Experiencia docente e investigadora del profesorado

The elevation of banality through an attentiveness to the commonplace has a textured phenomenological history that begins in the rise of the relationship between culture and hyperconsumption, most notably elucidated by Bauman who writes under the assumption that postmodernity trumps all other values and norms. His work, deeply embedded in the sociological tradition, responds to postmodern ideals of capitalism, but also inherently announces the

convergence of modern and postmodern ideals in the midst of competing cultural norms taking root in unreflective consumer culture. His work yields similar implications to Gilles

Lipovetsky’s hypermodernity, a unification of modern individualism and postmodern

fragmentation in the form of petit narratives, engaged in an era of excess, the driving assumption of this project. Bauman contends that, in a transition from modern nation-building cultures to a postmodern condition of globalization, diaspora, or the dispersal of groups of peoples all of the world, shrunk the distance between strangers, at once compelled by stark differences and competing viewpoints in an increasingly small space. Simultaneously acknowledging a new moment, Bauman recognizes that we have not lost modernity to history—modernist impulses have morphed into a postmodern condition, and, this project argues, a hypermodern one.

Culture, according to Bauman, is comprised of three significant characteristics: 1) optimism in the limitless potential of human nature, 2) universal assumptions that the potential for change is the same for all, and 3) eurocentrism, or the conviction that communal and

individual life is exemplified by specific institutions. Bauman writes in defense of the European Union, calling forth the need to celebrate difference and invite clashing perspectives to create new realities. The result of globalization, according to Bauman, is that we have replaced ideologies of cultural supremacy with desires for difference, yielding clashes between and

among the individuals who protect and promote various perspectives and narrative viewpoints.

The great diasporas of globalization created minorities with mutual feelings of isolation and self-protection as a means to guard against clash and conflict. Segmentation and fragmentation between and among various cultural identities reigned, and continue to reign, in place of collective entities of like-minded individuals. Bauman offers a call for the celebration of all identities and differences, respecting the particular nature of each culture and erasing hierarchical boundaries in the quest to learn from one another.

Bauman defines our historical moment as liquid modernity because of its “self-propelling, self-intensifying, compulsive and obsessive ‘modernization,’” which results in a liquid-like form of social life and human communication, constantly morphing and reshaping to attend to the present changes inherent in a social world struggling for identity and recognition (Bauman 11). Culture focuses upon the individual quest for selfhood through excessive notions of needs, struggles, and challenges that become problems of excessive consumption in this historical era. Bauman reads modernity as a great unifier that melted away into postmodern fragmentation with preference for individual decision-making and choice. While not calling it hypermodernity, both Bauman and Lipovetsky announce a historical moment with significant ramifications for Warhol’s project and for philosophy of communication ethics.

Bauman cites Oxford sociologist John Goldthorpe, who claimed that culture, in this historical moment, supplanted the cultural elite with a new phenomenological commonness that permits all access to high or elite art within the public sphere. Culture is a mixture of all that high art previously defined itself as coupled with a turn toward popular culture and popular

consumption—television, various forms of music, etc. Thus, Bauman announces the elevation of the commonplace and the banal in a turn away from traditional standards of cultural elitism. The

bridge between high art and low art, as such, is not a conflict of taste but a desire to consume everything and all things, coupled with a selective mindset that acknowledges class struggles manifesting as identity crises. While writing under the auspices of postmodernity, Bauman’s characterization resounds with Lipovetsky’s understanding of the call of hypermodernity to hyperconsumption as a means of individual expression—and this manifested in the world of art, as well. Once, in Bauman’s estimation, art fragmented various audiences by social class. Now, current cultural norms and communication ethics announce a fragmentation that collapsed upon itself as a pattern of rejection of traditions. Under this framework, selfhood emerged as a primary means of historical interpretation, and subsequently communication, of events and value

systems. In this vein, pop art surfaced as a response to cultural disrespect of various backgrounds and, yet, turned that very attitude in on itself through a commitment to superficiality through aesthetic, visual, and verbal communication inherently manifesting cultural values and ethics.

According to Bauman, the modern basic assumption related to culture was that few elites would be able to educate the masses and to reveal that which they guarded—a possessed

intellectual disseminated to the ignorant through cultural artifacts. Much of the colonizing attitude emerged from this basis. Intellectual citizens during the Enlightenment felt a responsibility to pull the disenfranchised out of their “monotonous routine” into a “modern nation” and state (Bauman 52). Modernity’s rejection of tradition in the favor of individual autonomy manifested in the new conditions that the cultural elite gave to the masses in education and cultivation of spirit. The rise of the modern nation-state signaled the rise of a singular

historical culture, calling forth progress at the expense of the local. The product, however, was hegemony of culture and an enlightened class with assured status, thus stagnating culture into a

homeostatic function of tranquilizing the masses not by inducing change but by depicting a state of affairs.

Bauman offers a warning, which resonates within the life, relationships, and works of Warhol. He contends that, in the midst of a changing public that challenges cultural elitism, or the status quo, one must have courage in the face of institutional constraints. That quality reserved itself for the intellectual elite, the academic experts, the celebrities, and the stars.

Bauman points to German word Bildung, later explicated further by Gadamer, to refer to the signifying of culture as force for change and upheaval, rather than the great equalizer or

preserver of the status quo. Warhol’s works were a direct challenge to the status quo, and acted as an elevator of banality and the commonplace in direct opposition to traditional modes of understanding within art, communication, and art as communication. Culture and high art, elitist forms of enjoyment, were shifted and torn down by Warhol’s penchant for the superficial and for repetition. His choices were direct and targeted, and offered a communicative stance of

responsiveness to his historical moment. Just as Bauman argues for a European Union that encourages the merging of difference, Warhol’s move toward creating works of art that reflected cultural values allowed for the merging of identities and narratives under the collapsed

distinction of high/low art.

Culture’s hypermodern endeavor was to ensure individual freedom, whereas individual choice trumps communal commitments. A sense of belonging in a community gives way to the need to choose an identity. Production supplanted duty and seduction and temptation bypassed commitments to change. Thus, consumer society is a byproduct of a changing culture, and one experiences hypermodern culture through consumption of goods, without standards and without preference, lacking tradition and respect for tradition. What seems to have occurred as a

byproduct, however, is that art lacked the revered ethos it once possessed in the traditional nature of art. If art is anything that you can get away with, as Warhol once stated, and artists are

preoccupied with the creation of art for the sake of fame and fortune, where is the value of a cultural artifact? Warhol heard this question as he transitioned into the Warhol of the 1960s. He witnessed the dissolution of modern impulses for a post-modern, or liquid modern,

preoccupation with individual choice, personal expression, and a taste for consumerism as a source of high art. Warhol’s life and works elevate the banal to the extremes by recognizing the commodification of the commonplace in a hypermodern moment, flattening into a superficial read of life, standards, and traditions. Bauman’s philosophical and sociological inquiry offers a hermeneutic entrance into the role of culture and consumption in aesthetic objects for purposes of human communication. Walter Benjamin, aesthetic philosopher and communication ethicist offers an interpretive extension of Bauman’s project in understanding art’s response to an age of consumption and commodification.