Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow

The lowbrows and highbrows hate the middlebrows because the middles take the best parts of each of their respective cultures and do the unthinkable: they mix them. When confronted by middlebrow culture, lowbrows feel cheated, because they have to wrestle with highbrow stuff they don’t understand because it’s intellectual. The highbrows feel sullied, because their beloved canon is cavorting with buffoonery and thus lowered in stature.

This thread needs a Paul Fussell mention too. Prole jacket gape: avoid it.

Isn’t this low/middle/highbrow distinction a way of talking about social class as if it were a form of taste (and therefore an issue of personal choice rather than economic necessity)?

It seems clear from the Woolf quote that she’s using “lowbrow” to mean “working class”—”Since they are lowbrows, engaged magnificently and adventurously in riding full tilt from one end of life to the other in pursuit of a living, they cannot see themselves doing it”—in other words their need to earn a living by manual labour means that they don’t have the time and money for the artistic pursuits of the middle and upper classes.

Similarly, in the Life magazine classifications, the “lowbrows” wear old army clothes, sit on mail-order furniture and watch cheap movies because they don’t have the money for tweed suits, designer furniture and tickets to the ballet.

Isn’t this low/middle/highbrow distinction a way of talking about social class as if it were a form of taste (and therefore an issue of personal choice rather than economic necessity)?

That is the most natural reading, based on Woolf’s essay (which to my mind can come off as a bit condescending.) But based solely on the reading I’ve done pursuant to this particular post, that’s not all there is to it. I found this Josh Glenn essay via his site Hilowbrow.com, and I think it explains what’s going on here in a manner that avoids a focus on class. And he more fully develops Woolf’s dislike of the “middlebrow” using modern examples that we can relate to more easily.

Actually Gareth, Josh does a much better job of explaining the non-class nature of lowbrow, middlebrow and highbrow in his comments to this particular post. And bonus, it’s much more concise than the article I link to above!

From The Real Frank Zappa Book:

“Songs written with one idea in mind have been known to mutate into something completely different if I hear an ‘optional vocal inflection’ during rehearsal. I’ll hear a ‘hint’ of something (often a mistake) and pursue it to its most absurd extreme.
“The ‘technical expression’ we use in the band to describe the process is: PUTTING THE EYEBROWS ON IT.” This usually refers to vocal parts, although you can put the eyebrows on just about anything.
“After “the eyebrows,” the ultimate tweeze inflicted on the composition is determining The Attitude with shich the piece is to be performed. The player is expected to comprehend The Attitude, and perform the material with The Attitude AND The Eyebrows, consistently, otherwise, to me, the piece sounds ‘wrong.’“

Isn’t this low/middle/highbrow distinction a way of talking about social class as if it were a form of taste?

To some extent, though as Emma notes in comment 13, M. Bourdieu is your friend in that department.

*Sigh* the bourgeoisie just can’t get any love, can they? Is it beyond anyone to point out that for a ‘highbrow’ avant-garde elite to despise middling strivers while maintaining a dutiful respect for the echt qualities of good, honest working-class folk who know their place is not so much a cliché as almost the entire history of the relation between class and taste in the west for the last 250 years at least? You can laugh at it, but you probably also live by it. Nosce te ipsum, dude.

Bah. One cigarette, one Orionid. A clear night and nearly no cosmic debris.

When we use “bourgeois” to indicate a less than elevated taste we emphasize that we’re not talking about socioeconomic status, or else that we’re so far outside the Marxist framework that our distinctions are more likely to confuse than clarify, though if we’re attempting to order everyone along a single dimension a certain amount of confusion is necessary to keep the conversation interesting.

Taste is splintered across multiple dimensions. Start with Snow’s two cultures and keep splitting through the cultural revolutions of the twentieth century. The shibboleths that divide two nearly identical groups eventually sound like common group identifiers to more distant crowds.

John Sladek described a conservation at a party between a professor and a student discussing respectively Rodin and Rodan. Life is a tossed salad of labels like hip and square, hot or not, high or low, in and out. It’s not just a matter of finding out what you most enjoy; you also have to know what your nearest and dearest are talking about.

Which of these two is more elite: a new model for the beginning of life or a reminder that tomorrow’s Great Performances on PBS features the LA Phil with a new work by John Adams?

The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in the Progressive Era in Portland, Oregon, Robert D. Johnston, Princeton, 2003.

