Mass society formed itself during the 19th century industrialisation process, through the division of labour, the large-scale industrial organisation, the
concentration of urban populations, the growing centralisation
of decision-making, the development of a complex and international
communication system, and the growth of mass political movements. The term
"mass society" therefore was introduced by anti-capitalist
aristocratic ideologists and used against the values and practices of
industrialized society.
As Alan Swingewood points out in The Myth of
Mass Culture (1977:5-8), the aristocratic theory of mass society is to be
linked to the moral crisis caused by the weakening of traditional centers of
authority such as family and religion. The society predicted by Ortega Y Gasset, T.S. Eliot and others would be dominated by philistine masses, without centers or
hierarchies of moral or cultural authority. In such a society, art can only
survive by cutting its links with the masses, by withdrawing as an asylum for
threatened values. Throughout the 20th century, this type of theory has
modulated on the opposition between disinterested, pure, autonomous art and
commercialized mass culture.
At first sight diametrically opposed to the aristocratic view would be
the theory of culture industry developed by Frankfurt School theoreticians such as Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse. In their view, the masses are precisely dominated by an
all-encompassing culture industry obeying only to the logic of consumer capitalism. Gramsci's concept of hegemony (see: cultural hegemony), that is, the domination of society by a specific group which stays in
power by partially taking care of, and partially repressing the claims of other
groups, doesn't work here anymore. The principle of hegemony as a goal to
achieve for an oppressed social class loses its meaning. The system has taken over, only the state apparatus dominates .
A third view on popular culture, which fits in the liberal-pluralist
ideology, and is often called "progressive evolutionism", is overtly
optimistic. It sees capitalist economy as creating opportunities for every
individual to participate in a culture which is fully democratized through mass
education, expansion of leisure time and cheap records and paperbacks. As Swingewood points out (1977:22), there is no question of
domination here anymore. In this view, popular culture doesn't threaten high
culture, but is an authentic expression of the needs of the people.
If we forget prerawwiki_inboundsors such as Umberto Eco for a
moment, popular culture studies as we know them today were developed in the
late seventies and the eighties. The first influential works were generally
politically left-wing and rejected the "aristocratic" view. However
they also criticized the pessimism of the
A nice example of this tendency is Andrew Ross's No Respect. Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1989). His chapter on the
history of jazz, blues and rock, does not present a linear narrative opposing
the authentic popular music to the commercial record industry, but shows how
popular music in the US, from the twenties until today, evolved out of complex
interactions between popular, avant-garde and commercial circuits, between
lower and middle class kids, between blacks and whites.
Still the traditional views have a long life (overview based on Clem Robyns, 1991). The theory which has been abandoned most
massively is the monolithic, pessimistic view on the culture industry of the
A second reproach is that this view may be as elitist as its
aristocratic counterpart. Both establish the lonely, autonomous, avant-garde
intellectual as the only light in a zombie society. Thus the former Marxists
arrive at an uncritical praise of the elitist and anti-revolutionary upper
class culture. This brings us to a third argument, already made in the sixties
by Umberto Eco (1988). In a state-dominated mass society, the lonely, lucid,
intellectual Übermensch can only retreat in his ivory tower. The historicity of the
contemporary situation is not taken into account, so its internal contradictions
are ignored, and thus revolution can only be seen as purely utopian. The
culture industry theory, therefore, would lead to passivity and thereby becomes
an objective ally of the system it pretends to criticize.
It is of course mainly the influence exercized
by the
However questioned this view on popular culture may be,
it still leaves some traces. For instance, in theories depicting narrative as
necessarily ideologically conservative, like Charles Grivel's
Production de l'intérêt romanesque (1973). Such theories
see dominant ideology as purely a matter of messages, propagated in this case
through the forms of narrative fiction. Thus they easily arrive at an
exaltation of experimental literature as necessarily revolutionary. However,
they may neglect the fact that the ideology is never simply in the message, but
in the position of the message in the general social discourse, and in the
position of its producers in the social formation.
Other theories easily yielding to monolithical
thought stem from the emancipation movements of oppressed groups. Early
feminist scholarship, for instance, often described society as universally and transhistorically dominated by patriarchy in every aspect
of life, thereby presenting a pejorative view of the women they claim to
defend. As Andrew Ross (1989) convincingly shows, the same remark goes for the
widely accepted account of rock history as a continuous appropriation of black
music by a white music industry. Only studies analyzing the cultural oppression
of homosexuality seem to take a less deterministic position.
