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Mass Culture Theory |
Mass culture |
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Mass culture developed in the early C20th and has raised new issues about culture. The debate first became intense during the 1920s and 1930s. Mass culture arises because of essentially modern industrial processes, thus making culture “almost infinitely reproducible”. This made many critics conclude that, for example, films “could not be art because they no longer possessed the 'aura' of authentic and genuine works of art.” Popular press, cinema and radio were the first types of mass media to emerge. The danger of mass media was seen to be its potential to support totalitarianism. This was exemplified by Nazi use of film, and their attempts to establish official Nazi ideology in all areas of culture and art.
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Debate centres on three related themes
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| (1) | | Who determines popular culture? The people or elites? |
| (2) | | “Does emergence of culture in commodity forms mean that criteria of profitability and marketability take precedence over quality, artistry, integrity and intellectual challenge?” [i] |
| (3) | | Does popular culture indoctrinate people - is it a tool whereby privileged people exercise power over the under-privileged? |
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Mass culture theory |
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Mass Culture Theory claims that society has been transformed by industrialisation — with large-scale and mechanised types of production. This has produced a state of atomisation: “a mass society consists of people who can only relate to each other like atoms in a physical or chemical compound. Mass society consists of atomised people, people who lack any meaningful or morally coherent relationship with each other.” [i]. Links between people are said to have become purely contractural In this situation the old moral order disintegrates and into the vacuum arises “a spurious and ineffectual order” and an order of “surrogate and fake moralities” [i]. These exacerbate the moral crisis of mass society. Individuals become susceptible to manipulation. Religion declines. Rational individualism, mass consumption arise in its place.
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The élitist bias of mass culture theory |
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Mass culture theory tends to view democracy as having contributed to this pathological development. In a democracy there is a false egalitarianism - and culture is thought to become debased because the masses lack taste and discrimination. However, mass society theory does not regard power as residing in the people. Power becomes monopolised by the state in cooperation with capitalism and the mass media industry.
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There is a contrast drawn between Folk Art and Mass Culture. This is illustrated by a quotation from MacDonald: “Folk art grew from below. It was a spontaneous, autochthonous expression of the people, shaped by themselves, pretty much without the benefit of High Culture, to suit their own needs. Mass Culture is imposed from above.”
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Mass culture is defined as “popular culture which is produced by mass production industrial techniques and is marketed for a profit to a mass public of consumers.” [i] It is determined by the profit motive. No sharp distinction is drawn between mass production of cars and mass production of films. Mass culture theorists argue that artistic integrity cannot reside in the products of Mass Culture. It is felt that the “inspired genius” must work outside the confines of the commercial market.
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The mass audience |
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Coupled to this there is a pejorative view of the mass audience. According to mass culture theory the audience is a mass of passive consumers, they are manipulated by the mass media, and influenced into consumerism. Mass products are criticised for being bland and standardised made of appeal to “everyone”. MacDonald expresses this view. “For the masses in historical time are what a crowd is in space: a large quantity of people unable to express themselves as human beings because they are related to one another neither as individuals nor as members of communities..” [iii] It is felt that “Mass culture .. celebrates trivial, sentimental, immediate and false pleasures at the expense of serious, intellectual, time honoured and authentic values.” [ii] It lacks intellectual content and is imbued with fantasy and escapism.
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Mass culture also endangers “high culture”. For example, Q.D. Leavis writes, criticising the general public for having “not even a glimpse of the living interests of modern literature” [iv] and consequently isolating the intellectual elite; “.. the critical minority to whose sole charge modern literature has now fallen is isolated, disowned by the general public and threatened with extinction.” Thus popular culture has a “capacity to level down or debase all culture, and remake it in its own image.”
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To defend against this pernicious development there must be an avant-garde. Q.D. Leavis argues “that the cultural rot can only be stopped by the efforts of a committed intellectual elite: 'all that can be done, it must be realised, must take the form of resistance by an armed and conscious minority”. [v] The elite must (1) conduct research to establish that the literary standards have fallen; (2) evangelise an elite to reverse the rot. The schools and universities have a particular mission to introduce culture to the masses.
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The ideas of mass culture theory have been enormously influential in the arts. The attack on mass culture is exemplified by the work of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden, to name but a few of the literary figures of the interwar period.
