Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society - Hardcover

Vargas Llosa, Mario

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374123047 ISBN 13: 9780374123048

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015

Synopsis

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

A provocative essay collection that finds the Nobel laureate taking on the decline of intellectual life

In the past, culture was a kind of vital consciousness that constantly rejuvenated and revivified everyday reality. Now it is largely a mechanism of distraction and entertainment. Notes on the Death of Culture is an examination and indictment of this transformation―penned by none other than Mario Vargas Llosa, who is not only one of our finest novelists but one of the keenest social critics at work today.

Taking his cues from T. S. Eliot―whose essay "Notes Toward a Definition of Culture" is a touchstone precisely because the culture Eliot aimed to describe has since vanished―Vargas Llosa traces a decline whose ill effects have only just begun to be felt. He mourns, in particular, the figure of the intellectual: for most of the twentieth century, men and women of letters drove political, aesthetic, and moral conversations; today they have all but disappeared from public debate.

But Vargas Llosa stubbornly refuses to fade into the background. He is not content to merely sign a petition; he will not bite his tongue. A necessary gadfly, the Nobel laureate Vargas Llosa, here vividly translated by John King, provides a tough but essential critique of our time and culture.

About this title

About the Authors

Mario Vargas Llosa was born in Peru in 1936. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” He also won the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world’s most distinguished literary honor. His many works of fiction and nonfiction include The Feast of the Goat, In Praise of the Stepmother, and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, all published by FSG. He died in Lima at age 89 in 2025.

John King edited From Oslo to Jerusalem from I. B. Tauris.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Notes on the Death of Culture

Essays on Spectacle and Society

By Mario Vargas Llosa, John King

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Copyright © 2012 Mario Vargas Llosa
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-374-12304-8

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Notice, 
Dedication, 
Epigraph, 
Metamorphosis of a Word, 
I The Civilization of the Spectacle, 
II A Brief Discourse on Culture, 
III Forbidden to Forbid, 
IV The Disappearance of Eroticism, 
V Culture, Politics and Power, 
VI The Opium of the People, 
Final Thoughts, 
Notes, 
Acknowledgements, 
A Note About the Author and the Translator, 
Also by Mario Vargas Llosa, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

The Civilization of the Spectacle

Claudio Pérez, a correspondent sent by El País to New York to cover the financial crisis, wrote in an article published on Friday, 19 September 2008: 'The New York tabloids are rushing around like madmen looking for a broker about to fling himself into the void from the top of one of those imposing skyscrapers which house the major investment banks, the fallen idols that the financial hurricane has been reducing to rubble.' Let's keep hold of this image for a moment: a pack of photographers, paparazzi, scouring the skyline, cameras at the ready, waiting to capture the first suicide that would be a graphic, dramatic and spectacular embodiment of the financial catastrophe that wiped out billions of dollars and ruined big businesses and countless ordinary people. There can be no better image, I think, that encapsulates our contemporary civilization.

It seems to me that this is the best way to define the civilization of our time, a civilization shared by Western countries, countries in Asia that have achieved high levels of development and many nations in the so-called Third World.

What do we mean by civilization of the spectacle? The civilization of a world in which pride of place, in terms of a scale of values, is given to entertainment, and where having a good time, escaping boredom, is the universal passion. To have this goal in life is perfectly legitimate, of course. Only a Puritan fanatic could reproach members of a society for wanting to find relaxation, fun and amusement in lives that are often circumscribed by depressing and sometimes soul-destroying routine. But converting this natural propensity for enjoying oneself into a supreme value has unexpected consequences: it leads to culture becoming banal, frivolity becoming widespread and, in the field of news coverage, it leads to the spread of irresponsible journalism based on gossip and scandal.

What has caused the West to slide towards this kind of civilization? The material well-being that followed the years of privation during the Second World War and the shortages of the post-war years. After this very tough period, there was a moment of extraordinary economic growth. In every democratic and liberal society in Europe and North America, the middle classes grew exponentially, there was increased social mobility and, at the same time, there was a notable extension of moral parameters, beginning with our sex lives, which had traditionally been held in check by churches and by the prudish secularism of political parties, from right and left. Well-being, a freer lifestyle and the increased time given to leisure in the developed world gave an important stimulus to leisure industries, promoted by advertising, the inspiration and magical guide for our times. So, systematically and imperceptibly, not being bored, avoiding anything that might be disturbing, worrying or distressing, became for increasing numbers both at the pinnacle and at the base of the social pyramid, a generational mandate, what Ortega y Gasset called 'the spirit of our time', a fun, spoiled and frivolous god to which, wittingly or unwittingly, we have been paying increasing allegiance for at least fifty years.