Christopher Lasch touched on the culture wars as far back as the WWI era America in “The New Radicalism in America”. A lot of the American left of that time was pretty corny, whereas the cultural left was often apolitical, ultra-leftist and effectively apolitical, or right-wing. Elitist liberalism goes back to the WWI New Republic of Walter Lippmann, who turns out to be (ta-da!) the grandfather of neo-liberalism (Mirowski: “The Road from Mont Pelerin”).

When H. L. Mencken, the leader of the liberated elite, turned out to be a Roosevelt-hater who had trouble making up his mind about Hitler, it shouldn’t have been a surprise — he was a Social Darwinist Bourbon Democrat of the Grover Cleveland type who hated all moralism, especially the silly idea of social justice.

But then, Emma, some might argue that that practice is just weird. Or is it only hoity-toity academics [like me, but I admit not like some of my fashion-victim colleagues] who can even dream of signalling their status by affecting to like the stuff they like, and to hell with it?

The European high bourgeoisie was wound way too tight. Austen’s oafish, stupid gentry were at least able to kick back and chill.

Over at Hilobrow.com — thanks, John, for the link — we agree with Bourdieu that aesthetics and lifestyle choices aren’t entirely independent of social class. Though (along with Carl Wilson) we reject the reductionism of his Distinction, we do rely on Bourdieu’s notion of the “disposition” (a tendency to act in a specified way, to take on a certain position in any field) and the “habitus” (the choice of positions in a field, according to one’s disposition). We’ve named and located 10 bourdieuian dispositions — 4 heimlich (Highbrow, Lowbrow, Neo-Aristocratic (Anti-Lowbrow), Quasi-Populist (Anti-Highbrow)); 2 gemütlich (High Middlebrow, or what Dwight Macdonald called Midcult; and Low Middlebrow, which Macdonald, following Adorno, called Masscult); 2 unheimlich (Nobrow, not to be confused with John Seabrook’s confused use of the term; and Hilobrow, our own coinage); and then there’s Unbrow, which Van Wyck Brooks confusingly called Lowbrow. There are various habituses possible within each of these dispositions, but since the mid-17th-century, these dispositions have formed into an invisible matrix of influence.

Our hypothesis is that the 4 heimlich dispositions formed in the mid-17th century and after because of Spinoza and the so-called Radical Enlightenment. Before that time, Highbrow and Lowbrow were united, e.g., in a figure like Shakespeare. For two centuries after this Shevirat HaKeilim-like moment of shattering, Highbrow and Lowbrow remained fond of one another, copacetic and complementary; but as recounted by historians like Lawrence W. Levine, in the late 19th century a wedge was driven between High and Low. Virginia Woolf’s essay is a lament about this suddenly widening gap; unlike those intellectuals of her time who celebrated Middlebrow for bridging High and Low, she blamed Middlebrow for the divide. Writing a decade earlier than Woolf, Van Wyck Brooks also deplored what was happening to Highbrow as it lost contact with Lowbrow. However, Brooks made two major errors: he confused Lowbrow with Unbrow (philistinism), and he called for Middlebrow to close the divide.

Whence Middlebrow, the uncanniest of guests? We’re still trying to track it down — we’re pretty sure it existed before it was named in the Twenties. It might have been born in the very late 19th or very early 20th century, per Woolf and Brooks. I think Christopher Lasch is likely analyzing the disposition High Middlebrow — though he mostly isn’t discussing taste — in his The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963. But in “Masscult & Midcult,” Dwight Macdonald blames Low Middlebrow on the industrial revolution, and it traces its origins back to mid-18th-century England. At Hilobrow.com we’re interested in tracking Middlebrow’s origins, but the critical thing is our discovery of its true role and position within the matrix of modern dispositions: Middlebrow does not mediate between Highbrow and Lowbrow; and therefore it should not be championed by those who are attempting to champion social mobility (i.e., from lower to upper class) in the sphere of culture. Lynes was misguided in this effort — and, as I mentioned at Hilobrow.com the other day, so are Andrew Ross, Susan Jacoby, A.O. Scott, the author of a recent Chronicle of Higher Ed essay titled “Confessions of a Middlebrow Professor,” and even my friends Alex Beam (author of a recent history of the Great Books series) and Carl Wilson. Despite what sounds — to our ears — like her snobbery, Woolf was dead-on when she claimed that Middlebrow was only making it more difficult for Highbrow and Lowbrow to reunite; and Macdonald and Adorno (also branded as mandarins) were also correct about this. Where does Middlebrow sit on the matrix of modern dispositions — and where do all these other “brows” that I’ve named sit? We’ve got it mapped out, and we’re revealing the answer slowly, whenever we get a spare moment (because we have day jobs) at Hilobrow.com.

