What Does it Mean to Achieve a State of "High Culture"?
High Culture is often a signifier of inequality, but also a regulator of it
The apocryphal Marie-Antoinette, upon hearing about the lack of bread among the peasantry, was supposed to have proclaimed “let them eat cake”. This drew such a furor at her alienation with the struggle of the common people that it led to hers and Louis XVII’s hanging. In our own age, it is much more common and apropos to show consideration and petty admiration for the struggles of the poor, while the language of elites is much more enclosed and cumbersome, difficult to understand from the outside looking in. Where did you spend summer? What schools did your children go to? How many times has your name appeared on the side of a building? For our modern class separation, the division of cake and bread would seem only so simple to return to.
And yet, as we consume these experiences of culture, authority and structure in our day to day lives, we also experience culture as a sort of mainstreamed porridge, with social indicators and passive consumption of content - whether its White Lotus or whatever appears on Obama’s year-end list - there to maintain the concept of class, camp and status in a covertly political sense and an overtly civilized sense. Most of what we are exposed to regarding elite culture, and by extension high culture, is a matter of manners and taste.
This is in contrast to what is perhaps more classically understood as actual high culture, which would relate to classic literature, classical music (with even eminent figures like Wagner regarded as base and camp), and poetry like that of Milton or the attempts of TS Eliot to contend with the nature of human existence, sanity, original sin, and crimes like rape, incest, pederasty and untold moral failings which are meant to cast into light good and positive, socially constructive values.
Most “high” culture, historically, is reliant on internal drama, a development of a philosophy of the self, and a differentiation of the self primarily from one’s family (like the Oedipal cycle of Sophocles) but also from one’s city or one’s state. This sort of abandonment of social constraint should be considered positive by the elites of today, but as it exists they are captured by the same forces of middle class aesthetics, mass media, and a desire for communicability of culture that reduce the human experience to what can be resembled, rather than what can be thought.
This means: 1) a limitation of internal monologue, 2) a limitation of the exploration of internal contradiction (e.g. stories where they are always “good guys” and “bad guys” and 3) a desire of prerequisite basis of interest in media (e.g. comic book franchises, vs the consumption of media for its own sake).
The decline of unencumbered or “indulgent” forms like this is not merely a consequence of a disappeared landed gentry, but of a limited attention span which has increasingly diminished the capacity for humanity’s complex thought. Indeed, as short-form-video cements its position as the dominant media format of the 2020s, the medium itself is seeing players elongate the attention into serials and soap operas - similar to the style attempted by Quibi - but watching them entails relying on the drama, tropes, conflicts and habits of viewership that are developed through engagement with deeper, longer, more complex pieces of content.
In fact, as cinema is no longer the dominant form of media, cinema itself also becomes more like short-form video: modern movies are typically children’s movies, musicals, horror movies, or superhero flicks, and for the most part they are an assemblage of setpiece action sequences without the need for a strong narrative connection between them. They almost happen as inconsequential coincidences from one to the next, kind of like how life probably now feels for most people, most of the time.
More ironic in this context is the recession of once mainstream, middle class forms of media into elite novelty niches - once Jazz, soon hip hop perhaps, in some ways baseball, which is growing in financial capacity despite overall declines in popularity - the passage of time has cast out media and cultural practices which the middle class once adored in order for elites to collect, picking up the pieces and demonstrating status with their ability to “cosplay” as middle class patrons of old.
High culture served a purpose in past eras which we are lacking today: in previous centuries, high culture pastimes created a clear social order, in the same way the festivity around public executions might have. Yes, they were both something to do, but they also created a sort of etiquette that reinforced the social order: beautiful ballerinas were adored quietly, meandering criminals were hung by the gallows. In our modern context, ritual reinforcement of social order is seen as gauche, but it is also apparently necessary to maintain order and good function of day-to-day society. As such, any economic nationalist agenda not only needs to have an aesthetic component, but also aesthetic regulation by the state - state subsidy for high culture as a means to maintain the consistency, the hegemony and the good order of a functioning society - and yes perhaps also a return to public executions as well.