Social Media Kitsch

On Milan Kundera, the role of the writer as a public figure, and mass media.

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I wanted to let you all in one what’s going on behind the paywall curtain, to give you an idea not only where we are right now — with bonus material and behind-the-scenes insight — but also where this thing could go.

So today, here’s a whole section of the recent essay for the Words of Wisdom series that would normally only be available to paid subscribers. If you want to join the community and support what we’re doing at Art of Conversation, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. And if you’re already paying, thank you so much!

Milan Kundera fits so many big and wonderfully phrased ideas into so few pages that I had to continually prune digressions from my essay. I’d find that I’d start following an idea he hints at, and the next thing I was miles away from the central theme of my piece. Some of those digressions gave me ideas for future essays, but here’s one that didn’t need more than half a page, yet was interesting enough to make that half-page worth reading.

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In his Jerusalem address, Kundera cites Flaubert in defining a novelist as one who “seeks to disappear behind his work”, someone prepared “to renounce the role of a public figure”. This is, he goes on to say, an increasingly difficult proposition in the age of mass media (and this was well before social media), which causes “the work to disappear behind the image of its author”. The upshot of this is a detriment to the novel itself, which risks “being considered a mere appendage to [the novelist’s] actions, to his declarations, to his statements of position”.

These days, we’re all so used to hearing statements of position from our authors, and every other public figure, because our culture demands it. We’re wary of admiring the work of someone today who tomorrow might say something verboten by the authorities of political good taste. We fret about whether we can read, let alone enjoy, the works of long dead writers who weren’t as savvy to our modern sensibilities about race, gender, and permissible language. There are interesting, nuanced conversations to be had here, but they rarely are, overshadowed instead by posturing and preening.

What we are demanding of our novels — and films and music — is that they reflect the views of the author, and that the author’s views be palatable to our particular sensitivities. It’s therefore little surprise that the pop-culture is almost exclusively offering films and books that affirm what we already believe. This is what Kundera describes as “kitsch”:

“The word ‘kitsch’ describes the attitude of those who want to please the greatest number, at any cost. To please, one must confirm what everyone wants to hear, put oneself at the service of received ideas. Kitsch is the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling. It moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel.”

Reading these prescient words, it’s hard not to think of the decade-and-a-half glut of superhero movies and franchise sequels, which use “fan service” in their storytelling to such an extent that they have become themselves two-hour pieces of fan service. They show the people what they want to see and never challenge anything they think or feel. Social media, too, perpetuates kitsch almost as if it were a stated part of its business plan, and Kundera – a quarter century before the rise of Facebook and Twitter – has words for this:

“Given the imperative necessity to please and thereby to gain the attention of the greatest number, the aesthetic of the mass media is inevitably that of kitsch; and as the mass media come to embrace and to infiltrate more and more of our life, kitsch becomes our everyday aesthetic and moral code.”

Our only first-principle defence against this conformity is our insistence on being individuals, and it is in “the imaginative world of the novel” where the individual is formed, cultivated, nurtured, and sustained. This is all to say: put down the phone and shake off received ideas; pick up a book and become yourself.

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