High Culture
HIGH CULTURE
Arthur Mitzman
Although there is no consensus among historians as to the definition of high culture, for many the term evokes the ivory tower of art for art's sake, mandarin aversion to raucous public entertainments, and highbrow disdain for politics. Because of this assumption of a willed distance from mundane, everyday life, elective affinities between high culture and the normal concerns of social history seem lacking. Where social historians have dealt with it, they have been more preoccupied with its relevance to the broader agendas of social history—that is, popular culture, demographic trends, or institutional intermediaries for cultural formation like schools and publishing houses—than with its contents, which they have left to specialists in literary and intellectual history. Under the influence of postmodern theory, in the late 1980s and 1990s social historians turned away from questions of social stratification and power toward broadly cultural matters of gender, textuality, print culture, and identity. This shift, however, has not increased their professional interest in the conventional terrain of high culture.
Nonetheless, the standard references to "culture" in modern European history link it to high rather than popular culture and consistently show high culture besmirched with political and social involvement. In general many of the turning points in the evolution from ancien régime to modern society have been associated, rightly or wrongly, with high culture. In Germany the term is used in the romantic nationalist defense of German Kultur—whether against Latin civilization, as in Jakob Burckhardt's title Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860; The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy), or, after 1872, against Rome-centered Catholicism in Bismarck's Kulturkampf (cultural war). In Belgium the revolutionary birth of the nation in 1830 was triggered by an opera performance, a high culture ritual. In France conservative enemies of the French Revolution attributed that upheaval to the anti-Christian rationalism of the High Enlightenment. A century later the concept of the "intellectuals" was inseparable from the intervention of creators of high culture, like Anatole France, Marcel Proust, and Émile Zola, who defended Alfred Dreyfus in the "affair" that led to the definitive separation of church and state in the Third Republic. To the extent that most of these political events involved social conflict and that the various movements of high culture implicated in those events were shaped by the rapidly changing social institutions, ideologies, and mentalities of the modern era, "high" culture merits scrutiny by social historians.
The significance of high culture for historians is here limited to its meaning in modern Europe from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century. Assuming the relevance of certain literary, anthropological, sociological, and depth-psychological perspectives, this discussion proceeds from four theoretical points of departure: Friedrich Nietzsche's distinction in The Use and Abuse of History between celebratory, "monumental" high culture and negative, satiric, parodistic, deprecatory, "critical" high culture; the Weberian concept of an ongoing rationalization and centralization of all aspects of society; the Freudian concept—not altogether unrelated to the Weberian one—of culture as sublimation of instinctual impulse; and Pierre Bourdieu's notion of "cultural capital." Frameworks for the discussion are the dialectical relation between "high" and "low" in Western culture, as discussed in anthropologically informed literary theory; Robert Muchembled's notion of a mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission) directed at the lower orders of society by the social strata embodying the high culture; and the complex question, provocative to intellectual historians, sociologists, and social historians alike, of the relation between high culture, cultural capital, educational institutions, ideologies, and intellectual paradigms, which might be called the question of the sociology of knowledge.
The first section of this article distinguishes the anthropological notion of culture from high culture. It differentiates between high culture's monumental and critical sides and between modern secular and premodern religious high cultures, tracing the historically shifting boundaries between "high" and "low." The second section discusses the various underpinnings of modern secular high culture. On the one hand are the religious and psychological bases for the evolving opposition of high and low; on the other are the institutional and ideological bases of that distinction in the culture of the modern world. This section also posits the paradoxical blurring of high and low in art, literature, and music. The third section presents the increasing predominance of critical elements in the secular high culture of the modern era in terms of the emergence of formal criteria—the autonomization of thought and aesthetics, bohemia, and abstraction—and concludes with a summary of the critical theory of the Frankfurt school. The final section focuses on the paradoxical relationships between autonomization and universities as cultural monuments, between postmodernism and political economy, and between high culture and cultural capital.
SOME DISTINCTIONS
Anthropologists view culture as the totality of that part of the human environment that has been more or less consciously created by humankind. Since 1970 this notion of culture largely has been taken over by both cultural and social historians. Agricultural systems and implements, ideologies, cities, architectural styles, automobiles, information technology, poems, weapons of mass destruction are all, as conscious creations, expressions of human culture.
A narrower meaning of culture excludes from such creations those that are indispensable, or at least materially useful, for human survival and focuses on those that are viewed by the society that produced or inherited them as agreeable. Such creations are useful in the nonmaterial sense of being edifying or pleasing to eye, ear, or mind. On what basis within this latter category is the historian to distinguish between high and low? On the one hand, any distinction between high and low culture remains an artificial construction based on the values of those who make the distinction rather than on an evidential reality. On the other hand, historical analysis of the contents of such constructions in particular societies has yielded many answers to the question of the sociology of knowledge.
With this paradox in mind, a workable definition of high culture is that which signifies the spiritual, intellectual, and aesthetic achievements viewed by the hegemonic strata of a particular society as worthy of emulation and continuance. This definition appears to stress the monumental, self-celebratory side of culture; but to understand the concept it is crucial to realize that a critical, satiric aspect has frequently accompanied it, even been integrated into it.
