13 November 2007

Entertainment: Consuming Culture and Leaving Decay

Habermas delineates five different types of public spheres and identifies the danger of mass media to the integrity of the public sphere, and ultimately to the integrity of communicative action.

Separate from a 'true culture', Adorno identifies mass culture and a culture industry that commodifies, liquidates, and reifies the individual and forces him into (non-thinking) resignation. As a form of Anti-Enlightenment, the culture industry is a type of cult - a cult of conformity - and an ideology of ideology.

Arendt refines Habermas' and Adorno's arguments by identifying and narrowing in on the principal culprit: Entertainment. More importantly, she defines culture, society, and mass society and by so doing, relays why Entertainment has such a (detrimentally) significant impact on culture.

Before anyone can speak on a topic with any import, it is important first to define what s/he means by the term(s) utilized. Arendt is a definer par excellence on this front because she has a rich knowledge of the Latin and the Greek languages:

According to her (and any good dictionary), culture is of Roman origin from the word colere, meaning to cultivate, dwell, take care of, tend to, and preserve ("The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance," Between Past and Future, 1961). Implied in the Roman use of the term is an attitude of cultivation and care between man and nature. Cicero first used the term for matters of spirit and mind (excolere animum - cultivating the mind; cultura animi - cultured mind).

In contrast, Arendt explains that the Greeks had no equivalent to the Roman concept of culture because of the predominance of the fabricating arts in Greek civilization. They did not think of culture as cultivating but rather as fabrication and thus, belonging to the cunning, skillful, technical devices with which man tames and rules nature.

Between the Roman and the Greek usage of the term, she settles on the Roman:

"culture in the sense of developing nature into a dwelling place...as well as in the sense of taking care of the monuments of the past, determine even today the content and the meaning we have in mind when we speak of culture."

Although Arendt adopts the Roman usage of culture, it is interesting that the current reality tends more towards the Greek usage due to the omnipresence of electronic technologies. However, rather than taming and ruling nature, electronic technology enables a degree of mediated transcendence over nature.

Electronic technology is dynamic potentiality and preserved change. It is cultural redefinition in perpetuity because it challenges and forces into critical reassessment traditional and normative concepts, limitations, and possibilities.

Arendt continues her definitions by delineating the differences between society and mass society, and between entertainment and culture:

Society wanted culture, evaluated and devaluated cultural things into social commodities, used and abused them for their own selfish purposes, but never consumed culture so it never disappeared.

Mass society wants entertainment rather than culture. For her, the products needed for entertainment serve a life process to while away left-over time (the time after labor and sleep). With mass society, the products of entertainment are consumed and thus, disappear.

Entertainment is a part of a biological life process. Because entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life, it devours, consumes, and destroys. It is a consumer good destined to be used up. It is anti-culture because culture is that which is durable, lasting, and immortal. By its very nature, entertainment and the need for entertainment has begun to threaten the cultural world.

Culture is being destroyed to yield entertainment, resulting in a general decay. Because culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world, an object is cultural to the extent it can endure. Arendt identifies art works as cultural objects par excellence because their durability outlasts the lifespan of mortals:

"Only where such survival is assured do we speak of culture, and only where we are confronted with things which exist independently of all utilitarian and functional references, and whose quality remains always the same, do we speak of works of art."

Culture is threatened when all worldly objects and things are treated as mere functions for the life process of mass society to fulfill a need and thus, to be consumed.

Arendt extols art as the paragon of all cultural objects. However, the current state of culture and experience is such that perhaps technology should replace the role of art and culture should be redefined. We no longer have the need, patience, or temperment for endurance qua art and artifact. Art in this sense is historical - a snapshot of the zeitgeist to which it belongs.

Away from history, technology defies traditions of time and remediates a qualitatively efficient durability and endurance. If we are to follow the Roman usage of culture, then perhaps the role of electronic technology and functionality need their due, either in lieu of art, or juxtaposed alongside art.

In either scenario, language needs critical re-assessment. The traditions structuring culture need to be renovated.