The Contours of the Banal: Popular Art and Culture, Folklore and Kitsch

The essay returns to Gramsci’s pages on folklore, which, besides giving rise to a very important debate in Italy between the 1950s and the 1970s, led to the foundation of demology. The main objective of the paper will be to establish a dialogue between these texts by Gramsci and Benjamin’s reflections on kitsch, popular art and mass culture, to virtually continue the Gramscian discourse through Benjamin’s interpretative categories, actualized in the light of the present. Taking into account the contribution of Cultural Studies, we will then confront the limit that demology has run up against: that of confining the discipline to an anthropology of folkloric heritage, considered more “authentic” the less it is contaminated by the homologating grammars of the culture industry. The second objective of the chapter is to make this limit productive by overcoming it, by proposing on the contrary a new analysis of metropolitan and contemporary forms of folklore. An analysis that must be able not only to grasp and develop the aspects of freedom and resistance within these forms, where they exist, but at the same time to criticise them as social appearances when they are instruments of exploitation, oppression and repression. In response to the contemporary superstitions, reaction and fascism, the chapter concludes by arguing that a renewed revolutionary enlightenment is needed.