The mass consumption of pseudoculture


'Marcuse has shown how mass culture tends to be anticulture - to stifle creative work by the sheer volume of what is "produced," or reproduced. In which case poetry, for example, must start with an awareness of this contradiction and use it - as anti-poetry - which freely draws on the material of superabundant nonsense at its disposal. One no longer has to parody, it is enough to quote - and feed back quotations into the mass consumption of pseudoculture' - The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New Directions ISBN 0811205703)

More Thomas Merton here.
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