Instructions
1. This assignment requires you to prepare one essay, approximately 1500 words (4 pages) on the topic outlined below. The essay must be double spaced, typed in 12-point font, and with margins of no more than 1 inch. This essay must conform to the MLA style and follow the footnoting and documentation format described at the online link: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/.
Essay Topic
o Summarize and comment critically on the so-called “mass culture/popular culture” debate in cultural studies.
Be sure to identify the underlying theoretical assumptions that inform the two sides of the argument and present your own conclusions about the perspective you believe to be the most convincing and why?
You should base your essay response on the material provided in the assigned readings for Unit 2. Remember to provide scholarly support for claims made in your essay and document your sources correctly using MLA format (see above link).
Reading Assignment:
From British Cultural Studies: An Introduction, read
“Chapter 6: Ideology”
From the Cultural Studies 325 Reading File, read
“Opening the Hallway: Some Remarks on the Fertility of Stuart Hall’s Contribution to Critical Theory” by John Fiske
From Literary Theory: An Anthology, read
Part 12, Chapter 6, “Culture, Ideology, Interpellation” by John Fiske
From British Cultural Studies: An Introduction, read
“Chapter 4: Audiences”
From Literary Theory: An Anthology, read
Part 12, Chapter 3: “The Culture Industry as Mass Deception” by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno
From the Cultural Studies 325 Reading File, read
“Commodities and Culture” and “Productive Pleasures” by John Fiske
Some Notes:
Marxism was probably the most important theoretical influence on early British cultural studies. The following explanation, which is taken from The Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies, provides a synopsis of basic Marxist premises:
As its name implies, Marxism is a body of thought derived from the work of Karl Marx which dates from the mid-nineteenth century and stresses the determining role of the material conditions of existence. . . . The central place of class conflict in Marxist theory and the promise of a classless society supply Marxism with its claim to be an emancipatory philosophy of social equality. Marxism is, above all, a form of historical materialism that stresses the changeable character of social formations. (Barker 114)
And further,
For Marxism, culture is a material force tied into the socially organized production of the conditions of human existence. This idea is expressed in the metaphor of the base and the superstructure wherein the cultural superstructure is shaped or determined by the organization of the economic mode of production. (Barker 114)
Of the so-called “founders” of cultural studies, both E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams were self–declared Marxists, but it was Williams who eventually became central to the thinking of later cultural studies practitioners. Williams’ approach, which is sometimes referred to as cultural materialism, was to always “ground” abstract categories in the collective lived experiences of human agents in specific social contexts. Andrew Milner describes Williams’ cultural materialism as an insistence that we “look at our actual productive activities without assuming in advance that only some of them are material” (97).
Graeme Turner and others view Williams as primarily “culturalist” in his orientation. Certainly, he was skeptical of Althusser’s structuralist Marxism (although he did accept the concept of “over determination” as outlined in Althusser’s book, For Marx). And like Stuart Hall, Williams was strongly influenced by the thinking of Italian communist, Antonio Gramsci.
Gramsci’s influence is evident in Williams’ essay “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.” Here, Williams uses Gramsci’s theory of hegemony to explain how, at any given time, societies contain both dominant (hegemonic) cultural formations and alternative (or at least potentially oppositional) cultural formations, which are sometimes described as subcultures or counter-cultures. Furthermore, some examples of both dominant and alternative cultural formations can be regarded as residual, which means that they are no longer connected to the social processes that created them, or as emergent, which means that they anticipate, or point to, future change. For Williams, there is a continuous struggle between the dominant culture, which attempts to incorporate and neutralize (or co-opt) emergent cultural forms, and the ability of the emergent cultural forms to resist and thereby force some kind of accommodation. In turn, these accommodations may or may not result in significant modifications to the dominant culture.