In liberal-pluralist accounts of popular culture, the theorizing on its
supposedly liberating, democratizing function is nowadays most often pushed to
the background. This type of criticism, often produced
by people who are also active in popular-literary writing themselves, often
amounts to paraphrase and suffers from an uncritical identification with the
study object. One of the main aims of this type of criticism is the
establishment of ahistorical canons of and within
popular genres, in the image of legitimized culture. This approach however has
been accused of elitism as well.
To put it simply: the intellectual, in this view, can fully enjoy junk
culture because of his or her high culture background, but the average reader
can never raise to the learned intellectual discourse of which he or she is the
object. An example of this form of appropriation is Thomas Roberts's An
Aesthetics of Junk Fiction (1990). Though Roberts claims to take a distance
from studies of canonical fiction, he justifies his (implicit) decision to
impose canonical models on popular fiction as follows: "If people who read
Goethe and Manzoni and Pushkin
with pleasure are also reading detective stories with pleasure, there is more
in the detective story than its critics have recognized, perhaps more than even
its writers and readers have recognized" (1989:5). This illustrates a
frequent strategy: the legitimation of popular
fiction on the basis of its use of canonized literary features, and of the
legitimized public's response to it.
Equally alive is the aristocratic apocalyptic view on mass culture as
the destruction of genuine art. As Andrew Ross (1989:5) writes, a history of
popular culture is also a history of intellectuals, of cultural experts whose
self-assigned task it is to define the borders between the popular and the
legitimate. But in contemporary society the dispersed authority is ever more exercized by "technical" intellectuals working
for specific purposes and not for mankind. And in the academic world growing
attention for popular and marginal cultures threatens the absolute values on
which intellectuals have built their autonomy.
In the sixties, Marshal McLuhan caused wide
irritation with his statement that the traditional, book-oriented intellectuals
had become irrelevant for the formulation of cultural rules in the electronic
age. This is not to say that they lost any real political power, which humanist
intellectuals as such hardly ever had. It does mean, however, that they are
loosing control of their own field, the field of art, of restricted symbolical
production (Pierre Bourdieu). While in the 19th century, intellectuals managed to construct art as
a proper, closed domain in which only the incrowd was
allowed to judge, they have seen this autonomy become ever more threatened by
20th century mass society. The main factor here was not the quantitative
expansion of consumption culture, nor the intrusion of commerce into the field
of art through the appearance of paperbacks and book clubs. After all,
protecting art from simplicity and commerce was precisely the task
intellectuals set for themselves.
More important is the disappearance of what has been called the
"grand narratives" during this century, the questioning of
all-encompassing world views offering coherent interpretations of the world and
unequivocal guides for action. As Jim Collins argues in Uncommon Cultures
(1989:2), there is no master's voice anymore, but only a decentered
assemblage of conflicting voices and institutions. The growing awareness of the
historical and cultural variability of moral categories had to be a problem for
an intellectual class which had based its position on the defense of secular
but transhistorical values.
This brings us to a second problem humanist intellectuals face, that is,
the fragmentation of the public. 19th century intellectuals could still tell
themselves that they were either writing for their colleagues, or teaching the
undifferentiated masses. 20th century intellectuals face a heterogeneous whole
of groups and mediums producing their own discourses according to their own
logic and interests. Thus they can't control the reception of their own
messages anymore, and thereby see their influence on the structuring of culture
threatened. Many neo-apocalyptic intellectuals, such as Alain Finkielkraut and George Steiner, emphasize their concern about the growing "illiteracy" of
the masses. In practice they seem to be mainly concerned with high culture
illiteracy, the inability to appreciate difficult art and literary classics.
The neo-aristocratic defense of so-called transhistorical
and universal human values may also often be linked to a conservative political
project. A return to universal values implies the de-legitimation
of any group which does not conform to those values. It is no coincidence,
therefore, that attempts in the
The blurring of the boundaries between high and low culture is one of
the main complaints made by traditional intellectuals about contemporary mass
society. It's hardly surprising then that a lot of studies deal with this
topic. There are for instance a number of sociological studies on literary
institutions which are held responsible for this mix. Among the first were the
commercial book clubs, such as the Book-of-the-Month-Club, appearing from the
twenties on. The aggressive reactions they provoked are described by Janice Radway (1989) in "The Scandal of the Middlebrow".