PS: Hilobrow may not actually be a disposition that anyone can actually inhabit; it might be more of an ideal — Highbrow and Lowbrow, reunited and it feels so good — that can only be articulated negatively, by saying what it isn’t. “Let me admit frankly that I have not in my experience encountered any certain specimen of this type; but I do not refuse to admit that as far as I know, every other person may be such a specimen. At the same time I will say that I have searched vainly for years….”

thanks for showing up, josh.

and may i say–you can disagree with carl wilson all you like, but his lead vocal track on “god only knows” is still sublime.

I should mention that I’ve criticized Lynes’ “classic” essay: check it out. This was very early in the Hilobrow.com project, you understand — I should write a new response some time.

In retrospect, Woolf”s criticism strikes me as enormously parochial. Sure, she was trying to make room for something new, but her assaults on people like Galsworthy and Bennett have a categorical quality that is quite unfair.
Closer to home, a matter of some regret for me is the decline and disappearance of what I call the genteel novel, (using the word in a non-pejorative way). I have in mind the works of Louis Bromfield, John P. Marquand or Edna Ferber, to name a few at random. These were solid craftsman who produced fine novels, for all that Henry James couldn’t stand their like.
I finally decided that the genteel novel had gone out because there weren’t any more genteel readers. In large part the counter culture phenomenon swept away any interest in organized society (and maybe organized society as well). To be sure, places like country clubs still exist, but they have lost their hold on the American imagination. I can’t imagine anyone being culturally ambitious any more. The one exception is the university communities. I’m not sure we’re the worse off for the change. I’m continually astounded and pleased by how deeply cultured are my son and his friends – people in their 40s now.

In retrospect, Woolf”s criticism strikes me as enormously parochial.

All of the brow critics strike me as provincial, including Adorno. 50’s America in genral seems distant and strange, even though I was there at the time.

Adono’s culture was deep but narrow. One of the first things I read from that school showed them trying to replicate the life of the German high bourgeois left in Hollywood, supported by people who made soft porn Biblical epics and pop-Freudian Hollywood problem plays with happy endings. It was just too weird.

I have never understood why the varied refugee intelligentsia of ruined Europe received such deference in the U.S. They were smart people, but they were the ones who fucked this up, not us.

Fucked up Europe, not Hollywood. The “this” should have been edited out.

I have never understood why the varied refugee intelligentsia of ruined Europe received such deference in the U.S. They were smart people, but they were the ones who fucked this up, not us.

Because Americans knew very well that, unless deferred to, European intelligentsia were quite capable of using their Science Powers to build superweapons that could destroy the world. It wasn’t respect so much as fear.

It’s bizarre to hear “genteel” used as a compliment, and to see the Frankfurt School and other intellectuals blamed for fucking up prewar European culture! Not sure where to begin with the first, but as for the latter, let’s lay to rest the shibboleth that Adorno hated lowbrow/popular culture. As I’ve repeated too many times, Adorno “enjoyed unique and eccentric lowbrow productions — which he described as being every bit as ’embarrassing’ to the coercive aims of the Disneyfied culture industry as were those highbrow works (e.g., Schoenberg) for which he is a better-known advocate.”

For example: “The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done them … calls for Mickey Rooney in preference to the tragic Garbo, for Donald Duck instead of Betty Boop” (Adorno and Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment As Mass Deception”). This is not a rejection of all pop/lowbrow; A&H (primarily Adorno, I think) is here criticizing Disneyfied (low middlebrow) productions. Carl Wilson makes it crystal clear, by the way, that he prefers lowbrow/pop to low-mid like Céline Dion… but he tries — mostly in vain — to force himself to appreciate Dion for (noble, praiseworthy) reasons I’ve analyzed recently at Hilobrow.com.

Did European intellectuals have nothing to do with the European disaster? Sure, they were on the losing side, most of them, but they had been in positions of influence, and in 1930 or even 1932 many of them were militant and confident of victory. It would seem that events should and some way have diminished our respect for the profound wisdom of Europe, rather than increasing it.

