Author: Eric Hobsbaum
Excerpt from: The Fractured Age: Culture and Society in the 20th Century (CITIC Publishing Group, Insight City-State, 2021)
Eric Hobsbawm
（WilliamH. McNeill，1917—2012）
British historian, fellow of the Royal Academy of Sciences, and winner of the Barzane Prize. In 1998, British Prime Minister Tony Blair personally awarded him the title of "Honorary Lord of Britain", praising him as "a giant in progressive political history".
Hobsbawm's study of the historical period is dominated by the 19th century and extends to the 17th, 18th and 20th centuries; the area of study extends from the United Kingdom, the European continent, and to Latin America.
He wrote a great deal of literature during his lifetime, and his research in the fields of labor movements, peasant rebellions, nationalism and world history is of the highest standard among contemporary historians.
Hobsbawm is also a master of narrative historiography, and his macroscopic and smooth writing style extends the charm of narrative historiography to the public.
Representative is the "Era Quadrilogy": "The Age of Revolution: 1789~1848", "The Age of Capital: 1848~1875", "The Age of Empire: 1875~1914", "The Age of Extremes: 1914~1991"
Its magnificent structure and clear narrative have become a very popular contemporary historical work, giving millions of ordinary readers around the world the opportunity to touch history.
He is also the author of "Nation and Nationalism", "Hobsbawm's Autobiography", "On History" and other books.
The social history of such a noble animal as a horse is worth learning from those who study art. The horse's role in the world was once as steady as Tarzan's, and to this day, its power is used as a unit of measurement. In addition to carrying people and transporting goods, it has other less obvious roles in human life: it is a symbol of the status of the rich who own land, an excuse for the poor who have no land to gamble and rest, an object of praise for painters and sculptors, and so on. This shows how indispensable it has been in everyday life. It's all the way to the past. Except in a few less developed countries and special regions, horses have been completely replaced by cars and tractors, and the results are very satisfactory, because cars run much faster and tractors pull things more. Horses are now a complete luxury. As a result, man's understanding of the function of transport and horses needs to be changed not only, but fundamentally, because most of the ideas on these issues in the horse's time are out of date or completely outdated.
The situation of 20th-century art is comparable. Art has also become superfluous due to advances in technology, and the first task of art criticism should be to figure out how this happened and what exactly replaced art. To date, most artists and art critics have been reluctant to face this situation honestly. Part of the reason is that no computer has ever written a novel, not even a thriller, which gives them an excuse not to face reality, but the main reason is that no one happily writes an obituary for themselves. In addition, old-fashioned handicrafts or artisan craftsmanship still flourished as a luxury, like ponies on the outskirts of cities, while old-fashioned craftsmen were more successful than horses in adapting to mechanized mass production. However, the economic facts are irrefutable. Professional writers who write books are like weavers who still use hand looms after the invention of the power loom: 2/3 or 4 of professional writers may not earn as much as typists, and to bring together writers who make a living entirely on books, a medium-sized room can more than enough to hold them all. Every advertiser and editor knows that it's photographers, not "artists, who charge high today."
The industrial revolution in the production of ideas, like the industrial revolution in material production, has two reasons: technological progress has replaced manual skills; large-scale demand has made manual production overwhelmed. The key to it is not the mass production of specific creative products—all forms of printing have always done so, without changing the characteristics of writing, nor does the record player substantively change the music, but in its ability to replace creation. The visual arts were thus transformed by static and dynamic photography; music later entered the realm of artificial sound (like the man-made fibers in the textile industry). But writing is still resisting true mechanization, even as scientists make great efforts to develop effective translation machines. In fact, to determine whether an art has "industrial" characteristics, it is not necessary to look at whether it employs specific mechanical devices, but whether it divides the process of individual creation into special parts, like Adam Smith's famous pin factory. It means that individual producers are integrated into a collective coordinated by a director or manager. Novels have authors, newspapers don't. Some newspapers publish "reports" that have been edited, rewritten or compiled of raw or semi-processed materials, and cannot even be regarded as the joint work of several authors.
Such an industrial approach is essential to meet the unprecedented needs of the masses. The entertainment or art to which the masses are now accustomed is no longer an occasional event, but an activity that runs like a rolling river, and broadcasting, a natural product of technological culture, is an example. Certain branches of literature, such as novels for application purposes, can still be produced by hand, not only because the demand for it is small, long-flowing, and cyclical, but also because the market can rely on a large number of temporary workers, as well as professional authors who are willing to hire writers. Even so, authors who really want to keep up with the pace of industrial production will either die of overwork, like Edgar Wallace, or retreat, like Simenon. The new arts of the industrial age, such as film, radio, and popular music, had a detailed division of labor in the process from the beginning, while in essence, collective or cooperative art has always done so, with prominent examples of architecture and stage performances.
