What is the role of the middlebrow in our cultural and academic representations? In the 1972 film “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” the director Luis Bunuel criticizes the Bourgeois lifestyles in France as they mock working class servants and constantly engage in meaningless gatherings of dates, business arrangements and consumption. Two of the sequences in the film come to the bourgeois with a different eye. Throughout the movie, we randomly cut to a long deserted roadway where the characters walk slowly and indifferently to nowhere in particular. This is not a casual stroll, but more like purgatory. This feeling is also examined in the reoccurring meal setups, where the characters gather expecting a meal and are never fed. During the whole film, the characters never eat and are left hungry by all of their desires.
While Bunuel clearly has no sympathies for the Bourgeois (these two elements are more damning rather than understanding), we might consider why we should have sympathy. Throughout the course we have discussed how the working class taste is often romanticized in culture and highbrow taste dictates culture. The middlebrow taste, as characterized by Andrew Ross’ account of the Rosenberg’s letters is always disdainful. There is a feeling by intellectuals that the middlebrow taste in its striving, is just trying too hard and the result is a web of emotions, literary and cultural signals, and attempts at profoundness. Ross calls this “the language of “ordinary people” writing for literary effect … they are writing for a public” (27).
Ross points out: “The problem of petty-bourgeois taste, culture, and expression remains to this day a largely neglected question for cultural studies and a formidable obstacle to a left cultural politics” (29). So, while No Respect was written in 1989, it still doesn’t seem like this question has been sufficiently developed, (yet in 20 years, I’m sure it has and I just haven’t stumbled on it yet). Ross traces the anxiety of the bourgeois, especially the petite-bourgeois. We also see it in Bourdieu’s chapter in Distinction, where through his case study of petite-bourgeois interviews, the fear of not ‘keeping up’ is clearly expressed and the mode of indicating pleasure in objects is always aware of itself. There is a knowledge that one should say they know Picasso and be able to articulate major works or general styles, but the effort and time required to keep such an education is taxing on their well-being and financial security (families running their financials into the ground just to send their children to better schools or buy expensive theater tickets).
In examining Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Ross points to this concern again. The selection he takes from AGK about the Russian Peasant (44) could be more fully fleshed out. Yes, Greenberg holds that the process of the art piece is the real focus and not the “effect.” Yet, he also understands what it would take an individual (especially one from a lower class, - I’ll add middleclass -) to comprehend and appreciate an artwork such as Picasso. Ross leaves out this bit:
“This needs, after all, a considerable amount of “conditioning.” Superior culture is one of the most artificial of all human creations, and the peasant finds no “natural” urgency within himself that will drive him toward the Picasso in spite of all difficulties. In the end the peasant will go back to kitsch when he feels like looking at pictures, for her can enjoy kitsch without effort” (Greenberg, 19).
Ross’ focus on choice and freedom in this chapter does not connect Greenberg’s awareness of how other classes come to art and how they are trained. I think in this passage, we see that Greenberg ‘gets it.’
The middlebrow is the most hated of all the brows, maybe because they buy into a system that keeps them “buying in” (???)
I really like your reading of Bunuel's film as middlebrow as purgatory, Katie. Your argument about this middling position itself links back nicely to the ways Bourdieu draws the field of cultural production. The highbrow is the space of rarefied production and theoretical advances in form. Lowbrow, even is romanticized in a way because the workers who materially produce and distribute the cultural products (I'm thinking of newspaper delivery boys and printshop workers here) have actual, active roles in this process. What does the middlebrow do? Buy. And push papers.
ReplyDeleteThe problem of reading the middlebrow as simply as "buying in" is, however, I think, a larger flaw in Bourdieu's reasoning. The authors of middlebrow art are, more often than not, themselves middlebrow. Could T.S. Eliot write a good TV script? Probably about as well as Jackie Gleason could write poetry. Of course, I'm being over-reductive here--plenty of authors/producers can efficiently cycle between brows--but I think its incorrect to equate directly a hierarchical media model with hierarchies of genre/form.
The question I would want to pose in return is something we have been thinking about all semester, though I'm not satisfied with out answers: to what brow do academics belong, in general? While we spend our lives theorizing and reflecting on form/genre/and medium like the highbrow, we do not produce in the same way as the avant-garde highbrow. Does that mean that we are simply "buying in" to elitist or kitsch culture?