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Mass culture and Americanisation |
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American popular culture is vilified as the embodiment of all that is wrong with modern culture This feeling originated in Britain in the C19th. It is illustrated by a quotation from Edmund Gosse (1889) quoted by Q.D. Leavis - “Of late there have seemed to me to be certain signs, especially in America, of a revolt of the mob against our literary masters..” It is also expressed by Arnold in Culture & Anarchy: “.. in things of the mind, and in culture and totality, America, instead of surpassing us all, falls short.” To Arnold America meant “fragmentariness” and “an addition to the banal”. F.R. Leavis also criticised mass culture.
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The attack on American Popular culture is reflected in Orwell's work on the 'decline of the English murder'. Americanised murder stories have “no depth of feeling”. Orwell discusses the American crime novel - for example, No Orchids For Miss Blandish - contrasted with Raffles books. Orwell complains about “the equivocal attitude towards about “the equivocal attitude towards crime” and contrasts this with Raffles: “it is clearly understood that Raffle's crimes must be expiated sooner or later.”
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Orwell deplored the effect of Americanisation on the culture of the working-class. “This conception of the working class shared many of the qualities ascribed by mass culture critics to the rural folk community - organic harmony, shared authentic values, a moral sense of communal and individual worth.” Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy 1957 also “tried to document how the traditional and closely knit working-class community was being taken over by what he termed 'a shiny barbarism'..” Hoggart deplored the Hollywood film and the cheap and brutal crime novel. He also deplores “the debasement of working-class life” by Americanisation.
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The Germans also share this rejection of American cultural colonialisation. For example, Wim Wenders complains of how “The Americans colonised our sub-conscious.”
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A Critique of Mass Culture Theory |
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Dominic Strinati claims that mass culture theory is still influential. He agrees that mass culture theory is elitist and implicitly supports this view and denies its philosophical basis. “This raises the question of why the understanding and appreciation of popular culture by some groups is thought to be better or more valid than the standards of other groups..” He denies that this is the case — working class evaluations are just as valid. Additionally, elitism ignores “the range and diversity of popular culture...” Strinati elaborates and illustrates this point: “Popular culture is not homogeneous” and “does not have to be consumed as a whole”. He examines three strands of the attack on popular culture: (1) it diverts energy away from more useful pursuits; (2) it has harmful effects on audiences; (3) “bad mass culture drives out good culture — both folk culture and art.”
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Strinati attacks the idealisation of the 'golden age' of folk art — “the theory overestimates the past and underestimates the present”. Further, “the idealised past is one based upon a cultural hierarchy dominated by the standards of the elite, to which the people are expected to defer.” Such idealised past communities never existed. And further, “mass culture theory lacks an adequate understanding of social and cultural change. It registers and criticises the appearance of mass culture but fails to explain it.”
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Strinati claims that mass culture theory arises from the resentment of “certain groups of intellectuals” of mass culture. And there is no clear demarcation between mass and high culture. For example, F.R. Leavis dismisses cinema as a serious cultural form, but this is clearly absurd. For example, Eisenstein and Hitchcock are clearly great directors. Strinati rejects the view that there is a mass audience. The audience for popular culture is not “undifferentiated” and people are not “passive consumers”.
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Strinati also comments on what he regards as a refreshing feminist critique of mass culture theory. Modleski claims that it tends to 'feminise' mass culture, giving the feminine qualities of “consumption, passivity” to the masses. “The power of men over women is reflected in the cultural distinction between art and mass culture.” Strinati discusses the work of Ang and her analysis of responses to Dallas — her concept of “ideology of popularism” as an alternative to mass culture theory — it is based on “an equalitarian tolerance of different kinds of cultural taste and a respect for people knowing what they are like.”
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REFERENCES
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| i | | Dominic Strinati, An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture, Chapter on Mass Culture, Routledge, 1995 |
| ii | | Dominic Strinati, An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture, Chapter on Postmodernism, Routledge, 1995 |
| iii | | D. MacDonald, A theory of mass culture in B. Rosenberg and D. White (eds) Mass Culture, Glencoe, Free Press, 1957 |
| iv | | D. MacDonald, A theory of mass culture in B. Rosenberg and D. White (eds) Mass Culture, Glencoe, Free Press, 1957 |
| v | | Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and The Reading Public, London, Chatto and Windus (1935) |
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