However, in order for this process to be credible, cultural formations had to be thought of as both material and productive; not, as the more mechanical interpretations of Marx suggest, as merely a reflection or function of the economic base:
Williams’ “Base and Superstructure” essay had signaled not only a new reading of Gramsci, but also an attempt to recast the base/superstructure formula itself. He had argued for a ‘revaluation’ of each of the three terms in the formula, ‘base’, ‘superstructure’, and ‘determination’, so that: the first would now denote the primary production of society itself . . . rather than the merely ‘economic’; the second, the whole range of cultural practices, rather than a merely secondary and dependent ‘content’; and the third, the ‘setting of limits and exertion of pressures’, rather than predetermined causation. (Milner 96)
Mukerji and Schudson interpret Williams’ essay in a similar manner:
Determination . . . should be revalued towards the setting of limits and exertion of pressure. . . . Williams [also] believes that base should be “revalued towards the specific activities of men in real social and economic relationships and away from the notion of a fixed economic or technological abstraction. (410)
In an essay entitled “Marxism without Guarantees,” Stuart Hall draws on both Williams and Gramsci to challenge the claim that Marxism could be dismissed as merely a form of “economic determinism.” Hall does an excellent job of clarifying and reasserting the importance of key aspects of Marxist thought. One can readily recognize the echoes of Hall’s predecessor, Raymond Williams, in these comments:
Understanding ‘determinacy’ in terms of setting of limits, the establishment of parameters, the defining of the space of operations, the concrete conditions of existence, the ‘givenness’ of social practices, rather than in terms of the absolute predictability of particular outcomes . . . establishes the open horizon of Marxist theorizing—determinacy without guaranteed closures. (Hall 45)
According to Williams, Marx himself never left human agency out of the equation, which might be proven by Marx’s famous remark that humans “make their own history” though not under “circumstances chosen by themselves” (Marx 595). However, regarding the ‘base/superstructure’ formulation as a rigid dichotomy is something of a “natural” for the structuralist interpreters of Marxism. The culturalist contention that structuralism was overly preoccupied with fixed abstractions can be summed up in the following statement by Andrew Milner:
In Althusser’s work, the characteristically Western Marxist tension between culture as praxis [i.e., emphasizing human agency] and culture as domination finally attained the unhappiest of all possible resolutions. . . . Althusser’s distinctive contribution was to read Marxism as if it were a structuralism— much as his friend and colleague, Jaques Lacan, had read Freudian psychoanalysis. . . . Culture comes to be understood, then, in essentially structuralist terms, as ‘constituting concrete individuals as subjects’. (83–84)
The concept of “hailing” (interpellation), which Fiske discusses, is central to the definition of ideology associated with Althusser. (Milner points out that this is also a theory of the subject.) You might find it interesting to compare Althusser and Foucault on the topic of identity construction, given the arguments presented by Fiske.
You can also see how Fiske’s ideas of popular resistance might be read as a kind of sub-text to his discussion/critique of Althusser. Again, look at the tension between structure and agency! Obviously, this invites us to think about how the mainstream media contributes to stereotyping and the shaping of public discourse. Certainly, this reading should serve as an effective transition to the themes examined in the next section.
Commentary
An understanding of the perspectives of the Frankfurt School, particularly as expressed in the writing of Theodor Adorno, is central to the historical overview of the Marxist tradition in cultural studies. While Lukacs, in his book History and Class Consciousness, was probably the first Marxist critic to articulate a rudimentary theory concerning the connections between ideology and consciousness, it was Adorno who first wrote at length about “mass culture” and “the culture industry.”
The term “culture industry” was coined by Adorno and his Frankfurt School colleague, Max Horkheimer, in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. In his introduction to The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, editor J. M. Bernstein summarizes their position as follows:
Culture now impresses the same stamp on everything. Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part. Culture has become openly, and defiantly, an industry obeying the same rules of production as any other producer of commodities. Cultural production is an integrated component of the capitalist economy as a whole. Culture is no longer the repository of a reflective comprehension of the present in terms of a redeemed future; the culture industry forsakes the promise of happiness in the name of the degraded utopia of the present. (9)
Many defenders of popular culture (Fiske is not alone here) have accused Adorno of elitism, and of valuing high modernist art over virtually every other period and style. According to Andreas Huyssen, Adorno is a theorist of modernism and a rather conservative one at that:
Adorno privileges a certain trend of modernist literature. . . . The notion of a politically committed art and literature is anathema for Adorno as it is for the dominant account of modernism in Anglo-American criticism. Major movements of the historical avant-garde such as Italian futurism, Dada, Russian constructivism, and productivism, as well as surrealism, are blatantly absent from [Adorno’s] canon. (38–39)
Throughout The Culture Industry, Adorno denounces much of mass culture. Cinema is dismissed as a “misalliance between photography and the novel” (63); impressionist music is “a spurious synthesis of painting and music” (71); jazz is a kind of St. Vitus’ Dance performed by “improvisers in a compulsory situation” (88); and sport is “not play, but a ritual in which the subjected celebrate their subjection” (89). In statements such as these, his pessimism is readily apparent.
Adorno and Horkheimer’s views on “mass culture” are often opposed to those of their Frankfurt School colleague, Walter Benjamin. Benjamin clashed with Adorno over the issue of “mechanical reproduction” and the extent to which it would liberate or destroy art. While Benjamin himself had mixed views about how public access to art would politicize the populace, most would probably agree that history supports his more pro-mechanical reproduction position. Today film, print-making, and recorded music are all considered to be legitimate artistic media, but this is not the same thing as arguing that the individual products are all equally “good” as judged from a particular critical perspective.
Adorno has been accused of basing his theory of mass culture on the assumption that the masses are cultural dupes. Perhaps this was indeed the case, but it may be an overstatement of his position. The following passage is an important qualifier:
Today anyone who is incapable of . . . reproducing the formulas, conventions and judgements of mass culture as if they were his own, is threatened in his very existence, suspected of being an idiot or an intellectual. Looking good, make-up, the desperately strained smile of eternal youth which only cracks momentarily . . . all this bounty is dispensed by the personnel manager under threat of the stick. . . . This is why mass culture proves so irresistible and not because of the supposed ‘stultification’ of the masses which is promoted by their enemies and lamented by their philanthropic friends. (Adorno and Bernstein 92; emphasis added)
Adorno, to his credit, was concerned with the pervasiveness of commoditization. To put it another way, he didn’t really “blame the (cultural) victims.” Nor did he exempt what he considered to be “art proper,” observing that, under capitalism, high art and consumer art were the “torn halves of an integral freedom (to which, however, they do not add up)” (123).
