Edgar Morin 1965

Intellectuals and Mass Culture

Source: Communication, no.5, 1965;Translated: for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor;CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2012.

I will situate myself along the axis of what Paul Lazarsfeld said. The concepts of mass

culture and higher culture were posed by the intellectual class. There must be an auto-

observation, an auto-critique on the part of the intellectual class. We must perhaps even put

in question the legitimacy of the two concepts of higher and mass culture.

The legitimacy of the first concept is easy to contest. Paul Lazarsfeld said it already: we

are living in an era when the avant-garde has become one of the forms of academism. There

is, as Harold Rosenberg called it, a tradition of the new. In a sense higher culture, which

once lived in the avant-garde, has become a generalized academism, reaching as far as the

avant-garde. In another sense this culture is in crisis in the 20th century. It puts itself in

question, and this questioning has become one of the elements of culture. In American and

French universities this questioning has not been pushed too far. I mean by this that as

much as painting puts in question the traditional forms of expression; as much a music puts

itself in question; as much as Surrealism and all that followed it constituted a putting in

question of the very notions of art and culture, to that extent it seems that as soon as we are

at the scholarly or humanist level the pieces are glued back together and once again people

speak of Culture (with a capital C).

The notion of art has been one of the most embattled notions of the past century. For

France the great shaker-upper was Rimbaud, who loved the Latin of the church and

carnival tents: in short, everything that appeared to artists and aesthetes to be a caricatured

degradation of art. But the entire 20th century saw that art was a combat between two

irreducible and antagonistic tendencies: on the one hand academic art, and on the other

hand new art. Where then is the unity of art, of culture? Today there is a mixing together of

academism and the avant-garde that is occurring so rapidly that it is difficult to precisely

situate academism, since the new is a new academism. Nevertheless, the multiplicity of

tendencies, of values, points out to us that it is difficult to pose higher culture as a value and

a homogeneity. The unifying vision is above all a reassuring vision, and this vision has

always been contested by creative movements in the realm of culture.

That takes care of higher culture. I am not saying that everything is disintegrating into

separate fragments, and my conclusion is not that there is no culture. My conclusion is that

what we are dealing with is a half-true notion because it contains as much heterogeneity as

unity. We find ourselves before an unstable notion, and we use it and discuss it incorrectly,

given that we manipulate a conglomeration as if it were something simple.

What is more, it would be erroneous to speak of culture when it is in crisis, and this crisis

opens it to interrogation. One of the most meaningful words in modern art is

investigation: painting, sculpture and music are carrying out investigations. But

investigation also deals with the truth, with values, with the bases of culture. Culture ceases

to be clear in itself. Today we cannot use the words high culture as a guiding light.

Let us now speak of mass culture. I have come increasingly to believe that we are wrong

to use the concept of mass culture. I say we, myself included, since I have often used this

concept. In the first place we know that we cannot identify mass culture with what is

distributed through modern technical methods. We cannot say radio and television = mass

culture, because there is political news, there is educational radio, there is religious

programming. Telecommunications are used on the sea between ships. It is what remains

(shows, entertainment) or what wraps things (news, not to mention religion) that we call

mass culture and which we can to a certain degree unify, in function on one hand of a

theme (individualism, youth, beauty, love, etc.) and on the other hand in function of the

notion of mass production and distribution.

I believe that during the years 1925-50 a mass culture developed with clear common

standards. But I also believe we are entering a new era of diversification, where the notion

of mass culture risks becoming artificially unifying.

We see today there are different stratifications. Mass culture develops along the road to

plurality, not homogeneity. Let us take the cinema: today three cinemas are developing: the

cinema of super-productions, the cinma d'auteur, and the television cinema of reporting-communication and cinma vrit, while the preceding period was dominated by astandard commercial cinema with marginal currents.

What is more, we today see the proliferation of mutual contamination between so- called

higher culture and sectors of mass culture. First, higher culture raises certain products of

mass culture to aesthetic dignity. What Paul Lazarsfeld said about the 20s is true today in

France. In that era the intellectuals, following the Surrealists in this, annexed Charlie

Chaplin. There was a great struggle to have the cinema called the seventh art. And in the

end, despite bitter resistance, the cinema imposed itself as an art among the cultivated.

