Kitsch Harries 1 Why Should We Be Afraid of Kitsch? English original of “Waarom moeten we bang zijn voor kitsch,” transl. Jan Willem Reimtsma, Nexus, 2007, no. 47, pp. 127-147. The essay developed my contribution to the symposium “A Kitsch Culture”? (with Sidney Blumenthal, Hendrik Hertzberg, Menno Meyjes. Jack Miles, Jonathan Taplin), part of the Nexus Conference “New Notes Towards the Definition of European Culture. The Classics, Art and Kitsch,” Amsterdam, November 11, 2006. 1. Nostalgia, Kitsch, and Romanticism These reflections address questions raised by the title of the most recent Nexus Conference: “New Notes Towards the Definition of European Culture. The Classics, Art and Kitsch.” Its keynote was sounded, in the brochure I was sent, by the expression Kultur-Herbst-Gefühl, with reference to a letter Nietzsche wrote on June 21, 1871 to his friend Carl von Gersdorff, in which he responded to a report of arson said to have destroyed the Louvre and its collections. Nietzsche took it as a metaphor of a battle against culture waged by our modern civilization, leaving him for several days “entirely annihilated and dissolved in tears and doubts.” As it turned out, the report was mistaken: it was the Tuileries that went up in flames, part of the unrest that culminated in the downfall of the Paris Commune. And it was not in that letter that Nietzsche used this pathos-laden expression, so heavy with cultural nostalgia, to describe his mood, but in the first of a set of “Memorabilia,” a few words jotted down in the spring of 1878, after he had finished Human, All Too Human and was looking back, with much more questioning eyes, at something that now lay behind him: “Autumn — pain — stubble — rose- campions [Pechnelken — literally “pitch-carnations”] asters. Very similar, when the Louvre was supposed to have burned — Cultur-Herbstgefühl. Never a deeper pain.”1 In keeping with the young Nietzsche’s conviction that the civilization, of which he too was part, shared responsibility for the destruction of the supposedly lost masterpieces, the first panel of this Nexus conference thus addressed the question: why 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, 28 = N II 6. Frühling-Sommer 1878, no. 1, in Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. G. Colli und M. Montinari (DDTV, de Gruyter: München/ Berlin/New York, 1980), vol. 8. p. 504. Kitsch Harries 2 have we abandoned the classics? But have we in fact abandoned the classics? Or were the classics simply left behind by the progress of our post-technological and increasingly global culture? And who are “we”? A small, largely self-anointed cultural elite, guardians of what remains of that culture that once provided something like a spiritual home? Does this “we” include the ungebildeten, i.e. uneducated masses? And finally, just what lets us call a work a classic? Does the very conception of a classic not presuppose a faith in Western culture as the custodian of enduring values, enshrined in certain key works, that can no longer be presupposed? The second panel continued the discussion by considering the question: “Why Art, Music, and Poetry?” That these should continue to play a decisive part in shaping our understanding of what we take to matter is by no means obvious. Does this question not also betray nostalgia for something that today no longer seems to possess more than a peripheral significance? And nostalgia was suggested once more by the question that was the title of the final session: “A Kitsch Culture”? That question does suggest that, at least in some sense, art remains significant: does not “kitsch” name first of all a certain art? To be sure, the label suggests that a culture, whose heart and soul is, to cite George Steiner, kitsch, can only be a simulacrum of true culture. As Clement Greenberg once put it, defending abstraction as a last bastion of authenticity: “Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money, not even their time.”2 The suggestion is that kitsch, born of and answering to a loss of culture that Greenberg links to the industrial revolution and to the capitalism it made possible, while it may pretend to demand nothing of us except our money, ends up drowning us in inauthenticity. 