art," it seems odd that he says so little about it in this essay. The above quote makes clear that he thinks it was a crime that the bourgeoise "withheld" the benefits of serious art from the oppressed classes. What the lower classes were given instead was mere "light art," i.e., "bread and circuses." This art had no identity of its own but existed in a "shadow" relationship to "autonomous art." Possibly in other essays Adorno defines this kind of art with greater resort to examples, but very few artists or their specific works are cited here. For that matter, one never knows from this essay what would constitute "light art" prior to the rise of the bourgeoise and of industrialization, with one exception:

"Whether folk-songs were rightly or wrongly called upper-class culture in decay, their elements have only acquired their popular form through a long process of repeated transmission. The spread of popular songs, on the other hand, takes place at lightning speed."

Thus folk-songs come by their "popular form" legitimately, through "repeated transmission" among actual human beings, rather than being promulgated via the mechanical means of productions controlled by the culture industry. I'm not sure why there's nothing at all mechanical in the larger sense about all this repetition of familiar ballads and such, but clearly Adorno considers the speed of mass culture's promulgation to be proof of its manipulation by Capital.

(I should note that Adorno later said that he meant "culture industry" to take the place of the earlier term "mass culture," in order to make clear how thoroughly this culture was NOT the expression of the oppressed who lived in its matrices. But I've never seen anyone but him use "culture industry" that way: "mass culture" is still generally used for the oppressed and "culture industry" for those doing the oppressing. I'll continue to use them both in this way.)

Of serious art, pre-industrial "light art," and "culture industry" art, the last category is the one of which Adorno supplies the most examples, mostly taken from popular movies. However, in keeping with his view that all of these products must be interchangeable, he cites no movie-titles, much the way his possible disciple Frederic Wertham rarely cited issue-numbers to the comic books he assailed. Adorno does name various stars, both those living and those brought to life by pen and ink, in curious passages like this one:

"As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them... [This ideology] calls for Mickey Rooney in preference to the tragic Garbo, for Donald Duck instead of Betty Boop. The industry submits to the vote which it has itself inspired."

In this comments-section I asked Charles Reece to explain what this section meant, but he declined, after having claimed that I just didn't understand Adorno's argument. I do understand that if everything that follows pre-industrial mass culture is controlled by the culture industry, then all four of these stellar figures should be equally implicated as the "rubbish" of the culture industry. I do understand that Adorno considers mere novelty to be one of the means by which the hidden controllers manipulate the masses, but his reference to "the tragic Garbo" suggests that on some level he *does not* consider her work to be the same sort of "rubbish" as that of Mickey Rooney. The parallelism of his sentence would suggest that Betty Boop also holds some slightly-higher vantage than Donald Duck, particularly since he singles Donald out for more lofty scorn in a passage I'll quote in Part II.

So against all his rhetoric, Adorno may have recognized distinctions in what he claimed was undifferentiated.

What can one say of a writer whose own chosen examples poke holes in his theory?

Find out in Part II.

FANTASY IN THE RAW

"Whereas directed thinking is an altogether conscious phenomenon, the same cannot be said of fantasy-thinking. Much of it belongs to the conscious sphere, but at least as much goes on in the half-shadow, or entirely in the unconscious, and can therefore be inferred only indirectly. Through fantasy-thinking, directed thinking is brought into contact with the oldest layers of the human mind, long buried beneath the threshold of consciousness."-- Carl Jung, SYMBOLS OF TRANSFORMATION,p. 29

"[the Frankfurt School scholars] poo-pooed the type of industries that make some stuff that's related to things you like."-- Charles Reece's take on my objections to the Frankfurt School, seen in more detail in this comments-section.

Though I debated Charles' statement in the comments-section to some extent, I want to draw particular attention here to his incorrect statement that the Frankfurters were objecting only to the "industries" that made and still make popular fiction, which organizations were subsumed by Mssrs. Adorno and Horkheimer into one satanic majesty designated as "the culture industry." The elitist Frankfurters were opposed not just to the culture industry but to popular culture as such, by invoking the fallacy that it was all controlled "from above" and thus in no way represented the true culture of the people.

From THE DIALECTICS OF ENLIGHTMENT:

"Not only are the hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details are interchangeable. The short interval sequence which was effective in a hit song, the hero’s momentary fall from grace (which he accepts as good sport), the rough treatment which the beloved gets from the male star, the latter’s rugged defiance of the spoilt heiress, are, like all the other details, ready-made clichés to be slotted in anywhere; they never do anything more than fulfil the purpose allotted them in the overall plan. Their whole raison d’être is to confirm it by being its constituent parts."

I've devoted no small effort to demonstrating the untruth of this statement: of showing how some popular works are indeed purely functional and represent little more than an assemblage of cliches, while others are clearly "superfunctional" in terms of not only how they function under the critic's microscope but in their public reception. That Adorno and Horkeimer could actually believe that the "cliches" could be "slotted in anywhere" speaks to their inability to grapple with the question as to why one popular work, be it song or soap opera, should be more popular than another one.

I think part of the reason is that these Frankfurters had no real idea of the creative process: they simply worshipped a concept of "art" that was so wonderfully hermetic that it could be easily divorced from the sort of "cliches" that pleased the hoi polloi. I'd be surprised if either Adorno or Horkeimer, steeped in their doctrinaire Marxism, showed any cognizance of the human faculty that Jung calls "fantasy-thinking:" the faculty which accounts for the capacity of both storytellers and their audiences to enjoy stories for their own sake, apart from their status as "art"-- even though, in the inclusive sense of the word, Donald Duck is ever bit as much "art" as Adorno's beloved Kafka.

It's significant that Jung, who was not a literary critic but who probably shared much the same highbrow education of the Frankfurters, was able to "step outside the box" of High Culture to such good effect. Jung wrote very little on popular culture but his intuitions about how creativity takes place, whether in high art or low, have stood the test of time through the explorations of lit-critics like Leslie Fiedler and Raymond Durgnat. In contrast, Marxist critics today, appropriately enough, are the ones who are ceaselessly repeating a "rigidly invariable" form of criticism.

I'll have more to say in a future post about the silliness of the "things you like" part of Charles Reece's rhetoric.