Although high cultures are normal in the history of civilization, arguably Western society since the Renaissance is a unique case. In most of the world's major civilizations, the monumental aspects have predominated and have been inseparable from religious traditions, rituals, and beliefs cultivated by either a priestly caste or a religiously colored, bureaucratic mandarinate. Such civilizations, including ancient Egypt, Confucian China, and the Christian Middle Ages, were stratified so sharply by sacralized social privilege and distinction, frequently taking the form of caste systems, that specifically cultural differences between high and low were usually less important than the social ones embedded in sacred hierarchies of power and privilege. For example, medieval Europe had two parallel high cultures, that of the feudal aristocracy, based on a religiously sanctioned code of chivalry, and that of the church, which monopolized literacy and intellectual debate. Nonetheless, even in the Christian Middle Ages parodies and inversions of both the clerical and the aristocratic cultures originated in and supplemented the high cultural heritage. The musical play-inversion of rites and hierarchies, la fête de l'âne (the feast of the ass), which introduced an ass into the church as bishop, was performed by apprentice clergy in cathedrals during the ten-day holiday after Christmas. The vernacular masterpieces of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Dante ridiculed the vice and folly of the powerful as well as of the common people of the medieval world.
In the Western version of high culture that developed between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries, the hegemonic strata came to distinguish themselves by their identification with and support for literary, artistic, musical, and intellectual achievements of an increasingly nonreligious character. The gradual disappearance of a religiously sanctioned hierarchical social order, together with the accelerating degree of social mobility, blurred social contrasts that formerly were taken for granted. A shopkeeper who became a wealthy banker was avid for the insignia of distinction, and an aristocrat who fell on bad times no longer was guaranteed privileged status by birth and title alone. In this context the contrast between those associated with the achievements of the secular high culture and those associated by idiom, taste, and mentality with the culture of the common people became more important. The common people were assumed to have a merely customary, contingent, or mercenary character, viewed as base or barbaric, expressive of a low popular or mass culture. But the high culture that was the fruit of family values and education and that permitted identification with the hegemonic strata—Bourdieu's "cultural capital"—became an important supplement to economic capital.
Paradoxically, however, in the contemporary world the concepts of high and low culture appear more and more difficult to distinguish, particularly since the development of modern media. A clear-cut distinction between the elite and the popular in cinema and television is hard to find, and the impact on culture of the diffusion of texts and images through the Internet has further complicated matters. The inexpensive reproduction of art and music has led some critics to repudiate the mass diffusion of such works as inauthentic, reserving the notion of high culture for works and performances that are created and appreciated directly, without electronic or other means of reproduction or amplification. Walter Benjamin, for example, distinguished original works of art from their reproductions by the "aura" attached to the original.
This problem of shifting boundaries between high and low is, of course, anything but new. There are many historical examples of cultural artifacts, once considered "elite," that became "popular" and vice versa. "Classics" easily have become popularized under certain circumstances, for example, through the films or musicals that have brought works of Victor Hugo, George Bernard Shaw, or William Shakespeare to the masses. Paradoxically, many of the plays and novels that have become part of the "high" culture heritage, including those of the three men just mentioned, were originally presented to the public in theaters and imprints intended for a popular audience. Indeed the source of modern dramaturgy lies in the vernacular mystery plays of the Middle Ages that, though originating in the clergy, became a phenomenon of the urban lay culture by the early fourteenth century. Most of the survivals from past cultures, such as Gothic cathedrals, the works of the Greek philosophers, the writings of Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer, revered since the eighteenth century by those who viewed them as testimonies to the sublimity of the human spirit, blurred the distinction between elite and popular.
As the automatic sacralization of power and privilege that characterized the Middle Ages was called into question, it became desirable and necessary for the ruling strata to add cultural distinction to the other attributes of power. The bases of such questioning multiplied in the modern era. The Reformation, which at least at a spiritual level denied hierarchy; the mercantile individualism of the urban cultures; the rationalism spurred by feudal absolutism; and after the French Revolution, the democratic ideologies of nationalism and socialism—all undermined the religiously endorsed hierarchies that shaped most of Western culture.
Thus the modern concept of a high culture, which links the cultivation of aesthetic, intellectual, and ethical sensibilities to a secular worldview, has been coterminous with the postmedieval evolution of literate elites, whose social hegemony depended, in their eyes, on their capacity to distinguish themselves culturally from inferiors. Cultural (as distinct from social) contempt for what was "low" or popular became increasingly evident in Renaissance and baroque Europe among an increasingly literate and luxury-loving aristocracy, who disdained the rituals, beliefs, and idioms of common people, physical labor, and apart from the city-states of northern Italy and Flanders, commercial activity. Cultural contempt also appeared in the value the subsequent bourgeois society placed on brainpower and the refinement of feeling as opposed to muscle power and violent emotion.
THE EVOLUTION OF SECULAR HIGH CULTURE
Religion and psyche. Although the concept of a secular high culture became common coin only in the modern world, its origins are implicit in the historical development of morality and religious ideas. To the extent that religions evolved from local beliefs (shamanism, totemism, animism) linking the supernatural to natural phenomena into a belief in some kind of transcendent, rationally comprehensible, omniscient, and omnipotent being, the newer faith viewed the older one as of a lower order. Where distinctions were made between heavenly (divine or moral) and earthbound (diabolic or immoral) supernatural forces, the earlier religions were associated with the earthbound. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error (1979) demonstrates this association in the operations of the fourteenth-century inquisition in a southern French town.