I certainly am not an expert on Adorno, very far from it, but scattered passages have been really horrible. I remember him fulminating about how horrible do-it-yourself hobbyism was and wondering what the fuck he was talking about.

By “John” I presume you mean the real John here, not me.

I don’t think you could write a treatise about class in the United States without mentioning the subtle impact on the WWII generation of the first film version of “The Razor’s Edge” (1946.) If you’ve never seen it, make a date, it’s a terrific and unusual story. I find the director’s hand to be a bit lax but it’s well worth watching, because Clifton Webb is still a revelation (“I do not like the propinquity of the hoi polloi!”) and there have been few beauties to equal that of Gene Tierney. It’s also a Valentine to the destruction of class distinction, and, to a generation coming back from the War, an obvious directive about what they had been fighting for. The most interesting character with regards to the conversation here is Maugham as played by Herbert Marshall (who played the classy jewel thief in Lubitsch’s “Trouble in Paradise” (1932), one of the best romantic sex comedies, pre-Hayes Code, don’t miss that either.) The Maugham character is very low key and at home in both worlds, and some of his voiceovers function as Greek chorus.

For me, what it points to is an evaluation of the 20th-century writers who I guess might have been called “middlebrow” at the time, Maugham, Waugh, Forster, etc, who had the journalist’s dedication to observing the facts and who ended-up creating some of the furthest marks of culture yet. I also think Joyce belongs in there, although he was called a low-brow when he was alive and is now almost unread, being too difficult; and Tolkien, who transferred all his concerns into a complex and thorough allegory and was, I think, dismissed by all but a cult following until the recent movies showed that he easily trumps everybody in the story-structure department.

Story is king.

For class distinction in the U.S.? The 1960’s shook up everything, now the arts have gone into polystylism, the subcultures of youth music and occupational employment determine the dress, and the inundation of world information puts everyone at a conversational disadvantage outside their own specialties and interests — which isn’t balkanizing into new classes so much as atomizing any attempt at valuation. Except every time anew, and from the ground up. Here in L.A. you can show up at a black dress cocktail party in jeans and tennis sneakers and nobody bats an eye. I mean nobody. Mention Welles’ “Chimes at Midnight” (1965), one of the finest movies of all time, virtually an addition to the Shakespeare canon, by one of the greatest directors (who was considered to be a middlebrow at best,) — and nobody’s seen it. I mean nobody. (Get the DVD from Amazon, and never let it go!) Ask about Ozu, Bresson, Fellini, directors who pushed great art in the 20th century as far as anyone, and they may not even have HEARD of the first two. This, is in the filmmaking industry.

Once established in Australia, though, they made friends in their new milieu, and as a result their house, decorated to their taste, looked odd to them just about every year, for well over a decade.

That’s fascinating, and rings true to a great extent with my expat experience, where the basic premises of how one defines and shapes one’s life and living space are so different.

That kind of mobility also creates opportunities for -brow arbitrage, where someone who imports the cultural trimmings of one milieu into a new one can find that it slots into a very different place on the spectrum. That’s more obvious for less tangible cultural artifacts — hoary but true examples, such as how a British accent perceived as low-brow back home can convey refinement abroad — but it applies to tangible ones as well.

There’s a very good Cockney actor in one US city who gets the aristocrat roles.

If I recall correctly, Adorno was in favour of genuinely nobrow culture, such as juggling or the trapeze. I think that this may have been because they were not pseudo-intellectual attempts at emotional manipulation, but were simply enjoyed for what they were – i.e. exhibitions of skill, craft and ability. The idea of there being something worthwhile or redemptive in purely content free leisure seems to be a common theme in the Frankfurt school, I think that it was Marcuse (or it may have actually been Horkheimer) that found great consolation in watching the animals in the zoo.

They weren’t guilty. They just failed. In 1930 they were expecting revolution, and by 1934 they were exiles, and absolutely nothing had happened the way they had confidently expected.

Judging by the way the German-speaking world turned out, why should anyone seek German wisdom? It seems to have been a fairly general failure.

IIRC, Adorno was very proud of a “Last Judgment” he had carved into an apricot pit. He always carried it in his vest pocket and would show it off at the slightest provocation. It was a charming eccentricity until one had already seen it three or four times …

(note to moderator: email address fixed, please delete this note, and previous post)

I’ve just been rereading Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise which is full of observations on the interaction between class and taste in 1932.