Another, no less important, factor in the shaping of this reality has been the democratization of culture. This is a phenomenon born of altruism: culture could no longer be the patrimony of an elite; liberal and democratic society had a moral obligation to make culture accessible to all, through education and through promoting and supporting the arts, literature and other cultural expression. This commendable philosophy has had the undesired effect of trivializing and cheapening cultural life, justifying superficial form and content in works on the grounds of fulfilling a civic duty to reach the greatest number. Quantity at the expense of quality. This criterion, the domain of the worst demagogues in the political arena, has caused unexpected reverberations in the cultural sphere, such as the disappearance of high culture, by its very nature a minority undertaking due to the complexity and on occasion hermetic nature of its codes, and the massification of the very concept of culture. Culture has now become exclusively accepted in its anthropological definition. That is, culture is all the manifestations of the life of a community: its language, beliefs, habits and customs, clothing, skills and, in short, everything that is exercised, avoided, respected or hated in that community. When the idea of culture becomes an amalgam of this kind, then it is inevitable that it might come to be understood merely as a pleasant way of spending time. Of course, culture can indeed be a pleasing pastime, but if it is just this, then the very concept becomes distorted and debased: everything included under the term becomes equal and uniform; a Verdi opera, the philosophy of Kant, a concert by the Rolling Stones and a performance by the Cirque du Soleil have equal value.

It is not surprising therefore that the most representative literature of our times is 'light', easy literature, which, without any sense of shame, sets out to be – as its primary and almost exclusive objective – entertaining. But let's be clear: I am not in any way condemning the authors of this entertainment literature because, notwithstanding the levity of their texts, they include some really talented writers. If today it is rare to see literary adventures as daring as those of Joyce, Woolf, Rilke or Borges, it is not just down to the writers. For the culture in which we live does not favour, but rather discourages, the indefatigable efforts that produce works that require of the readers an intellectual concentration almost as great as that of their writers. Today's readers require easy books that entertain them and this demand creates a pressure that becomes a powerful incentive to writers.

It is also not accidental that criticism has all but disappeared from the news media and has taken refuge in those cloistered communities called humanities faculties, and in particular in literature departments, whose work is accessible only to specialists. It is true that the more serious newspapers and journals still publish reviews of books, exhibitions and concerts, but does anyone read these solitary paladins who try to map a scale of value onto the tangled jungle that contemporary culture has become? In the days of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, criticism played a central role in the world of culture because it helped guide citizens in the difficult task of judging what they heard, saw and read. Now critics are a dying breed, to whom nobody pays attention unless they also turn themselves into a form of entertainment and spectacle.

Light literature, along with light cinema and light art, give the reader and the viewer the comfortable impression that they are cultured, revolutionary, modern and in the vanguard without having to make the slightest intellectual effort. Culture that purports to be avant-garde and iconoclastic instead offers conformity in its worst forms: smugness and self-satisfaction.

In the civilization of our times, it is normal, and almost obligatory, for cookery and fashion to take up most of the culture sections, for chefs and fashion designers now enjoy the prominence that before was given to scientists, composers and philosophers. Gas burners, stoves and catwalks meld, in the cultural coordinates of our time, with books, laboratories and operas, while TV stars and great footballers exert the sort of influence over habits, taste and fashion that was previously the domain of teachers and thinkers and (further back still) theologians. Half a century ago in the United States, it was probably Edmund Wilson, in his articles in The New Yorker or The New Republic, who decided the success or failure of a book, a poem, a novel or an essay. Now the Oprah Winfrey Show makes these decisions.

The vacuum left by the disappearance of criticism has been filled, imperceptibly, by advertising, and advertising is now not just an integral part of cultural life, it is its main vector. Advertising plays a decisive role in forming taste, sensibility, imagination and customs. Anonymous 'creative' people in advertising agencies now fulfil the role previously played, in this sphere, by philosophical systems, religious beliefs, ideologies and doctrines and the mentors that in France were called the 'mandarins' of an age. It was perhaps inevitable that this would happen from the moment when artistic and literary works came to be considered as commercial products, whose very survival or extinction depended on the fluctuations of the market, that tragic period in which the price became confused with the value of a work of art. When a culture relegates critical thinking to the attic of items no longer in fashion and replaces ideas with images, then literary and artistic products are promoted, accepted or rejected through advertising techniques and the conditioned reflexes of a public that lacks the intellectual and discriminatory antennae to detect when it is being duped. By this route, the exaggerated fashions that John Galliano displayed on Parisian catwalks (before it was discovered that he was anti-Semitic), or experiments in nouvelle cuisine, achieve the status of honorary citizens of high culture.

This state of affairs has also led to the celebration of music, to such an extent that it has become a badge of identity for new generations the world over. Fashionable bands and singers attract huge crowds to their concerts, which, like the Dionysian pagan festivals that celebrated irrationality in ancient Greece, are collective ceremonies of excess and catharsis, worshipping instinct, passion and unreason. The same can be said, of course, of the packed electronic music parties, raves, where people dance in the darkness, listen to trance-inducing music and get high on ecstasy. It is not too far-fetched to compare these celebrations to the great religious popular festivals of old. For we find, in secular form, a religious spirit that, in keeping with the spirit of the age, has replaced the liturgy and catechisms of traditional religions with these displays of musical mysticism where, to the rhythm of raw voices and instruments, both amplified to an inaudible level, individuals are no longer individuals; they become a mass, and unwittingly return to the primitive times of magic and the tribe. This is the modern and, of course, much more amusing way of achieving the ecstasy that St Teresa or St John of the Cross found through asceticism, prayer and faith. In these crowded parties and concerts young people today commune, confess, achieve redemption and find fulfilment through this intense, elemental experience of becoming lost to themselves.