What is produced by this industrial or semi-industrial production is obviously very different from the traditional handmade "work of art" and cannot be judged in the same way. There may be some revolutionary "works", like blockbuster movies, that can be judged in the old way, but it is not known whether that is the best way to judge. Occasional works of art in the past, such as literary geniuses such as Hammet and Simeon, arose in genres dominated by writers, but modern crime fiction is judged not by Sam Spade but by Perry Mason, for whom traditional criticism has no way of doing. In some of the increasingly common extreme examples, such as newspapers, comic strips, and some popular music producers' products, there may not even be a shadow of the past. It's ridiculous to judge Hemingway's "Smoke of War," to apply the criteria that judge Hogarth to Andy Capp, or to measure the Rolling Stones by the standards that apply to Hugo Wolf or even Cole Porter. Conversely, it has been said that no novel or film about the American West deserves the undeniable "great" work of art in the conventional sense, but this does not in any way detract from the achievement of works of art in Western themes. The truth is that industrialization has made old-fashioned critics as superfluous as old-fashioned artists.
In the face of this situation, we must first accept it, but acceptance is not the same as approval. It is human nature to hope that it will disappear, but to no avail.
In the face of the world of mass media, denial or full acceptance is not the solution. Although the latter is slightly more useful of both attitudes, since it at least implies the recognition of the need for a new analysis of this unequal situation.
There are three kinds of efforts to understand and accept industrial culture at the intellectual level. The Americans worked to discover, describe, and measure; continental Europe—especially the French and Italians—analyzed and elaborated theories; the British made relevant moral arguments. The field work done by Americans, especially in sociology, is well known. The work of the Italians and French is largely unknown, and it is possible that only Edgar Morin's brilliant book, The Stars, is known. Although Moran published his magnum opus, The Zeitgeist, two years earlier, it has attracted little attention in Britain; Roland Barthes' analysis of the meaning of the women's fashion industry or Evelyn Sullerot's study of women's publications (Paris, 1963) is completely unknown. Umberto Echo's Apocalypse and Synthesis—a somewhat pretentious title—provides a detailed and detailed analysis of Steve Cunning, Superman, and Charlie Brown, as well as the popular song industry and television, to learn about the efforts of Italian critics to study popular culture over the past five years. More than half of this informative book is research that has already been published.
British criticism in this area is effectively monopolized by the New Left, which reflects many of Levi's views (but not as repulsive to post-industrial culture as Levi's), and also includes some of Marx's theories, but in much smaller proportions. It carries a strong nostalgia for the "culture of the working class" and a general enthusiasm for democracy, and tirelessly and earnestly hopes that it will be beneficial to the world. In fact, this is a very typical British style. So, while our study of popular culture is less systematic and sometimes less specialized in terms of governance, a large number of solid practical studies make up for the theoretical deficiencies. The UK has really done something real about improving the mass media, and it's easy to compare It with British TV and Foreign TV. But not only that, but british observers have also been more aware of certain trends— such as the taste of adolescents— earlier and more clearly than sociologists in France and the United States, who are more academically weighty but somewhat out of touch with reality.
At the other extreme of the British study of popular culture, they tend to accept everything that reflects the "people's" preferences, believing that as long as it is what the people like, it must be good. Richard Hogart sometimes approaches this extreme in his famous book The Use of Literacy, for example, when he unearths significant significance from the minutiae details of ordinary life shown in the British women's magazine Pegger's Newspaper. Some laundry detergent advertisements also go this way. Both of these attitudes towards popular art have an intrinsic weakness, and both are bent on finding human values from mass-produced art, but human values can only be marginal at best. There are no horses under the lid of the engine probing the brain.
But if there are no horses, then what? The torrent of industrial culture produces not products that require individual attention (and if such products are produced by chance), but virtual worlds made up of newspapers, comic strips, or tv series of endless Western stories or crime stories. It produces not a specific ballet, but a crowded ballroom; not passion, but atmosphere; not beautiful architecture, but an entire city; not even a specific personal experience, but multiple experiences at the same time: all kinds of headlines are scattered, automatic record players in cafes sing non-stop, drama climaxes on TV, and shampoo advertisements interspersed in between. This is not a new phenomenon, walter Benjamin once said that it is the traditional way of experiencing architecture: facing a group of buildings, they are experienced as if they were the environment in which they lived; but today this phenomenon has risen to dominance. Traditional aesthetic criticism does not apply to it, because the products of cultural industrialization go beyond artistic techniques and focus on highlighting style. It's no wonder that the endless shows we see every day in the newspapers and on TELEVISION sell "personality", and the "star quality" of actors is valued more than acting talent or skill. Television series based on certain characters or novels illustrate this process.