Sorry about the two screen names. Your system remembers me differently at home and at work.

Are you nuts? Hitler was not “one man”. And note what I said in 55 — I’m not accusing them of being Nazis. They’re not guilty, they just failed — one of the most colossal political failures of all time, and the German intelligentsia had a status in their country that the intellectuals can only dream of. Taking political advice from refugee German intellectuals made as much sense as taking engineering advice from the designers of the Titanic or the Hindenberg.

Uuuh. Max Weber was very smart. He invented …. Protestantism and the kettle grill. And Hegel was totally not a communist. Just cited by The Big Communist. You said that the quiz was going to be multiple choice.

Unless maybe it’s Allan Bloom complaining about Michael Jackson and the Rolling Stones.

Yes, but one things, or at least hopes, that Adorno’s criticism of Donald Duck doesn’t lend itself so obviously to a Freudian explanation as did Bloom’s writings on Mic Jagger.

It strikes me as premature for any intellectual from the English-speaking world to be arguing that “German intellectuals were on the losing side of their cultural civil war against barabarism, so fuck those losers”.

If Strauss and Hayek are so foreign to American political culture (and so utterly Germanic) why is it that they won such strong followings in this country?

The very question I asked. It strikes me as weird. Both of them were political gurus. Why didn’t anyone ask them about the results they got in their previous job?

I’m sure Kershaw is a fine man but he’s only one guy, and your summary sounds loopy. WHere did he get his Satanic powers? He seems to have stepped into some kind of political cultural vacuum. Where did the vacuum come from, in a country with all those geniuses? There had to be something wrong besides that one guy.

I’m relatively friendly to Great Man theories, but that’s ridiculous.

I’m not a nationalist. I’m just asking why Americans were so worshipful of German imports after WWII.

Damn. I was enjoying this thread till it got jacked. One way or another.

No, we will discuss Germans and music.

Mozart and Schubert passionately advocated German, or Austrian, music in distinction to the Italian music in vogue at the court. Rossini came along and they sort of enjoyed him. It’s impossible not to. I think even Schumann approved. He liked everything, of course.

The Romantic movement split between the Wagnerians (Liszt, Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler) and the Classicists (Brahms, Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim, who wrote an opposing manifesto). At this distance it’s difficult to discern the difference. At the same time the Russians were intent on distinguishing themselves from the Germans, and looked askance at Tchaikovsky, whom Brahms eventually took the trouble to visit. In the end the classical canon became rigorously dodecaphonic under the tutelage of Schoenberg, which we forget because everyone was listening to Gershwin and Rodgers and Joplin and Johnson instead.

Mozart, who is mostly middlebrow nowadays, loved bowling and dancing and his viola quintets are still only enjoyed by the cognoscenti.

Urania was once ranked among the muses but the sciences get scant love from the tastemakers now. We can all rank bands and movies and books, but it’s death in polite company to mention hot topics in physics or biology. Most of the people I’ve known would rather discuss ghosts or UFO’s.

“German-speaking world”. I should have thrown in Hesse.

I was once at a party at a frat where around 3am I held an entire staircase of fraternity brothers riveted by answering their questions about quantum mechanics and black holes. It was very unexpected.

Well, I’m not generally regarded as well-meaning. And I think that brow theory, like Generation x,y,z…. theory, is a crock. And that fifties culture criticism is quaint and silly.

I can sympathize with Adorno in the context of his personal tragedy, and perhaps admire some of his writing, but I don’t think that he ever should have been thought of as a source of wisdom, guidance, or insight.

Adorno was big with the New York Intellectuals and the “consensus theory” political ideologues. The NYI, per wiki, were Philip Rahv, William Phillips, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Hannah Arendt, Delmore Schwartz, William Barrett, Lionel Trilling, Diana Trilling, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Richard Hofstadter, Harvey Swados, Richard Chase, Saul Bellow, Isaac Rosenfeld, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Robert Warshow, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Norman Podhoretz, Susan Sontag, Marshall Berman, and Michael Walzer.

Isn’t that a dated, provincial group? Kristol and Podhoretz and the neocon aftermath aside, how many of them deserve reading any more, except by Americanists? I’d say Arendt and Berman. Most would add Bellow and maybe Sontag and Bell. I read Hofstadter because of his maleficient influence.

