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 a
standard 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 the
aesthetic 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 of
Italian 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 on
the conceptual problem in order to find a solution. I think that in order to palliate this
difficulty 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 I
believe, historical development sees the accentuation of diversification in both high culture
and mass culture, the accentuation of contamination; if the adventure of art and the
adventure of culture explode these oppositions while recreating other oppositions without
bringing to an end the opposition between original investigation on the one hand and
conformism and snobbery on the other.
In conclusion, to refuse an analysis and dispute in terms of the opposition between high
culture and mass culture means not only avoiding the antagonistic colliding and the
verbal choice. To refuse the choice of a question posed in terms of an alternative between a
high and a low culture doesnt mean refusing to choose; it means refusing a schematic and
dogmatic question.

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