This high-low opposition, the basis of subsequent distinctions between high and low culture, occurs frequently in cultural history. The ancient Greek contrast between the gods of Olympus and their chthonic predecessors is one example, as are the various myths and legends of the classical and Christian traditions depicting a winged hero (Perseus, Saint George, or Saint Michael) rescuing a maiden from the clutches of a multiheaded hydra or dragon associated with the underworld. Shakespeare's opposition (in The Tempest) of Prospero and Caliban is a secularized variant on this: the cultivated seer versus the barbarian "wild man." Christianity's denigration and suppression of medieval nature religions, whose traces in the countryside persisted well into the nineteenth century, is an example. Another instance is the scorn among austere and "elevated" Christian reformers for clerical corruption and for the compromises, such as cults of the saints and carnival festivals, the Catholic Church made with the older religious beliefs. Tied up with religious notions of a higher culture was a slow transformation of morality and notions about human sexuality. The development of conscience (the evolution from "shame" to "guilt" cultures) accompanied both the change in the psychological locus of religious conviction from matriarchal (natural) to patriarchal (heavenly) belief systems and, independent of the matriarchy-patriarchy split, the change in social ethic from aristocratic honor to bourgeois virtue. As Norbert Elias, following Freud, showed, this latter evolution also involved mounting repression of affects that might lead to gross behavior, violence, or uncontrolled sexuality (associated with the lower body) and an increased emphasis on civility, tolerance, and ratiocination (associated with the head).
This valorization of intellectual capacities in the medieval and early modern world was long associated with the concept of a "higher" Christian sublimity, both religious and aesthetic; but for the French monarchs of the seventeenth century, that valorization was a means to curb the grossness and impulsive violence of the court aristocracy. Later, it was a means for Deist bourgeois successors to the Christian-feudal tradition to establish their own cultural identity against that imposed by the old regime. One of the icons of European high culture, Mozart's The Magic Flute (1791), provides an outstanding example of such a post-Christian religious identity. This opera reveals an artful integration of many of the themes of high versus low. It also shows the ambivalent relationship between the monumental and the critical sides of high culture characteristic of the era of the French Revolution and the dependence of the critical aspect on elements of the popular culture.
The Magic Flute demonstrates that the "superior" morality of high-culture Freemasonry was not simply directed against the "low" culture of the populace. To the contrary, the bird catcher Papageno, although given to buffoonery, is an emblem of virtue. Indeed the opera's initial performance in 1791 took place in a popular theater, evidence that the enlightened bourgeois and the popular were not sharply separated at that time. Like Mozart's other major operas, The Marriage of Figaro (1786) and Don Giovanni (1787), The Magic Flute sets the ethical standards of the enlightened bourgeois against the waning feudalclerical social order of the old regime as high versus low. In The Marriage of Figaro, Count Almaviva is trapped by his petit bourgeois majordomo and his long-suffering wife into giving up his licentious ways. In Don Giovanni the libidinous aristocrat is literally swallowed up by the underworld for his conscienceless sexual violence. The Magic Flute represents an early version of the moral consciousness of Europe's new middle-class culture, which in its Masonic form was more inclined to seek models in the religious rituals and consciousness of ancient Egypt than in those of classical antiquity.
Institutional and ideological bases of the evolution to a secular high culture. In general the notion of high culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries prioritized a classical literature that began in Greek and Roman antiquity. This development was largely dependent on two interrelated cultural phenomena that some observers consider the basis of both nationalism and modern society as a whole: mass literacy and printing. For these achievements to become widespread—ultimately catalyzing the modern distinction between high and low culture—four changes were necessary: the triumph of political centralization over feudal anarchy, the imposition of uniform vernacular languages on the innumerable patois of Europe's regions, the valuing of literature written in a uniform language, and an organized educational system accompanied by some kind of merchant capitalism. Culturally speaking, these various aspects of the ongoing rationalization and centralization of social power constitute the unity of the era of European history from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century.
THE MAGIC FLUTE
As The Magic Flute begins, the hero, Tamino, who will subsequently be initiated into an Egyptianate religion of sun-worshiping Deists, is chased by a huge serpent, a monster of the underworld. Tamino is rescued by three female servants of the Queen of the Night, who gives him the task of rescuing her daughter from the clutches of Sarastro, a villainous usurper and successor to her husband as high priest of the solar circle. The opera makes clear that the Queen of the Night, not Sarastro, is the true villain. Analysis of the text and music of the opera and the backgrounds of its collaborators—particularly Mozart and Emanuel Schikaneder, who commissioned the opera, signed his name to the libretto, and played the role of Papageno in the initial production—suggests that the solar cult is a thinly disguised version of Masonic beliefs and rituals. Late-eighteenth-century Austrian Freemasonry, to which all the important collaborators belonged, embraced High Enlightenment Deist ideas of a superethical monotheism deemed compatible with the moral teachings of most major world religions.
The conflict between Sarastro and the Queen of the Night is thus a conflict between high and low, that is, between heavenly and terrestrial, light and dark, sun and moon, true religion (Deism or Freemasonry) and false (by implication Catholicism). Overlapping these is the symbolic opposition between male (patriarchal) and female (matriarchal) principles. Women are not condemned altogether as evil and irrational—the daughter of the Queen of the Night is initiated into the mysteries of the cult alongside the hero—but the opera follows Enlightenment stereotypes in viewing them as intellectually dependent on men and given to evil passions when outside the male controlling influence. When, after the evil female does everything in her power to murder Sarastro, saying, "My heart is seething with hellish vengeance," Sarastro, foils all plots against him, revealing the generous wisdom of a philosopher-king in dealing with her: "Within these sacred portals, revenge is unknown . . . enemies are forgiven." Thus does the opera show the superiority of reason over violent emotion.