Brow theory is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.

Part of my dislike of Adorno is that he and his co-authors on “The Authoritarian Personality” convinced Hofstadter that Hitler was a populist and that the Populists were proto-Nazis.

As late as 1983 (Webster’s New International) “Populist” was defined as a proper noun, designating the American Populists and the not-very-similar Russian Narodniks. But starting with Hofstadter (I think) the common noun “populist” has had increasing currency, with the meaning “Hitler, the Populists, etc.” This has not been a good development.

If that’s the same Hofstadter who wrote “The Paranoid Style”, I don’t think his influence was wholly maleficient, even if he confused the paranoid style with populism.

It seems to me that “populism” is a term so debased today that it basically means “anyone who claims that the lurkers support them in e-mail”, which generally does include authoritarians, the paranoid style, and proto-fascists, but isn’t limited to them. The first meaning listed in my modern dictionary for “populist” is “a member of a political party claiming to represent the common people”, so that while the Populists were certainly populists, they weren’t the only populists and people with quite different views can be populists as long as they *claim* to represent the common people.

That dictionary was written after the meaning shift you deplore, but I’m not sure that Hofstadter deserves the chief blame, or even any blame, for the meaning shift.

My fingers wanted “poetry” instead of “party”. They have their own mind.

p. 209: “The shrew, a fossilized survival of the bourgeois esteem of women, is invading society today. With her endless nagging she takes revenge in her own home for the misery inflicted upon her sex from time immemorial.”

p. 158: “One simply ‘has to’ have seen Mrs. Miniver, just as one ‘has to’ subscribe to Life and Time.” One can easily imagine Herr Adorno writing this down after a cocktail party that had been especially unpleasant for him, at which some faculty wife recommended the film to him in terms he manifestly misunderstood, a misunderstanding that taints everything else he wrote.

p. 165: Calling co-workers by their first names (or perhaps their nicknames: “Bob” and “Harry”) “reduces relationships between human beings to the good fellowship of the sporting community and is a defense against the true kind of relationship.” This is even sillier than Anthony Burgess complaining about saying “Dickinson” because poet or not, calling by surnames is a male school habit and inappropriate for others.

There is a passage somewhere where he criticizes the kind of upper middle class housewives Friedan wrote about, by saying how horrible it is that their husbands permit them to have cultural interests.

John Emerson @ 83: Two cheers (at least) for the New York Intellectuals. Though I’m an Americanist (and thus my view may provisionally not count), I certainly think that Dwight Macdonald and (the early) Sidney Hook are still worth reading.

And Hofstadter is one of, if not the, greatest historians of his generation. Yes, he was wrong about Populism. And Emerson is right to see Hofstadter’s anti-P0pulism (and more general anti-popularism) as part of a larger, unfortunate tendency of postwar American liberalism. Still, like all Hofstadter’s work, The Age of Reform is worth (re)reading. For all its mistakes, big and small, it’s still brilliant and complicated. It rewards attention.

It’s also worth pointing out that Lawrence Goodwyn, whose work on Populism was an entirely necessary corrective to Hofstadter’s, significantly overcorrected for Hofstadter’s mistakes. Democratic Promise / The Populist Moment (the latter is the abridged version of the former) is also still worth reading, too. But it’s a less nuanced work than The Age of Reform. And its heroic portrait of Populism is also not quite right about the movement (Goodwyn’s vilification of fusionism and the Bryan presidential campaign seems particularly dated….and I say that as a sometime Third Party activist!).

At the risk of sounding Hegelian in this thread, out of Hofstadter’s thesis and Goodwyn’s antithesis has come a raft of more complicated synthetic work on Populism that takes better measure of both its positive and negative qualities (and understands it as a more local phenomenon both spatially and temporally, too).

Being thoroughly lower middle brow myself, of course I think Godwin’s law was invented by the upper middle-brower’s to distract people from the open realization that there is no highbrow and even if highbrow was not extinct it would be short solace in the face of lower brow’s with a keen eye for banners, badges and uniforms.

Highbrow is dead, Mencken is God and yes, everything is permitted, especially greed, poor grammat and typos.

@93 reminds me of American and Christian jingoists self-righteously quoting gotcha snippets of the Koran. Good show.

@99: Maybe someone who likes Adorno better than I do could do an impression of said person quoting gotcha snippets from the Bible.