It is unclear whether the process can be given the word "art". In real life, the gods of Mount New Olympus may include the characters we see in the newspapers every day. They may be noticed by the press for their film performances; the Lace News column reports all kinds of news about the stars. They could also be like the now-forgotten former Queen of Iran, Solaya, or Princess Diana, who is much later than her, starting with newspaper reports and going backwards.
This analysis raises two key questions: How do we judge the output of cultural trends and improve them? How much room is there for artistic value or personal creation? People who compare "good" and "bad" popular films, people who look for popular songs "in that category", and people who are good at the poor style of newspaper articles or newspaper typography confuse these two issues. The first question concerns the content of popular culture, especially morality. Bad comic strips don't get better just because they come from a master, they just make it easier for critics to accept. The most fundamental criticism of popular art is the criticism of the ideals and quality of life it endorses. As Hall and Werner have shown, the now-forgotten television series The Third Man was criticized not for its mediocre quality, but because it glorified greed and possession; even if it showed the right moral admonition, such as the need for tolerance between races, it could not diminish its condemnation. The real danger of industrialized culture, which has eliminated all competitors and become the only spiritual food for the majority of the population, is that it leaves the masses with no choice but to accept a world of mass production. Although some of its products do not completely adhere to the universal officially recognized moral code, such as the American comic strip "Superman", Mr. Echo's analysis of it is creepy and creepy, but even such products have not completely escaped the universal moral code. American intellectuals praised Abner Jr. for not going with the flow and for being critical because they really couldn't find anything else to praise; according to Mr. Echo, the comic strip "and its authors belong to the best and most enlightened Stevensonian radicals." In his quest for purity, the only thing he did not think of was that purity might mean complete subversion, meant the negation of the system." The greatest shortcoming of popular culture is that it creates a closed world, thus removing the fundamental element of human nature, that is, the pursuit of the perfect world, the great yearning of mankind.
This yearning does not disappear completely, but in popular culture it manifests itself as a fantasy of passive escape, usually a nihilistic fantasy. The Dada and Surreals foresaw this, and they became the only inheritors of traditional art who made a major contribution to modern popular culture. Despite the comical comedies of the Max Brothers and Britain, as well as some (but not all) anime and other manifestations of this illusory revolutionary spirit, popular culture still fails to fully reflect the growing illusion of denial of reality in public life, especially in the culture of young people. Only the advertising industry took the lead in producing a series of whimsical and unrealistic advertisements.
In popular culture, the fantasy, the unforeseen, and the incompletely rational stuff clearly provides a home for old-fashioned "art." Old-fashioned art naturally focused on activities that had not yet been mechanized. In contrast to the mechanical "Mickey Mouse music" is the improvisation of jazz musicians, who were the first explorers in the field. Today's emulation of them includes hand-operated cameras, casual discussions on television and unplanned shows, and most importantly improvisations on stage. Arguably, the remarkable revival of stage art in the 1950s was in many ways an artist's response to the triumph of industrialization. On stage, as in jazz concerts, the creator cannot be reduced to a screw, because the effect cannot be accurately copied, and the close relationship between the artist and the public still has that dangerous, exciting, unforeseen element.
However, improvisation is not the solution, but only a mitigation. Its relation to industrialized culture is that of leisure and industrial life, but of an enclave of freedom in the vast kingdom of coercion and convention (sometimes fragmented). Craft skills and industry pride The resources these artists have relied on since ancient times have produced better results because they still play a role in industrialized cultures. But for the artist, the best solution lies in the needs of industry itself, which, as Moran puts it, needs "the negative electrode of the electrode to function," that is, it needs to give a certain amount of space to real creation, because only real creation can supply it with raw materials for processing. In particular, there is a need to create new materials for industry, although artists are largely useless in the process of actual production. However, in film, the most successful genre of industrial culture, even Hollywood has always left a minimum of freedom for artists, while the financial structure of other film industries provides greater room for artistic creation.
But in the final analysis, popular art cannot be judged by how much space they leave for traditional art. The literary art of the American West is important not because John Ford directed excellent films on the subject. A good Western can only be regarded as a by-product of the popularity of this genre. The main achievement of the literary art of western themes is that it has created a landscape of ideas, a myth, a moral world, which is produced on the basis of hundreds of poor novels, movies and television dramas. Although the novels, films, and television have long since disappeared, this achievement has survived to this day. Hall and Werner's writings and similar books recognize this fact, which is their strength; their weakness is that, at least in the 1960s, they hesitated to acknowledge the implications of this fact. These books are still a guide to popular art, still telling people what is "good" and which is "bad." They still want to refuse to return to popular art.
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