During this period the consciousness of a distinction between high and low culture flourished, but its origins can be traced back to the various vertical culture clashes of the late medieval period. Elias, in his theory of the "civilizing process," focused on the efforts of French royal courts to curtail the violence and incivility of aristocratic vassals by importing standards and "manner books" from the more advanced courts of Renaissance Italy. But Robert Muchembled and others applied Elias's idea more broadly to the history of the early modern epoch. Muchembled, in Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 1400–1750 (1985), demonstrated that similar attitudes characterized the efforts of the church to Christianize the common people in the late medieval and early modern periods. In this case, however, the repression of the pre-Christian belief system on the grounds of superstition, immorality, and ungodly violence actually involved a diffusely conceived and executed "civilizing offensive" of a Christian culture, which saw itself as higher, against a partly pagan popular culture, which Christians viewed as lower. This offensive mission was part and parcel of the valorization of intellectual and ethical capacities and of a higher Christian sublimity, both religious and aesthetic, visible in the philosophy of Nicolas de Malebranche and François de Fénelon and in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and Marc-Antoine Charpentier. In baroque art, for example, in the work of Nicolas Poussin, huge canvases commissioned by the church expressed Christian sublimity through biblical subjects. Other paintings evoked for royal and feudal patrons heroic themes from classical antiquity, themes with which the aristocratic elites of the period identified.
As in Mozart's operas, comparable religious values with non-Christian or post-Christian presuppositions permeated the new bourgeois culture. Nonetheless, a certain ambiguity, also evident in The Magic Flute, characterized the relation of high to low in the modern era both before and after the French revolutionary watershed.
FROM THE "MONUMENTAL" PREMODERN TO THE "CRITICAL" MODERN
Even under the Old Regime, a number of important writers later associated with high culture, such as François Rabelais, the poet François Villon, and the playwrights Shakespeare and Molière, produced a major part of their oeuvre with little regard for the monumentalist norms that guided the work of most of their fellow creators. Genial creators made as much use of popular language and legend as of high-culture form. This tendency continued in the romantic era, for example, in the "grotesque," carnivalesque aspects of Hugo's oeuvre, and in the twentieth century, in works by James Joyce. In the work of the seventeenth-century English poet John Donne, religious sublimity coexists with an erotic passion that certainly escapes the confines of Christian sublimity. Donne's poems suggest the complexity of the high culture of the time and anticipate the coexistence of the sacred and the erotic in the work of the nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire. Other examples include the complex relationship between the sixteenth-century love stories and religious poetry of Marguerite de Navarre and the mingling of the sacred and the erotic in the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
During and after the demise of the Old Regime, this complex relation of the producers of high culture to the values and dogmas of the social elites that supported them intensified. Coinciding with the political and economic modernization of Europe, the aesthetic triumphs of high culture in the two centuries after the French Revolution reveal that the creative figures of modernism were elaborately connected both to the official morality of the bourgeois society that was their frequent social origin and source of support and to the "underworld" morality and perspectives of the popular culture normally denigrated by the dominant bourgeoisie. On the one hand, the developing high culture of Western art, literature, music, and social and philosophical speculation has been caught up in an ongoing professionalization and autonomization such that artists, thinkers, and musicians have created increasingly for their peers rather than for the economically and politically powerful. On the other hand, their social ties to the powerful have been frequently attenuated by a profound criticism of official morality and by a felt need, both ideological and creative, to infuse the common people with culture. This latter impulse was shaped by two mass ideologies, sometimes compatible and sometimes at loggerheads, that accompanied the processes of modernization: nationalism and socialism.
Following the French Revolution, a new social framework allowed an uneasy cohabitation of the trend toward professionalization with the impulse toward cultural populism. Via the impersonal marketplace and the individualization of social relations, the cultural creators gained increasing independence from the hegemonic classes. The patronage of wealthy nobles, royal courts, and high churchmen had been embedded in the hierarchical society of the old regime along with the aristocratic salons in which writers, artists, and musicians often found their wealthy patrons. The telltale sign of a sea change in the relation of the artists and intellectuals to society, and thereby in the significance of high culture, was the replacement, during the period of postrevolutionary romanticism, of the salon with the coterie of independent, like-minded artists and writers. Various circles of romantic novelists, poets, artists, and critics collected around the Schlegels in Germany, around William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and later around Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley in England, and around Hugo and his friends in France. These circles were all premised on the material possibility of earning a living as a writer or artist directly through the marketplace. In Illusions perdues (1837–1843), Honoré de Balzac portrayed brilliantly the functioning of coteries and salons in the era of the French Restoration (1815–1830). Salons and elite patronage never completely lost their influence over the production of high culture, and aristocratic libertinism and love of luxury were important elements in the aesthetic critique of bourgeois society by high culture poets and intellectuals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly in the art for art's sake movement. But after romanticism the institutional frameworks inherited from the Old Regime waned steadily in influence; the popular press, cost reductions in print technology, and university positions enabled artists and writers to determine the form and content of their creativity. Although social paradigms continued to be important in shaping individual creativity, they were attenuated when transmitted through the marketplace.
An important side effect of this relative independence from the taste and desires of elite patrons was the creation of bohemian subcultures, as in Schwabing, Montmartre and the Latin Quarter in Paris, and Greenwich Village and SoHo in New York, that nurtured communities of relatively free artists, writers, and composers. It is to a considerable degree within such subcultures that the two principal and often contradictory tendencies of modern thought and aesthetics—professionalization and autonomization, and cultural populism, making art and ideas the advocate of the suffering masses—have manifested themselves.
Historically, painters and sculptors frequently were of humble origins. In the Middle Ages, because of a tight association between traditional artisan crafts and the paintings and sculptures, largely of wood, later revered as high art in museums, the creators almost never signed their names to their work. This changed only in the Renaissance culture of the northern Italian cities, such as early thirteenth-century Siena, where individual painters were becoming recognized. More than two centuries later the transformation of anonymous artisan into artist was repeated in the metamorphosis of the goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini into a renowned sculptor.
