On the meaning of the decline of literature and classical music

125 years into the age of cinema, the novel now has gone the way of classical music: it is still being produced and enjoyed, and by many. But it is not central to the culture. Other literary and narrative forms are.

This means that the subculture to which it is central, which a segment of a social class, that of educated professionals who appreciate the fine arts, has ceased to be hegemonic. The influence that reading elites, and it literally is becoming the case that only elites read, which was true until the spread of print culture (except among the Jews), have over the society is, at the level of culture, indirect. And the majorities, which now can aptly be called silent, are excluded from this high culture, though as much in autonomous, self-selecting ways as anything.

To see what is being lost, it helps to consider what classical music and novel reading have in common that cinema and television (and theater, which was always a small audience affair) and popular music lack. The culture of classical music and book-length narratives is one of interiority, of reflection and introspection. Further, reading is introspective in its contents as well as form: the experience of reading is one of all kinds of thoughts and verbal expressions that pass through the reader's mind and that are 'in' the text itself, since literature is a use of language, and its contents are thoughts, not images.

The shift was accompanied by the mutation within the ruling class from bourgeoisie to professionalocracy. This was the social shift in all advanced societies that took place in the 20th century. It happened in the Soviet Union as much as the United States and Western Europe. The role of the novel in the life of the bourgeoisie is now taken by the role of professionals by various kinds of non-fiction discourse that supply the reader with useful information.

It does not ask them to think. Unless it is in order to solve the problems given in their profession.