Beware "The Culture"

One of the downsides to panoramic works like Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life is that it can leave you in a daze, a sort of psychic vertigo, in which vast quantities of information have been supplied yet to very little effect. One expects to be bowled over by the impact of such a leviathan and, consequently, one braces oneself for the deluge, only to find oneself dripped on.

First of all, Barzun’s notion of Western cultural life is incredibly selective; we are talking French, British and German, in the main, with some genuflection toward Vienna and Florence along the way, but by and large Western culture for Barzun means courtly arts rather than anything that might consitute popular culture (I don’t recall anything more than a passing reference to what Habermas devoted an entire work to, namely the structural transformation of the public sphere in the 17th and 18th centuries). Barzun’s specificities mean that this might be a nice introductory text for an undergrad studying Moderns, say, but not for anyone who imagines that “culture” means anything beyond opera, literature, and painting. And even on that score, were you to take a trip over to Alphonse’s blog, you can pretty much guarantee that the texts cited there appear nowhere in Barzun’s tome. I know where I prefer to get my lessons from.

Second, Barzun seems to want to argue that the past 500 years of culture embody an unfolding of particular themes—emancipation, individualization, secularization and so on—all of which he capitalizes as they appear throughout the text. It’s a case poorly made, not just because he is so selective in his choices and, I have no doubt, contrary selections could have been cited, but also because works of art are consciously made products, and if the themes he cites are deliberately chosen by artists, he needs to ask why it is that the artists he has highlighted have chosen those themes. If, on the other hand, he is arguing that these themes have appeared in spite of the artists' intended aims, but rather as a consequence of the unfolding of history, then he needs to link “culture” as he so narrowly defines it to the societies in which they evolve, since it can only be as a result of various economic, historical, and political conditions that art could develop so consistently in this way; moreover, I think he’d be making a major discovery if he could demonstrate such a definite causality. Figurational sociologists would be lining up to have a word.

I don’t generally provide links to HarperCollins books, as you no doubt know by now. I didn’t realize until I finished it that it was a Murdoch book, and you can be damned sure I wouldn’t have bought it if I had. I provide a link on this occasion in the knowledge that anyone who disregards my warnings will only have themselves to blame.