Despite their individuality, Renaissance artists had little room to determine their own subjects, and the content of post-Renaissance visual art continued to reflect the monumentalist, self-celebratory tastes of the ruling elites. The baroque and classical painters of the ancien régime, uniformly subsidized by elite patrons, portrayed scenes from antiquity and religious history intended to augment the grandeur of church, state, and feudality. In the Netherlands, where a burgher elite ruled over the newly liberated eleven provinces, artists portrayed bourgeois interiors, the peasantry, and everyday life but in conformity with a new paradigm. The important exception in the history of French painting is the seventeenth-century work of the brothers Antoine, Louis, and Mathieu Le Nain, who also painted the peasantry. This aspect of their work was long forgotten and was finally brought to public attention in the 1850s by the writer Champfleury, a friend of the realist painter Gustave Courbet. In general artists remained dependent on elite patronage. Even in the French revolutionary epoch, older painters such as Jacques-Louis David continued the classical style and its antique subject matter, merely bending its significance toward the celebration of the new value of civic liberty. Younger artists like Antoine-Jean Gros and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres adapted the existing style to the contemporary situation, particularly in the celebration of Napoleonic military valor.
With the exceptions of the preimpressionist experiments with light and color by the romantic landscape artist J. M. W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelite circle in England, the important nineteenth-century movements and innovations in the plastic arts were French. After Waterloo, French romantic artists, such as Eugène Delacroix and Théodore Géricault, began to emphasize their own styles and tastes. But apart from his well-known allegorical painting Liberty Leading the People (1831), the closest Delacroix came to depicting ordinary people was his romanticized gypsies and his colorful scenes of North African life. Although the new bourgeois elites paid considerable sums for portraits of themselves and their families, paintings of ordinary Europeans, most of whom were peasants in the nineteenth century, were rare before 1848. Only artists with an engraving background, like Honoré Daumier, Grandville, and Charles Johannot, regularly expressed cultural populism through lithographs in popular reviews and books, thus reflecting the social and political radicalism of artisan revolutionaries and democratic revolutions.
Modern art began around 1848 in the new school of realism represented by Courbet and Jean-François Millet. For the first time in France ordinary peasants became a common subject of paintings, as did circles of artists and writers, a clear sign of the developing autonomy and self-awareness of groups of creative figures. The cultural populism implicit in Courbet's work was representative of the brief revolutionary period in which it first appeared, but interestingly the genre of peasant paintings long outlived the radicalism of the French Second Republic. The Bonapartist empire that followed derived its legitimacy from popular referenda, in which the support of the peasantry was crucial. As long as the peasants were depicted as long-suffering but not revolutionary, Courbet and his friends could continue to paint them. In other words, the shift from a radical to a conservative cultural populism, matching the transition from the Second Republic to the Second Empire, occurred largely unnoticed in the visual arts. A friend of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Baudelaire, Courbet made public his feelings about the Second Empire in 1871, when, as president of the Paris Commune's fine arts committee, he ordered the destruction of a major Bonapartist symbol, the Vendôme column, a gesture for which he was punished after the commune was crushed.
The public greeted realism in painting with the same kind of incomprehension that has greeted most artistic innovations since the French Revolution. Courbet was dubbed the "leader of the school of ugliness," partly because of the somber tints of his palette and partly because of the unlovely character of the rural population he so "realistically" presented. Although impressionism, the artistic movement that followed realism, had a brighter palette, it was not given a better reception. Although the countryside depicted by impressionists was frequently the lush, summery landscape of southern France, and the women represented usually bourgeois beauties on holiday, the painters' brush strokes and other techniques made a picture coherent at a certain distance but incomprehensible when looked at up close. Impressionism took the first steps toward abstraction of color and form, and this emphasis on the formal aspects of art pleased philistine tastes no more than had realism.
Impressionism's new formal concerns had double origins, one social, the other technical. Socially, with the increasing autonomization of art, artists produced for one another, which, as with classical music throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, made contemporary art increasingly inaccessible to the contemporary lay public. Technically, the artists in the last third of the nineteenth century, the era of impressionism, confronted the fact that, for the first time in history, a machine—the camera—could more accurately reproduce visual reality than the most talented painter. This mimetic aspect of the new technology encouraged artists to focus on what the camera could not do, organize color and form not imitatively but imaginatively. Moreover at the end of the nineteenth century the emphasis on time as a constituent element of reality, for example, by Henri-Louis Bergson and subsequently by Proust, was picked up by impressionist artists in a way that prefigured cubism and futurism's efforts to represent change and motion in two-dimensional canvases. During roughly the same time span (1880–1930), symbolist, surrealist, and expressionist art attempted to depict emotional states that were only loosely related to visual reality. The terminus of this increasing distance from traditional representation was abstract expressionism. All these movements were partly the result of the autonomization of the plastic arts, partly the creative artist's response to the camera, and partly reactions to the accelerating pace and complexity of social existence and the theories that reflected it.
Despite their trend to abstraction, many modern artists have been vitally concerned with the "social question." Vincent van Gogh and Camille Pissarro, both related to impressionism, showed such engagement in the nineteenth century, as did Pablo Picasso, one of the first cubists, and many French artists in the twentieth century. Other artists, particularly those associated with the fin de siècle symbolist movement, like Gustave Moreau and Puvis de Chavannes, continued to treat the classic themes of antique myths dear to the high culture notions of the bourgeoisie but with an effort to penetrate the myths' emotional significance. European surrealism would later make similar efforts. The admiration expressed by André Breton, a leading surrealist, a communist, and a Trotskyist, for Moreau's symbolist painting warns against any facile association of the more traditional high culture of the symbolist movement with bourgeois conservatism.
