Habermas - CC

I usually don’t watch a lot of T.V because a) I don’t have cable and b) it makes me angry. But we own a lot of DVD’s and at the end of the day I usually sit down to watch something that I have control over, something that will make me, well… less angry anyway. For instance, there is (was?) a television show called Brak on Comedy Central. It is part of the highly ingenious Adult Swim programming, and the main character is a monster/alien thing that sings, dances, and says really nonsensical, yet wholesome, things. The show is centered on this young Brak monster, his family, and his friends. His mother is a large monster/alien thing, like himself, while his father seems to be the only “human” character on the show. But Dad (his official name on the show) is half the size of a normal person, and he spouts off even more unintelligible nonsense than Brak’s character. Brak’s “best friend” is a praying mantis that actually hates Brak and everything else he comes into contact with. The neighbor is a giant robot with a lovely front lawn. And Brak’s family lives in the middle of suburbia, despite the fact that the mother is a housewife and the father sits in an oversized chair almost all the time. You get the picture, complete absurdity (most of time) just for the sake of being absurd. So what does this have to do with our good buddy Jurgen Habermas?
Jurgen Habermas states in “Modernity- An Incomplete Project” that the current “relation between ‘modern’ and ‘classical’ has definitely lost a fixed historical reference.” In other words, the current modernity attempts to negate the past, to only look for “the new, the elusive and the ephemeral.” He continues that the split between the “experts” and the average Joe, in the areas of art, morality, and science creates a chasm. The average Joe simply cannot make sense of this avant-garde nonsense. Brak for instance. According to Habermas, it is social snobbery. Like a caste system dependent upon aesthetic tastes? To him, Brak’s nonsensical storylines that float in an uncharted area of space and time, not fixed by history (in terms of its content) make it a difficult candidate for purposeful art (purposeful seeming to be related to political agendas here) People just won’t “get it,” assuming that there is something to “get.” It seems that Habermas is of the mind that avant-garde artistic expressions are wasteful because they don’t reach the masses. They don’t bring our attention to the past; they draw it away from us.
I don’t know if I agree with Habermas on this issue. Though it seems to mirror my own personal struggle with postmodern thought- how can it be made political? How can it be put to action? Habermas seems to be getting at the same thing here in his discussion of aesthetics. But I don’t know that the dismissal of avant-garde comments, protests, etc. is really the key. To me, experiencing art is subjective under any circumstance. Just because someone doesn’t relate to an avant-garde expression doesn’t mean that they don’t have the capacity for it. And to go even further, why would anyone set out to create something that EVERYONE can relate to. How would someone set out to face that task? It seems pretty impossible to me, and it seems like it will only alienate more people in the long run by trying to appeal to a throng of outside influences. Besides, who says there aren’t strong and obvious political comments in even the most absurd? For instance, after rambling about bags of sugar and people who are better at being “you” than “you” are, dad ends a fatherly speech of nonsense with, “now, let’s all go watch the T.V until our finds falll asleep.” Indeed, Dad.