Mass Culture - a Cri de Coeur
Rosenberg, Bernard
IS MASS CULTURE AN ABOMINATION, a harmless anodyne, or a blessing? These are the real, if often merely implicit, questions in an interminable and ferocious debate. No one yields. Even now,...
...Edward Shils contended that "brutal culture" perfectly suited the masses...
...Anachronistically, he now writes in a psychedelic delirium comparable only to that of Timothy Leary...
...LSD in good solid cubes can induce psychosis...
...In Communist countries, as in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, this general circumstance is perfectly clear...
...The pose of objectivity is precluded...
...At that time "everyone" understood how these disparate societies were actually very much alike...
...its activity therefore not acknowledged...
...if Pacifica can operate a network of FM stations, broadcasting views that may be politically repugnant but are usually dissident and provocative, and all this on a shoestring...
...Those who propound this theory, when they are not subverting it, believe that direct facetoface confrontation is really decisive: parishioners look to their priests, wives to their husbands, an army of susceptible followers respond to the "influentials" in their midst...
...I have never heard the disrespectful attitude more offensively presented than at a conference on mass culture some years ago, to which a wide assortment of scholars and artists were invited...
...if even Hollywood, after destroying much of its best talent (Welles and Huston in our time, Griffith, von Stroheim, and Keaton long ago), can offer directors enough leeway to be creative without forcing them into exile or into obsequious submission, and Warsaw or Budapest can do the same...
...Intellectuals inside the business world may deserve a measure of compassion: Mr...
...Why not here...
...Youngsters react to pictures and to music with a measure of authenticity rarely attainable later on in their lives...
...everyone gets exactly what he is capable of absorbing...
...To REJECT "MASS-CULT" AND "MID-CULT" is to espouse high culture—and to do that is to be put down in certain circles as a snob...
...Whether there are more television sets than bath tubs in the land (there are) can be statistically determined...
...Competitive if indistinguishable products—like variously packaged political candidates—are said to be bought on the basis of personal influence...
...Those who go are homogeneous: overwhelmingly upper-middleclass, professional, disproportionately Jewish...
...Actually, on this topic, everyone is prejudiced...
...Tough executives brutally assert the complete disdain they feel for their audiences...
...We have learned as well as any people on earth that vice and virtue are interchangeable terms...
...What does this enthusiasm signify if not the capacity of common men to surmount the trash heaped upon them...
...Gilbert Seldes of CBS must walk more softly than Professor Gilbert Seldes of the academic world...
...Let us not overtax our memories...
...The production mentioned by Esslin took place in a maximum security prison before a truly captive audience—which was enthralled by a play it found perfectly intelligible...
...It was never otherwise...
...For, just as only the young can effortlessly learn a second language, so there is a chronological point after which generations bred on TV cannot assimilate the best that has been written and said...
...A personal element is present inwhat Lazersfeld and Elihu Katz call `the two-stepflow' of mass communications...
...is politically undemocratic, it is economically democratic and getting to be politically democratic, whereas the U.S...
...The trick consists of turning faucets, or just blowing, hot and cold...
...Above all, damn that part of it according to which mass culture does not even constitute a problem...
...A change of locus, for instance theater in union halls and not in ever more lavish "cultural centers," is frequently all that we need to re-animate the aesthetic impulse which lies dormant in every man...
...Here and abroad, Comte's successors have followed in his footsteps...
...Now the only good Chinaman (unless on the island of Formosa) is a dead one...
...From Frazer to Kroeber and beyond, anthropologists have been fascinated with primitive art, archeological finds, exotic artifacts, and the like...
...He said to me and people of my captious disposition, as though addressing himself to sex censors who privately revel in pornography...
...I side with that earlier Macdonald who saw the masses (which is to say, everybody) as victims of a merciless technological invasion that threatened to destroy their humanity...
...By 1948 it was okay, or rather it was mandatory, to repeat what had been said in 1938...
...How to fortify ourselves...
...The Freedom Southern Theater does vanguard drama successfully before rural Negroes who dig the message a meaningful contemporary play somehow cannot convey to jaded middle-class theatergoers seeking expensive entertainment...
...I would rather miss a flower in the jungle of mass culture (perhaps the Beatles really are such a flower) than lose myself in that jungle...
...With gruel today and gruel tomorrow, who can savor gourmet meals...
...Some few people are naturally responsive to art: the masses are not...
...Similarly, extended pseudo-sexual behavior produces fixation at that level...
...These are the real, if often merely implicit, questions in an interminable and ferocious debate...
...So back we go, and damn the opposition...
...We had better own up to that simple truth...
...They are: sociology and positivism...
...Sub-art systematically unfits a person for art, and vice versa...
...Almost all introductions to sociology contain a brief list of "universals," or institutions found everywhere...
...What happens...
...In precisely the same way, kitsch and instant education, if ingested for long enough, lead to cultural and intellectual dyspepsia or anesthesia...