The social history of modern literature is in many ways similar to that of modern art. Literature experienced an increasing sense of independence from the dominant class whose values it was expected to represent. It too went through phases of romanticism, realism, and simultaneously with impressionism, naturalism. The tight connection between impressionism and naturalism is illustrated by the friendship between the founder of the naturalist school, Zola, and one of the principal impressionists, Paul Cézanne. Zola crafted one of his major novels, L'oeuvre (1886), around this relationship. With the exceptions of cubism and abstract expressionism, the other artistic movements mentioned—symbolism, futurism, surrealism, and expressionism—all had literary equivalents.
Literary romanticism was initially more important in Germany and England than in France; only in France did it parallel the development of romanticism in the visual arts. The common denominator of all romanticisms was their correspondence to the principal social and political trends between the French Revolution and the revolution of 1848. The literary high culture of the postrevolutionary epoch revealed the increasing weight of the critical as opposed to the monumental side of high culture. On the one hand, writers expressed the individualism of the liberal era both in their appreciation and emulation of individual genius, military or literary, and in their striving to earn their bread independent of official patronage. On the other hand, they also voiced the new sense of collectivism that emerged in that era. The circles of poets, critics, playwrights, and novelists, even when their social origins were aristocratic or upper bourgeois, echoed the revolutionary consciousness of the masses. They often cast this consciousness in the mold of nationalist sentiment, which was more common in Germany, or of the utopian strivings of artisan socialists, as in the social romanticism of some French writers, such as Eugène Sue, George Sand, Jules Michelet, and Pierre Leroux, in the 1840s. Both the individualist and collectivist values of the romantics fed their criticism of bourgeois conformity.
Technology and education helped popularize literature and reinforced authors' leanings toward cultural populism. Improvements in printing techniques made books and newspapers cheaper throughout the century. Economically, from the 1830s on writers like Balzac, Sand, Sue, Zola, and Charles Dickens published their novels in feuilleton installments, which provided a regular source of income. Ideologically, the reactions of a more literate popular public sometimes had a radicalizing effect on authors.
Subsequent literary movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—realism and naturalism in particular—shed much of the diffuse social idealism and stylistic excesses of romanticism but retained and accentuated the romantic devotion to the craft of the artist, an aspect of the developing professionalization of cultural creation. They also accentuated the critical, parodistic, even subversive element in literature. Examples include the mid-century French novelist Gustave Flaubert, the poet Arthur Rimbaud, the playwright Alfred Jarry, and the French and German circles of expressionism, dadaism, and surrealism.
This critical element went deeper than merely siding with the popular victims of the new liberal order. Entangled within all of these movements from romanticism to naturalism and symbolism, writers liberated from upper-class patronage set themselves critically against the dominant liberal values of the nineteenth century. For some this meant a recourse to the remnants of Old Regime aristocratic values that were libertine and luxury-loving but also distinctly anti-utilitarian. Among those were the French school of l'art pour l'art (art for art's sake) as represented by Théophile Gautier and Baudelaire and in Germany the poetic circle of Stefan George. Writers such as Wordsworth and some of the German romantics immersed themselves in alternative religious conceptions that emphasized the "eternal recurrence" of the world of nature. In the juxtaposition of "natural harmony" to the jarring and depressing world of commerce and industry, a number of romantics, such as the historian Michelet, came close to expressing later ecological concerns.
Many creative figures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century high culture emerged from circles of rebellious bourgeois youth. Such circles peppered the social landscape from roughly the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century and fed the ongoing critique of the dominant values of the elites. The adolescent groups of friends, beginning with German, English, and French romanticism, imprinted oppositional values on a wide variety of important creative figures, from Wordsworth and Coleridge to the German expressionists and French surrealists. Flaubert was powerfully influenced by a group of adolescent intimates, which is reflected in his L'éducation sentimentale (1869). Oppositional values were at the heart of the German youth movement, which started in an elite Gymnasium in Berlin, and the student-based youth rebellion of the period 1965 to 1975.
A number of these themes—nature as an alternative to industrial society, the distance from liberal utilitarian values, and an increasing appreciation of the sexual passions and an opposition to their repression in high Victorian culture—appear in the work of two Austrian writers of the late nineteenth century, Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and in the work of two English novelists of the early twentieth century, E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence. In general the critical element in modern high culture wavered between this more profound, often philosophical dissent from its monumental, self-celebratory aspect and the cultural populist denunciation of social injustice.
This wavering shows up in the evolution, between 1930 and 1970, of the Frankfurt school, the group of German philosophers, sociologists, and psychoanalysts specifically associated with critical theory. Continuing the Hegelian-marxist tradition in German thought, most of the principal figures in this group focused, until the middle of World War II, on the critique of fascism as a fusion of traditional authoritarianism and monopoly capitalism in its anticommunist phase. During this period critical theory represented a sophisticated marxism that was nonetheless a version of cultural populism. The course of the war seems to have convinced many of them that the responsibility for modern barbarism lay deeper than any traditional leftist interpretation could account for. Indeed it was inherent in the Western notion of rationality, particularly in its empiricist, liberal, instrumental, and nondialectical forms. That rationality posited the domination of reason over nature and emotion and impeded empathy with human suffering. This turn took shape in a series of books and articles that began with Max Horkheimer's wartime Eclipse of Reason (1947) and a book he coauthored with Theodor Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947), which posed fundamental questions about the character of the rationalism propagated by the High Enlightenment. It continued to Herbert Marcuse's seminal works Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964). Following its transformation during World War II, the Frankfurt school provided an essential commentary on modern high culture, analyzing critically its philosophical presuppositions, condemning its ties to inhuman systems of exploitation and mass destruction, and defending and resuscitating its aesthetic protagonists who resisted its norms. It particularly defended poets and artists who refused the limitation on feeling and imagination mandated by the monumental, self-celebratory side of the "official" culture's instrumental rationalism.