According to Radway, the book clubs were perceived as
scandalous because they blurred some basic distinctions of cultural discourse.
In a society haunted by the spectre of cultural
standardization and leveling towards below, they dared to put
"serious" fiction on the same level as detective, adventure stories,
biographies and popular non-fiction. Book clubs were scandalous because they
created a space were high and low could meet.
Soon, the term "middlebrow" was introduced to qualify this phenomenon,
and to dismiss it as threatening the authenticity of both high and popular
culture. A bit after the book clubs came the paperbacks, and their influence
was even more wide-ranging. More about this can be found in Thomas Bonn's book
(1989) on New American Library. It shows through what elaborate strategies the
respectable hardcover editors had to go, in order to hide the fact that, from
the sixties on, paperback publishers had taken over the control on the
production of serious literature.
The question whether popular culture or mass culture is inherently
conservative, or whether it can be used in a subversive strategy as well, is
equally hotly debated. It seems widely accepted that popular culture forms can
function at any moment as anti-cultures. "Bad taste" products such as
pornography and horror fiction, says for instance Andrew Ross (1989:231), draw their popular appeal
precisely from their expressions of disrespect for the imposed lessons of
educated taste. They are expressions of social resentment on the part of groups
which have been subordinated and excluded by todays
"civilized society".
The question whether popular culture can actually resist dominant
ideology, or even contribute to social change, is much more difficult to
answer. Many critics easily read popular fiction and film as "attacks
against the system", neglecting both the exact ways in which the so-called
revolutionary message is enacted, and the capacities of dominant doctrines to
recuperate critical messages. Tania Modleski in
"The Terror of Pleasure" (1986:159), for instance, presents
exploitation horror films as attacks on the basic aspects of bourgeois culture.
Thus a loving father cannibalizes his child, and priests turn into servants of
the devil. Other scholars (e.g. Clem Robyns, 1991)claim that, by presenting their perversion as supernatural,
or at least pathological, horror films precisely contribute to perpetuating
those institutions.
Similarly, many critics exalt stories which feature a lone hero fighting
for his ideals against an inert and amoral system. Thus Jim Collins in Uncommon
Cultures (1989:30-31) sees crime fiction opposing a smart private detective and an inefficient police force as a
critique of state justice. On the other hand, Thomas Roberts demonstrates in An
Aesthetics of Junk Fiction (1990:173-174), a study of the historical background
of the private detective model, how the detective story came into existence in
the middle of the 19th century, at the time the institution of state police was
developed. This force consisted mainly of lower class people, but nevertheless
disposed of a certain authority over the upper class. The fears among the upper
classes for this uncontrolled force were eased by domesticating the police in
stories explicitly devoted to them. Their inability to pass on correct judgment
was amply demonstrated, and forced them to bow for the individual intellect of
the detective, who always belonged to the threatened upper class.
Finally, Umberto Eco's studies on
Superman and James Bond (1988:211-256, 315-362) as myths of a static
good-and-evil world view, should be mentioned as very early and lucid examples
of a combination of semiotic and
political analysis.
Still, there may be ways to wage revolt in an age of mass media. One way
could be to introduce small gradual changes in products otherwise conforming to
the requirements of a dominant ideology. The problem here, of course, is that
isolated messages get drowned in the discourse as a whole, and that they can be
used to avoid real changes. Some scholars however describe how opposition
forces use the logic of the media to subvert them. In No Respect (1989: 123), Andrew Ross mentions the
late sixties Yippie movement. Yippies would stage media events,
such as the public burning of dollar bills in Wall Street,
thereby drawing heavy media coverage. This politics of the spectacle brought
the counterculture right into the conservative media and filled their forms with
subversive content.
Whether this strategy is effective or not, it points to an important
fact: the mass media are not above, but dependent on the public. As Alan Swingewood states in The Myth of Mass Culture (1977:84),
the ideological messages the mass media receive are already mediated by a
complex network of institutions and discourses. The media, themselves divided
over innumerable specific discourses, transform them again. And finally the
public meaningfully relates those messages to individual existences through the
mediation of social groups, family networks, etc., which they belong to.