Recently the Western and the crime film have succeeded in imposing themselves as modern

epics and tragedies, when before the war they were rejected by the mass of the cultivated.

I will skip rapidly over this. But we see that today there are efforts to integrate the aesthetic

into vulgar genres: the recent integration of films on Roman antiquity, the rehabilitation of

the popular novel of the 19th century... Currently the comic strip is being integrated with

art: a year ago a comic strip club was created in which they examine, as seriously as the

Princesse de Clves, certain strips of the high era. These phenomena of integration into theaesthetic are not simply a wish to appear original or a refined snobbery or a seeking of the

ultimate refinement in the trivial.

In short, all of this represents an extremely interesting phenomenon because what

differentiates mass culture from the aesthetic, i.e. from high culture, has to do not only with

the work itself, but essentially with how we look at it. For example, right now I am

following the process of aestheticisation of comic strips. Until now comic strips were

situated in a formless world. They were consumed and that was that. But integrating them

into culture means introducing hierarchy and value to them; the differentiation between the

beautiful and the not-beautiful. And so in the strips of the Pieds-Nickels people

distinguish between the good and bad periods. We see that the process of acculturation in

this sense consists in establishing order and giving value to the senses of beauty and non-

beauty. But the integration of so-called vulgar genres is at the same time the disintegration

of the traditional hierarchy and the disaggregation of low art.

To be sure, in the multiplicity of current interferences and osmoses between higher

culture and mass culture there is a reciprocal attraction, an encounter between the most

accessible levels of higher culture and those levels of mass culture that raise themselves the

highest.

But its not only this. There is also the fact that what appeared to be the most vulgar, the

dullest, the most ridiculous, the lowest from the classic point of view of culture now appears

to the integrators as something poetic, charming, true, etc. For example, the geste ofItalian films on antiquity (Hercules Against Samson, ...Against Ulysses, etc) has

something naively poetic about it that charms the esthetic sense of many of the cultivated.

Personally, I believe in the nave art of low class commercial films, in the art brut of semi-documentaries, slices of life and longest days... But lets set my taste aside. What matters is

to note that there are zones of reciprocal contamination between the two cultures.

In these conditions, we should note among the phenomena provoked by the reciprocal

actions of the two cultures one that manifests itself on an important scale: the constituting of

a new sphere. Certain zones of so-called mass culture constitute a sphere that orbits like a

satellite around both the technological nucleus of mass culture and the cultural nucleus of

higher culture. You thus have a satellite with two suns. Such is the case for the art cinema

the cinma d'auteur which now has its own theaters, circuits, system of production.

And so I think that beyond a certain point the words mass culture and higher culture

are of no help. I dont cast these words into an undifferentiated chaos. They are sufficiently

appropriate that we can preserve them up to a certain point: we feel they concern

something. But at the same time they neither define nor discern everything. And for my part

I feel I was wrong in the essay I dedicated to this question in not sufficiently reflecting onthe conceptual problem in order to find a solution. I think that in order to palliate thisdifficulty we must above all see the great lines of force that are the industrial, the cultural,the technological, the social, and the political, around which we must align the problems.We cannot content ourselves with these two polarizing concepts alone; we require others,and it is possible to find a certain number. This would be all the more necessary if, as Ibelieve, historical development sees the accentuation of diversification in both high cultureand mass culture, the accentuation of contamination; if the adventure of art and theadventure of culture explode these oppositions while recreating other oppositions withoutbringing to an end the opposition between original investigation on the one hand andconformism and snobbery on the other.

In conclusion, to refuse an analysis and dispute in terms of the opposition between highculture and mass culture means not only avoiding the antagonistic colliding and theverbal choice. To refuse the choice of a question posed in terms of an alternative between ahigh and a low culture doesnt mean refusing to choose; it means refusing a schematic anddogmatic question.

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