Or:

George: upper
John: middle
Ringo: low
Paul: lower than low

Platonist, your analysis is wrong in every particular. Middlebrow was completely exterminated by the highbrow/lowbrow alliance that is already in view in Woolf’s time. Woolf liked the highbrow because it was sophisticated, and respected the lowbrow because it was authentic. Middlebrow’s great crime was aspirational intellectualism, which made it neither sophisticated nor authentic. The reason why the Hefner quote — “We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” — sound so ridiculous to modern ears is that aspirational intellectualism is the worst possible fault. Where in the 50s we had Playboy, now we have Girls Gone Wild. In the wake of the 60s, authenticity became the great highbrow virtue, so highbrows now perform highbrow-ness by miming authenticity.

Maybe Ken Burns is plausibly middlebrow, but the list of other candidates is pretty short. Jazz has like 7 living fans left in the world, so it’s not much to build a case on.

Anti-intellectualism wasn’t really a factor for the Populists. They were greenbackers and or free silver inflationists, and they had their own intellectuals against the gold bugs. They were more right than wrong. Their enemies were the monopolies and the banks, especially the national and British banks (who did control world credit). Destler’s bio of Demarast Lloyd or Woodward’s bio of Tom Watson describe Populist intellectuals.

The enemies of the Populists were not the intelligentsia, but finance, big business, and the corrupt party machines (Roscoe Conkling, Boss Tweed, and dozens of others).

The Populists were moralistic and used overheated rhetoric the same as the Democrats and Republicans of the era.

As for nuance and complexity, I think if the Democrats dialed their nuance buttons down a few notches that would be a wonderful thing. In order to take any initiative of any substance, at some point you have to stop saying “on the one hand… but on the other hand…..”

The main reason for Democratic lack of spine is corruption, but there’s a philosophical aversion to having any definite opinions about anything among what I’ve called the party’s wonk demographic — well educated Democrats who constitute a big chunk of the rank and file, but who think that they’re policy experts and deep strategists, and who ntry to figure out the outcomes of fights before they’re fought. The net outcome in game theory terms is premature compromise settling for the sure thing rather than fighting for the best outcome.

So perhaps we just disagree. It’s too late to do the right thing about the financial meltdown, for example, but some populist anger might have made it possible to do so. Instead, we stuck with our same old “shit happens, objective forces, nuances and complexity” reaction and decided that we should settle for a quick fix and reward the malefactors and incompetents.

And essentially, that was because “we” do not really have a representative in the game. It’s just the finance A Team fighting the Finance B Team, just as it was in Grover Cleveland’s day.

You’re at the far end of the range.

Another way to state the question: are there any must-reads in the group? Any who will be read in fifty years? I’d say two at most, and Arendt is from Elsewhere.

Just look globally at Europe, 1914-1945. In 1913 Europe wis out question the culmination of human civilization. In 1946 it was a heap of rubble and tens of millions of premature cadavers. You’d just have to say there was some terrible flaw there.

And a lot of Europeans did, after WWI, but then they came up with solutions worse than the problem.

Neither Communists nor fascists had a role in making WWI happen. (The causality was the other way). It was all done by orthodox, mainstream, stodgy, right-thinking people.

This related to the brow controversy, because a lot of the brow thinkers were worshipful of European culture and contemptuous of American culture., and the whole episode was collective social climbing. It just strikes me as an odd episode.

Fortunately for my opponents, the US has now achieved European levels of culture and military organization.

Gotcha: you’re the one who wants to save lives, where I’m a purist and don’t care about human suffering. You looked over all human history and know the truth: the only lesson is compromise. Thank you for playing true to type. If I could, I’d pickle you and put you in my loser Democrats museum, compromise monomaniac division.

Settling for the sure thing beats the hell out of fighting for the best outcome, losing, and getting nothing.

It doesn’t in the long run, though. If the other side knows you’ll never fight, they’ll low-ball you. That’s what the Republicans did during the very successful (by their standards) Bush years. In a a bluffing game, you have to bluff or you lose a lot, though if you do bluff, you lose a few. (This is the third paradox of rationality in Nigel Howard’s “Paradoxes of Rationality”, BTW. No risk, no gain. That’s why I mentioned game theory. And that’s why I talk about “figuring out the final score before the game is played”. )

The main problem with the Democrats is corruption, but playing their hand weakly, which they always do, makes things worse. But rank-and-file purist resistance has already improved on the wretched Baucus bill and it seems possible to improve it even more.