The work of Jürgen Habermas carried the critical theory begun by Horkheimer and Adorno into the late twentieth century. Habermas's work exhibits little of the specifically Hegelian, marxist, and Freudian presuppositions of his predecessors. Poststructuralist and postmodern theorists attacked those assumptions as "essentialist," that is, as presupposing—by positing the reality of abstract ideas like the dialectic, capitalism, and the id—some kind of real essence, a subject capable of historical action. Habermas attempted to recast critical theory on bases less susceptible to such attacks. He replaced the Frankfurt school's opposition between instrumental and dialectical reason with a differentiation between official and private discourse. This differentiation parallels the distinction, posed by the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, between the psychological analogues of society and community, Kürwille and Wesenwille. In the face of postmodern critiques of "essentialism," Habermas thus retained the utopian element in critical theory. In his view the expansion of those private spheres of discourse and their social underpinnings create a new normative basis for philosophy and "a community of needs and solidarity" as well as "a community of rights and entitlements" (Benhabib, 1986, pp. 339).
CONCLUDING PARADOXES
The extensive discussion of the historical interaction between the monumental-celebratory and the critical aspects of modern high culture leads to a related problem: the extremely complex tension between
- processes of autonomization in the arts and the intellectual disciplines,
- the institutionalizing of intellectual and cultural production in universities,
- changing paradigms or discourses about literature, art, science, and society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
- changes in modes of production and in the norms of political economy, and
- high culture as the "legitimate culture" or the "cultural capital" (in Bourdieu's terms) of hegemonic elites.
Bourdieu attempted to order the paradoxical connection between the autonomization of the aesthetic sphere—the emphasis by the creators and appreciators of visual art, literature, and music on purely formal questions divorced from narrative, social, or ethical content—and the elites' use of the new formal criteria as a badge of their distinctive cultural prowess. The paradox is that this autonomization—initially in the social and economic frameworks of coteries, bohemian communities, and literary reviews—developed after the disintegration of the ancien régime as a symbol of the emancipation of writers and artists from aristocratic patronage. The emergence of autonomization coincided with a historically unprecedented outburst of criticism, by poets and other writers, of the new society that had afforded them this freedom. Among the devotees of art for art's sake were, in France, Gautier, Flaubert, Baudelaire, and Stéphane Mallarmé; in Germany, the George Kreis and Thomas Mann; and in England, Oscar Wilde. These artists frequently had only contempt for the high bourgeoisie, who a generation or two later embraced as sublime their separation of aesthetics from ethics and transmitted their works to posterity in deluxe bindings.
The institutional independence of poets, artists, and intellectuals was, however, historically circumscribed. It continued to exist for poets like Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, and T. S. Eliot and for novelists like Proust, Joyce, and Joseph Conrad until well after World War II. The social space of intellectual and artistic freedom remained open for philosophers and critics like Jean-Paul Sartre and Edmund Wilson until the mid-twentieth century. It is undeniable that most aesthetic production and virtually all critical work in philosophy and social thought in the late twentieth century was written, painted, sculpted, or composed by members of university or college faculties. A fundamental path for social historians of culture, then, is to trace and comprehend the development of new ties and new dependencies between, on the one hand, the intellectual and poet and, on the other, the economic and social power elites that control universities.
Flowing out of this dependency is a further question concerning the relationship, within the academic dispensation, between the autonomization of high culture production, the paradigms and ideological parameters that shape it from within, and the changes in the dominant mode of production that mold the perspectives of the powerful entrepreneurs and other public figures who govern the universities. For example, does a certain correspondence exist between the deconstructionist side of postmodern thought and the decentralizing production methods that since Henry Ford have swept global industrial centers? Do both reflect the triumph of a liberal or neoliberal worldview that emphasizes the individual and denies the collective? That worldview posits the need for "flexibility" of labor, condemns public spending, especially on the poor, and denies the "social question" even as it rejects structural thinking, "essences" and fixed "subjects," and demands the universal acceptance of "risk" and "chaos." This linking of postmodern and neoliberal perspectives has been resisted by academic radicals, who argue that postmodernist aesthetics imply the transgression of conventional discourse. Moreover such radicals have purported to defy the individualism of neoliberal thought by pointing to the support of postmodernism for "identity studies," a field that deals with the values and interests of collectivities, particularly of ethnic and gender groups. Those hostile to the postmodernist position, however, have argued that this radical postmodernism touches on collectivities only as individual entities without intrinsic connection to humankind as a whole or to collective notions like class or nation that used to be considered an integral part of it. Thus they undermine any concept of a social justice applicable to all people and make it impossible to theorize a "just society." In the 1950s and 1960s American cold war propaganda agencies easily exploited and manipulated avant-garde aesthetic creations by covertly subsidizing individuals and organizations, anticipating the rupture between aesthetics and ethics in postmodernism. Thus the "transgression" of conventional ethics by the late-modernist autonomization of aesthetics may be quite compatible with the dominant liberal ideologies of the second half of the twentieth century.