Massification, along with frivolity, is another feature of our time. Nowadays sport has acquired an importance matched only in ancient Greece. For Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and other regular visitors to the Academy, the cultivation of the body was coextensive with and complementary to the cultivation of the spirit, because they believed that both were mutually enriching. The difference with today is that, now, people usually play sports at the expense of, and instead of, intellectual pursuits. In the sporting field football stands out. It is a mass phenomenon that, like modern popular-music concerts, attracts large crowds and raises passions to a greater degree than any other public mobilization, be it political meetings, religious processions or civic assemblies. Of course for the fans – and I am one of them – a football game can be a magnificent spectacle of skill and harmony, with justifiably applauded flashes of individual brilliance. But today the major football games, like the Roman circuses, function mainly as a pretext for irrationality, the regression of individuals to the tribe, to being a part of a collective, where, in the anonymous warmth of the stands, spectators can give free rein to their aggressive instincts, to the symbolic (and at times real) conquest and annihilation of the opposition. The notorious Latin American barras bravas, the gangs of supporters attached to certain clubs who cause havoc with their homicidal brawls and the burning of stadiums with great loss of life, show how, in many cases, it is not watching sport that attracts so many fans – almost always men, though women are increasingly attending games – but rather the ritual that releases irrational instincts, allowing them to turn their backs on civility during the game and behave as part of the primitive horde.

Paradoxically this mass phenomenon is parallel to the increased use of drugs at all levels of the social pyramid. Of course, the use of drugs has a long tradition in the West but, until recently, it has been almost exclusively confined to elites and small, marginal sectors, such as bohemian, artistic and literary circles where, in the nineteenth century, these artificial flowers were cultivated by figures as respectable as Charles Baudelaire and Thomas de Quincey.

Today, the spread of the use of drugs bears no resemblance to these earlier times; drugs are not used to explore new sensations or visions for scientific or artistic purposes. They are not an expression of rebellion against the established norms by nonconformists looking to adopt alternative forms of existence. Today, the mass consumption of marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy, crack, heroin, etc., is a response to a social environment that pushes men and women towards quick and easy pleasure, that immunizes them against worries and responsibility, allowing them to turn their backs on any self-knowledge that might be gained through thought and introspection, two eminently intellectual activities that are now considered tedious in our fickle, ludic culture. This need for distraction, the driving force of the society in which we live, stems from a desire to flee from the void and anguish that we feel when we are free, and forced to make decisions such as what to do with our lives and our world, especially in challenging times. For millions of people drugs now have the role, previously played by religions and high culture, of assuaging doubts and questions about the human condition, life, death, the beyond, the sense or senselessness of existence. With their artificial highs or moments of tranquillity, drugs offer a momentary feeling of being safe, free and happy. This is a malign fiction because drugs isolate individuals, and only appear to free them of problems, responsibilities and anguish. Because, in the end, they are a form of imprisonment, demanding ever heavier doses of stupefaction and overexcitement that only go to deepen the spiritual void of their users.

In the civilization of the spectacle, secularism seems to have gained ground over religions. And among those still claiming to be believers there has been an increase in people who just pay lip service to religion, who treat it in a social, superficial way, but whose lives are barely touched by it. The positive effect of the secularization of life is that there is now greater freedom than when ecclesiastical dogma and censorship had an asphyxiating hold. But it would be wrong to say that, because today in the Western world there are smaller numbers of Catholics and Protestants than before, religion has increasingly disappeared in a secular world. That is just the stuff of statistics. In fact, at the same time as many of the faithful were abandoning traditional religions, there was a great increase in sects, cults, and all sorts of alternative ways of practising religion, from Eastern spiritualism in all its schools and divisions – Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Tantrism, yoga – to the Evangelical churches that now proliferate and divide and subdivide in poor neighbourhoods, and picturesque offshoots such as the Fourth Way, Rosicrucianism, the Unification Church – the Moonies – Scientology, so popular in Hollywood, and ever more exotic and superficial churches.

The reason for this proliferation of churches and sects is that only very few people can do without religion entirely. For the vast majority, religion is a necessity because it is only the security that religious faith offers on such matters as transcendence and the soul that can assuage the sense of unease, fear and anxiety in the face of extinction. And it is the case that the only way that most people understand and adhere to ethics is through religion. Only small minorities have freed themselves from religion, filling the void left in their lives by culture: philosophy, science, literature and the arts. But the culture that can fulfil this role is high culture, which confronts problems rather than shying away from them, which tries to offer serious and not playful answers to the great enigmas, questions and conflicts of human existence. Superficial and glitzy culture, which is playful and an affectation, cannot replace the certainties, myths, mysteries and rituals of religions that have stood the test of centuries. In today's society narcotics and alcohol offer a momentary spiritual peace, and provide the certainties and respite that, in earlier times, men and women could find in prayer, confession, communion and sermons.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374123047
• ISBN 13: 9780374123048
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240