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Oh, gosh, please don't throw away lixiviated culture quite yet! I have for the past few days been considering the similarities between the process and the washing away of cultures.
A movie I mentioned on Miscellany, "The Weeping Camel," shows just that sort of insidious lixiviation in Mongolia, at first focusing on families working their sheep and camels on the desert, and finally showing in a very subtle way the movement of television into a nearby town. One of the old ones senses the threat of television--images in glass, he calls it. And the shots of poles to carry electricty look so foreign on the desert where the sheep and camel herders live. The poles look like invaders and the motorcycles from the town look threatening, too.
But it is all subtle, insidious, creeping on the surface, but likely to snap the nomadic culture apart if it takes root.
Evisceration works, too, but it seems more like a bomb...not so subtle. Lixiviation seems as though it could work slowly, insidiously, like contaminated water leaching soil nutrients, a process so subtle, but sure, that it can go undetected for years before the damage is done and hard to turn back.
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from behind the curtain we hear two voices:Sherman, Set the Wayback Machine for 1964. Why are we going then, Mr. Peabody? We're going home Sherman, so we can see just how different things were then. But Mr. Peabody, you know that you can't go home again! That's only if you've read Thomas Wolfe, Sherman. Besides I want to revisit Herbert Marcuse, and you just can't find his books anymore. aside: It's getting so that it's hard to find many books... <another time, another place> We are in a large room with many shelves, all filled with books. Sherman selects and opens a book at random and, fortunately for the dramatic movement of our story, it is by Herbert Marcuse. Sherman reads aloud.The achievements and the failures of this society invalidate its higher culture. The celebration of the autonomous personality, of humanism, of tragic and romantic love appears to be the ideal of a backward stage of the development. What is happening now is not the deterioration of higher culture into mass culture but the refutation of this culture by the reality. The reality surpasses its culture. Man today can do more than the culture heros and half-gods; he has solved many insoluble problems. But he has also betrayed the hope and destroyed the truth which were preserved in the sublimations of higher culture. To be sure, the higher culture was always in contradiction with social reality, and only a privileged minority enjoyed its blessings and represented its ideals. The two antagonistic spheres of society have always coexisted; the higher culture has always been accommodating, while the reality was rarely disturbed by its ideals and its truth.
Today's novel feature is the flattening out of the antagonism between culture and social reality through the obliteration of the oppositional, alien, and transcendent elements in the higher culture by virtue of which it constituted another dimension of reality. This liquidation of two-dimensional culture takes place not through the denial and rejection of the “cultural values,” but through their wholesale incorporation into the established order, through their reproduction and display on a massive scale....
Just as people know or feel that advertisements and political platforms must not be necessarily true or right, and yet hear and read them and even let themselves be guided by them, so they accept the traditional values and make them part of their mental equipment. If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator – the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value counts. On it centers the rationality of the status quo, and all alien rationality is bent to It. As the great words of freedom and fulfillment are pronounced by campaigning leaders and politicians, on the screens and radios and stages, they turn into meaningless sounds which obtain meaning only in the context of propaganda, business, discipline, and relaxation. This assimilation of the ideal with reality testifies to the extent to which the ideal has been surpassed. It is brought down from the sublimated realm of the soul or the spirit or the inner man, and translated into operational terms and problems. Here are the progressive elements of mass culture. The perversion is indicative of the fact that advanced industrial society is confronted with the possibility of a materialization of ideals. The capabilities of this society are progressively reducing the sublimated realm in which the condition of man was represented, idealized, and indicted. Higher culture becomes part of the material culture. In this transformation, it loses the greater part of its truth. Mr. Peabody interrupts.Yes, Sherman. Marcuse summed it up by saying, "the progress of technological rationality is liquidating the oppositional and transcending elements in the “higher culture.” They succumb in fact to the process of desublimation which prevails in the advanced regions of contemporary society." fade to black
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desublimation - a process by which things are undone that were previously sublimated on a higher level of the cultural scale
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It has been a very long time since I read Marcuse's An Essay on Liberation but I'd bet this quotation comes from it. Right?
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doubtlessly Marcuse borrowed from his own writings, but I gave away this source in the subject line: One-Dimensional Man. actually, I googled part of the excerpt and cut it from one of the three hits that came up.
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the loss of culture is so detrimenta
When you talk about Dylan, he thinks you're talking about Bob Dylan (whoever *he was). The cat ain't got no kulcha!
-- Anon F.W.
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[ It is brought down from the sublimated realm of the soul or the spirit or the inner man, and translated into operational terms and problems. Here are the progressive elements of mass culture. The perversion is indicative of the fact that advanced industrial society is confronted with the possibility of a materialization of ideals. The capabilities of this society are progressively reducing the sublimated realm in which the condition of man was represented, idealized, and indicted. Higher culture becomes part of the material culture. In this transformation, it loses the greater part of its truth.] _________________________________________ - Hurbert MarcuseYeah, yeah, yeah, the sky is falling. Herbie Marcuse and tswum should unwrite themselves their old man's lament and look around at a World exploding with portent of a most wonderful and amazing future. Listen, ancient ones, go back and sit in your dark safe caves and moan and wail the loss of traditions past their prime and whine and chant your youthful ole sayings that no longer have a ring. Be not afraid. Hope, spirit, and desire, are all hardwired into the human psyche and thanks for the fish. 
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I think we have a winner (although I still like the metaphorical idea of lixiviation and its insidiousness).
Desublimation: kind of like the theology of the Incarnation. Deity desublimed. Buddy Jesus.
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dear Milo, In no way did I advocate the teachings of Herbert Marcuse here. Nor do I believe anything that Ayn Rand put on paper. I still have some scribblings of both of these writers because they come in handy for moments like these; to wit, discussions about words. as to why I came to possess books by either of them, when I was but a callow youth we were encouraged to read everything. Does our "culture" frown on this now?! The extract of Marcuse I posted above was given as backgound for the word desublimation, and to show the parallels to the theme which has grown out of the original premise of this thread. Please take up your crusades with other parties if you must; but once again you bring your politics into these forums when we have repeatedly, since their inception, asked people to keep religion and politics for other venues which encourage them. It's quite true that you can glean much of a person's philosophy by what he posts here; but you should not expect others to submit tacitly or passively to the manifest proselytizing of your own. best regards, Michael
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>I think we have a winner
thanks for that, aorto.
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