An additional link between contemporary ideologies and postmodern high culture surfaces in information technology, which has inspired industrial and financial practices since Ford and has shaped the postmodern view of the world. Instantly downloading information onto the computer screen has conditioned automated production methods and the international financial market, and it also has encouraged the ahistorical and "playful" way of thinking of postmodern philosophers and literary critics. Technology has had another parallel impact on economy and high culture, the elimination of as many costly "permanent" positions as possible in factories and offices. The ease of subcontracting in computerized production has been mirrored in universities in a proliferation of poorly paid, nontenured positions and in the shifting of much professional production to underfunded and academically substandard junior colleges or branches of state universities. Finally, the postmodern dismissal (as "essentialist") of notions like "the nation" and "the working class" has coincided with the factual undermining of both phenomena by neoliberal globalization and computerization.
Merely granting the possibility of correspondences between the preconditions and precepts of postmodernism and those of neoliberal ideology raises two final questions for the social historian confronting contemporary high culture. What does the autonomization of aesthetics and intellectual disciplines, so bravely launched in the nineteenth century, signify in an epoch in which the producers of art and thought may reflect, both in their organizational dependence and in their intellectual and aesthetic paradigms, the worldview underlying the current mode of industrial production and exchange? The second question flows from the observation that both the monumental and the critical aspects of high culture have always been dependent on a notion of the present as imbedded in a continuum that moves between past and future. Given the symbiosis between the neoliberal celebration of the end of history and the virtual denial of history mandated by postmodern criticism and philosophy, are either of these aspects, particularly the critical, valid?
See alsoThe Medieval Heritage (volume 1);Secularization; Communications, the Media, and Propaganda (volume 2);Artists (volume 3);Belief and Popular Religion (volume 5); and other articles in this section.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism. New York, 1973.
Allen, James Smith. In the Public Eye: A History of Reading in Modern France, 1800–1940. Princeton, N.J., 1991.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. New York, 1983.
Arato, Andrew, and Eike Gerhardt, ed. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. New York, 1993. Includes essays by T. W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Cambridge, Mass., 1968.
Benhabib, Seyla. Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of CriticalTheory. New York, 1986.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. London, 1984.
Brombert, Victor. Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel. Cambridge, Mass., 1984.
Cassagne, Albert. La théorie de l'art pour l'art: En France chez les derniers romantiques et les premiers réalistes. 2d. ed. Paris, 1959.
Chailley, Jacques. The Magic Flute: Masonic Opera. Translated by Herbert Weinstock. London, 1972.
Chambers, E. K. The Mediaeval Stage. 2 vols. Oxford, 1903.
Chevalier, Louis. Labouring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Frank Jellinek. London, 1973.
Clark, T. J. The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848–1851. London, 1973.
Clark, T. J. Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution. London, 1973.
Craig, Hardin. English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages. Oxford, 1955.
Duby, Georges. Le temps des cathédrales: L'art et la société, 980–1420. Paris, 1976.
Eagleton, Terry. The Illusions of Postmodernism. Oxford, 1997.
Elias, Norbert. Über den Prozess der Zivilisation: Soziogenetische und psychogenetischeUntersuchungen. 2 vols. Basel, Switzerland, 1939.
Febvre, Lucien. Amour sacré, amour profane. Paris, 1971.
Febvre, Lucien. "Civilisation." In A New Kind of History: From the Writings of Febvre. Edited by Peter Burke. Translated by K. Folca. London, 1973. Pages 219–257.
Gay, Peter. The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. 5 vols. New York, 1984–1998.
Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford, 1983.
Ginzburg, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worms. The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-CenturyMiller. Translated by John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1983.
Gombrich, E. H. The Story of Art. Oxford, 1984.
Gossman, Lionel. Between History and Literature. Cambridge, Mass., 1990.
Graña, César. Bohemian versus Bourgeois: French Society and the French Man of Letters in the Nineteenth Century. New York, 1964.
Howarth, W. D. Sublime and Grotesque: A Study of French Romantic Drama. London, 1975.
Huyghe, René. La relève du réel: la peinture française au XIXe siècle: Impressionnisme, symbolisme. Paris, 1974.
Jacoby, Russell. The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy. New York, 1999.
Jacoby, Russell. The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe. New York, 1987.
Jay, Martin. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and theInstitute of Social Research, 1923–1950. Boston, 1973.
Kreuzer, Helmut. Die Boheme: Analyse und Dokumentation der intellektuellen Sub-kultur vom 19. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart. Stuttgart, Germany, 1971.
Le Goff, Jacques. Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago, 1980.
Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error. Translated by Barbara Bray. New York, 1979.
Lindsay, Jack. Gustave Courbet: His Life and Art. London, 1973.
Löwy, Michael, and Robert Sayre. Révolte et mélancolie: Le romantisme à contre-courant de la modernité. Paris, 1992.
Marienstras, Richard. New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Cambridge, U.K., 1985.
McCole, John. Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition. Ithaca, N.Y., 1983.
Mitzman, Arthur. Michelet, ou, La subversion du passé. Paris, 1999.
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus. Die Zauberflöte. (The magic flute.) Libretto to Colin Davis recording. Translated by Robert Jordan. Philips, 1984.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Use and Abuse of History. Indianapolis, Ind., 1957.
Palmer, Bryan D. Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History. Philadelphia, 1990.
Ringer, Fritz K. The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933. Cambridge, Mass., 1969.
Saunders, Frances Stonor. Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. London, 1999.
Schorske, Carl E. Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. New York, 1980.
Thiesse, Anne-Marie. "L'éducation sociale d'un romancier: Le cas d'Eugène Sue." Actes de la Recherche en Science Sociale 32–33 (April–June 1980): 51–63.
Wiggershaus, Rolf. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance. Translated by Michael Robertson. Cambridge, Mass., 1994.