Thank you for being true to type.

Harold, Mirowski’s “Machine Dreams” and “The Road From Mount Pelerin” and Reisch’s “How the Cold War tranformed Philosophy of Science” describe some of the mechanisms by which that was done, albeit in economics and philosophy rather than history or political science.

There were special nuances with the New York Intellectuals, since some of them were ex-Communist anti-Communists. As anti-Communists they wanted to purge radicals from the Democratic Party, but as ex-Communists they needed to protect themselves. If the Democrats became elitist, both ends could be attained.

I feel the NPOV (as wikipedia would say) sociological explanation of accounting for tastes had yet to be written.

I have to say that while in Andalusia Spain I was struck by the good taste (in my view) displayed by all classes — I don’t know if it is the egalitarian aesthetic inherited from Islam, or the enforced conformity of centuries of repressive theocratic rule, decades of going without consumer goods, the heritage of nationalism, pride of traditional craft, Hapsberg rule, social conformity — or what — explains it. It had to do with the austere simplicity and lack of ostentation and use of traditional materials and appreciation of craftmanship, whether in a so-called luxury hotel or in the home of a retired maid married to a fisherman. Of course some of the modern church art of the Franco period in Spain was deplorable (I found). But I missed seeing that in Andalusia.

I believe that after the rise of Oasis in the 90s (and truly, all Brit-pop and the cool Britannia “movement”) what we have now is Monobrow culture.

-G.

Oops. CK Dexter, c’est moi.

I grew up in a “bohemian” environment and looked with nostalgia on middlebrow values, which I think Baudelaire characterized as the “luxe, calme, volupte” he saw as existing in the Netherlands. My grandparents (of more or less peasant stock) certainly aspired to that. I think for them it encompassed polished silver, orderliness, meals on time, with fresh fruit with every meal, a piano in the living room, classical music (though they really liked musical comedy). Comfortable upholstered furniture in solid colors and polished dark wood surfaces. Books, but not too many: the Arabian Knights, Scott, and Dickens. Two newspapers every morning. In short — restrained haut mitteleuropean comfort with nothing ostentatious or gaudy (no oriental splendor) was the ideal they strove for. (Consumer goods were frowned on then. How I remember my grandfather’s disapproval when I bought myself a transistor radio!) I gather my mother had found this suffocating, but my own life has and hers seems so strained and chaotic in comparison to this ideal. Getting rid of middlebrow came at a price.

Ah, the piano…

I know; piano is the quintessential middlebrow piece of furniture.

Actually, Adorno snatched a few points from Weber’s piece without critiquing it. I cannot blame him for this. Just for lots of other things.

Dersu Uzula is one of my favorite movies.

Harold, did I remember the piano right? It was such a stereotyped domestic scene, but maybe the piano was edited in by me.

Yes, my grandfather, with the first money he earned, bought his mother a player piano. Probably in 1910 or so.

I don’t remember if the Russian family in Derzu Usula had a piano, unfortunately. The book, by V.K. Arseniev, which I have in front of me, does not mention one.

What I miss about Bourgeois culture is how people used to sing all the time. Around the piano or not. In the car. Though by the time I was born my grandparents had given the famous baby grand piano that saved the family to my aunt, who majored in music education. My mother, who was not musical but loved music anyway, obtained a (cast off) upright and kept it in my room. She used to play and sing songs for me on it every night before bed. Twinkle, twinkle, Bach minuets and the like (her repertoire was limited). It was out of tune and she couldn’t sing, so I developed an ear for microtones. That wouldn’t happen now.

Where I am from (a place where people live in small apartments) upright piano was the symbol of middlebrow. Grand piano in an apartment would mean that most likely a professional pianist lives here. My parents had an upright piano, I had to take lessons for 4 or 5 years, hated every minute of it.

You were so promising, too, Henry. I’ve never understood why you threw it all away.

It’s Henri, with h muet. But yeah, I know, I know… I blame my mother, she just wasn’t determined enough.

What kind of half-assed arguing is this? The best defense of Adorno someone can muster is to clutch their pearls and bemoan the fallen state of Man? Adorno’s opinion of jazz was famously cretinous, almost as bad as that hilobrow site people keep linking to.