2 Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Art and Culture. Crititical Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1961), p. 10. Kitsch Harries 3 But does such elitist pathos not attribute to kitsch a sinister significance that it does not generally possess? What threat do garden gnomes and Bambi pose? Has most entertainment not always been kitsch? Who today is still afraid of kitsch? We may deplore that there is not more support for what we think really deserves to be called art, but is most kitsch, like most art, not quite harmless? Suppose ours is indeed a kitsch culture, must this be criticized? The negative connotations of the “kitsch” label may make the answer seem self- evident: from its very beginning in the elitist art-world of late 19th century Munich “kitsch” has been used as a term to condemn, initially a certain kind of cheap, too easily produced art, relying on formulas and mechanical reproduction, a mere shadow of authentic, genuine art. But what was condemned was increasingly not just a certain kind of inferior art, but the state of mind, the ethos that produced and welcomed such art: the kitsch-personality that to find Ersatz for lacking values wants to be moved and edified without having to invest too much emotional capital in what it consumes and without really having to change. Both the producer and consumer of kitsch are here condemned, not just for having bad taste, but for having a taste that suggests something like moral failure: the consumer of kitsch wants to be deceived, refusing to open his eyes to reality as it really is and to the demands it places on us, escaping from that reality to clichéd images of some happier, better world, perhaps of the good old world of the fathers, a world that selfishness and greed are supposed to have destroyed. The producer of kitsch exploits such willingness to collude with the deception and, like the old magician of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, “knowingly, willingly lies,” substituting simulacra for what should be real and genuine. Such an understanding of “kitsch” recalls what Nietzsche had to say about romanticism: “too much energy is being wasted on all sorts of resurrections of what has died. Perhaps the whole romantic movement is best understood from this point of view.”3 Nietzsche might very well have agreed with Roger Scruton that “The romantic artist is attempting to invest human life with a religious aura, to rewrite those purely 3 Friedrich Nietzsche, Morgenröte, 159. Kitsch Harries 4 human experiences of conflict and passion as though they originated in the divine.”4 But the mature Nietzsche would have us question the way Scruton opposes the romantic artist to the creator of kitsch; he would have underscored the “as though”: is “the vision of a higher life” that romanticism is said by Scruton to sustain “in the midst of bourgeois mediocrity” supported by more than nostalgia for something already overtaken by the progress of reason and the world is has shaped? Scruton calls romantic art “a heroic attempt to re-enchant the world: to look on human beings as though they had the significance and the dignity of angels.” Once again the “as though” deserves special attention. As Kierkegaard taught, we must beware of allowing the aesthetic subjunctive to obscure the indicative of reality.5 Do romantic attempts to re-enchant a disenchanted world not also lead to kitsch, a far more demanding form of kitsch perhaps, but because of its pretensions not as harmless as some plastic Jesus dangling from a dashboard or an entertaining Hollywood movie of the fifties? The conjunction of kitsch, nostalgia, and romanticism invites the question: do those who invoke the culture of the past to condemn our post-culture as a kitsch culture not cling to something that belongs into a museum precisely because it no longer possesses genuine life? Are they not romantics in Nietzsche’s sense? By 1878 Nietzsche, as we know, had come to condemn not only Wagner, but his own Birth of Tragedy, despite all its attacks on Alexandrianism, appropriated by Greenberg in his critique of kitsch, as itself kitsch — although that word was not yet available to him — pretentious kitsch, to be sure, kitsch for a self-selected, self-validating elite, but kitsch nonetheless? Human beings have long opposed their versions of some past golden age to the decadent present. That the distinctive ugliness of our disenchanted modern world should breed nostalgia for some bygone and supposedly more authentic, more moral, more beautiful world is only to be expected. If we can call such nostalgia the mother of kitsch, 4 Roger Scruton, “Kitsch and the Modern Predicament,” City Journal, Winter 1999, http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:suDGSDR4q2kJ:www.city- journal.org/html/9_1_urbanities_kitsch_and_the.html+%2B%22Roger+Scruton%22+%2 Bkitsch&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1 5 See Karsten Harries, "Transformations of the Subjunctive," Thought, vol. 55, no. 218, 1980, pp. 283-294. Kitsch Harries 5 its father could perhaps be said to be the industrial revolution and the capitalism it made possible.