On the whole, Adorno’s view is somewhat gloomy, but his writing does contain some interesting anomalies. For instance, in the essay entitled “Free Time,” he talks about how the leisure industry is able to ensnare us as consumers of, for instance, camping:
The industry alone could not have forced people to purchase its tents and outdoormobiles, plus huge quantities of extra equipment, if there had not already been some longing in people themselves; but their own need for freedom gets functionalized, extended and reproduced by business; what they want is forced on them once again. (Adorno and Bernstein 190–191; emphasis added)
This sounds remarkably close to a Gramscian position and suggests that, for Adorno, there is still some connection, however tenuous, between exchange value and use value. Thus, even if we are buying pure sizzle, we do so because we remember, or are somehow aware of, the existence of the steak!
Adorno concludes the above essay with a discussion on how some of his own research on audience responses to the public spectacle of a royal wedding indicated that “it is doubtful whether the culture industry and consumer-consciousness can be simply equated with one another” (195). He adds that it was possible “to detect symptoms of a split-consciousness” (196), which led him to conclude that “the real interests of individuals are still strong enough to resist, within certain limits, total inclusion” (196–197).
But there is one final point to be made. Adorno anticipates later trends in cultural studies by being one of the first in the discipline to consider Marxism as a kind of “smorgasbord,” selecting the parts that he finds useful (e.g., commoditization, alienation, and the mind-body split that is an internalized effect of the social division of labour) while rejecting much of political Marxism and social activism generally. (See his essay entitled “Resignation.”) As mentioned earlier, there is some question as to whether or not selective approaches of this kind are an appropriate way to consider theory, but certainly cultural studies has been forged in the crucible of theoretical eclecticism. Also and ironically, the theory of the Frankfurt School itself could be thought of as—to use Adorno’s words—a “spurious synthesis” of Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Freud!
While, in many respects, Walter Benjamin manages to agree with his good friend and Frankfurt School colleague, Adorno, their differences are rather profound. The following excerpt is taken from an article on Walter Benjamin written by Esther Leslie, which appears in The Literary Encyclopedia (online version). It begins with the tellingly appropriate statement, “Walter Benjamin is hard to pin down,” and continues as follows:
Of all his major essays of the 1930s, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” was the first to generate widespread posthumous debate in Germany and beyond. Written for the Institute of Social Research’s journal of critical theory, it discussed the implications for fine art of the rise of mass media and its technologies of production and reproduction. Benjamin was keen to understand the social implications of this cultural change, but also the ways in which modes of cultural appropriation might have social consequences.
Mechanical reproduction of art was understood in two ways. Firstly it referred to the easy accessibility of other representations of “great art”, postcards, illustrations in books and magazines, posters, copies that could be acquired, grasped by hand, excerpted and incorporated into a viewer’s environment. In copy form, an encounter with artworks, once available only to the few who could travel to the place of deposit or were socially awarded the right to view, could now be had by everyone. In addition, technology had altered the cultural scene such that new forms of imaging had emerged—film and photography—whose very basis was rooted in reproduction. Mechanically produced art challenged in fundamental ways the hitherto dominating conception of art with its emphasis on genius, originality and uniqueness. A film print or photograph has no original, in the old sense. Each copy of a photographic negative or a film print is of equal value. These developments, Benjamin insisted, bring about the decline of what he termed art’s “aura”. Aura suggests that unique, authored works of art emit a peculiar presence and effect. Art’s aura might be imagined as a fetishized glow that exudes from products of high art, untouchable, unapproachable, made by geniuses. Such art—unlike (at least potentially) mechanically reproduced art—bears a high value in cultural, moral and financial terms. Auratic artworks force the spectator to become a passive beholder drinking in the vision of genius. The decline of this “aura”—a fortunate by-product of mass reproduction—opened the way to a new appropriation of art by the masses. Encountering artworks more casually, in different environments, and in ever greater numbers, audiences could learn to manipulate them, to engage in the production of meaning from artworks, to criticise and evaluate.
This was not, however, an automatic process and Benjamin’s essay ends by noting the ways in which the production of culture within the property relations of capitalism puts a block on the progressive, democratic unfurling of culture. The Hollywood star system, for example, made of culture a commodity, and also re-instated awe before the product, by glorifying selected stars and creating cults around them, in a way reminiscent of the pre-bourgeois days of art as embedded in the context of religious ritual. Benjamin is also mindful of the ways in which the Nazis are able to make efficient use of modern mass media forms, such as radio and film. (Leslie, The Literary Encyclopedia, 2001)