...The communications industry drips with this contempt...
...Shakespeare really does seem to me a better playwright than Arthur Miller and a better writer than Mickey Spillane...
...Anthropologists are likely to add art...
...Comte's first publication was A Program of Scientific Work Required for the Reorganization of Society...
...Will they collide and embrace as inner and outer space converge...
...These are the media we are asked to exalt...
...if little magazines with limited circulation can survive...
...Neat, equitable, democratic— provided only that most people are natural inhabitants of Slobbovia...
...That fare should not be wasted on ordinary men and women...
...If illusory objectivity is inadmissible, so is the contention that critics of mass culture are ipso facto hostile to "the masses...
...They speak from an "aristocratic" point of view best elucidated over a century ago by Alexis de Tocqueville...
...Are they...
...By their gross underestimation of human potentialities they drug us beyond any hope of redemption...
...Yet, on theevidence so far adduced, opinion leaders wholearn what to think from Time magazine, from The Defenders, from David Brinkley, merely magnify the power of these institutions by incorpor ating and transmitting their judgments to a still wider circle...
...Frozen and packaged foods, above all bread (the staff of life—that compost of air and glue), those oats which only horses ate until Mr...
...And Japan is our noble Far Eastern ally...
...Very well...
...Literary intellectuals are licensed to express their preferences, but social scientists, if governed by positivist dogma, are supposed to remain disinterested...
...TYRANNY PLUS TECHNOLOGY is the formula for totalitarianism...
...The artist is basically an anarchist who should have as much withdrawal from commercial or political clamor as society can provide...
...Very interesting, but only small children and total amnesiacs could mistake this grotesque picture for reality...
...If you don't like the goods, stop handling them...
...As things stand, I can only agree with Herbert Read that Shelley chose his epithet well in calling poets unacknowledged legislators of the world...
...But no one protested in 1963 when Joseph Bensman and I put the matter as follows: "The publicis unequally exposed to mass communications, and quite often, as the sociologist Paul Lazersfeldhas shown, those more exposed influence otherswho have trouble deciding between candidates andcommodities...
...Small children everywhere spontaneously express themselves with whatever art materials they find...
...Later, as President Eisenhower made a move toward rapprochement with Russia soon after settling the Korean War, it looked as if the infinitely flexible media would be mobilized yet again, this time to make Khrushchev into Uncle Niki...
...Many, like Marshall McLuhan and his followers, have managed to find peace in the electric wonderland, celebrating what used to sicken them...
...Religion and the family nearly exhaust the list...
...An ambitious and no doubt unrealizable goal is to double that number— all the way to 2 per cent...
...Art does not have to be swamped by machines— provided the machines are used to foster pluralism, diversity, and decentralization...
...Peretz has been active in a wide range of political and peace movements, most recently, in the McCarthy campaign...
...Each is hallucinogenic in its own way...
...He and we desperately need his creations...
...Social scientists, hip-deep in the values they ritually forswear, cannot help being "problem-centered...
...I was once chided by an eminent art critic for sullying myself with this subject matter...
...Given race prejudice, overpopulation, suicide, or juvenile delinquency, they commit themselves to studying the problem in hand, with a view to ameliorating it...
...Is it unreasonable to fortify ourselves against such a danger...
...Of course you can stop handling the stuff, but it won't stop handling you...
...Additionally, he suggested the existence of an AQ, or aesthetic quotient...
...Rational discourse cannot take place when one group of passionate defenders claims scientific detachment for itself and dismisses every detractor as hopelessly subjective and emotional...
...Even now, when most of us are tired of each other's polemics, the issue will not go away...
...They, too, are able to have aesthetic experiences...
...Mad Avenue chefs "know" that finer * A friendly critic objects that I have been less than fair in presenting Paul Lazersfeld's famous thesis...
...While advising his clients on how to improve the efficacy of advertising, he tells his colleagues that it has none, that the mass media are powerless to form or change opinion...
...The custodians of mass culture and their academic satraps do not...
...I may buy Richard Nixon as mycandidate at your suggestion, but if your suggestion comes from the firm of Batten, Barten, Durstine and Osborne, the advertising agency for theRepublican National Committee, there, and not in Your persuasive skill, lies the locus of power...
...Income disparities seemed to be greater in Russia, and didn't that bode well for it?—as Henry Wallace, Henry Luce, Samuel Goldwyn and General Sarnoff kept telling us...
...That they—and Homer and Faith Baldwin—are all popular is irrelevant...
...And why should it when so much is at stake...
...NOTEBOOK is unchanged, unabsorbed...
...Facts must be gathered and analyzed, but every one of us is, at bottom, engaged in a battle over values...
...and if subscription TV finally emerges as something less than a disaster—then, the direction in which we must try to move is clear...
...the Chinks are little yellow bastards...
...Whether this ratio is desirable is a question about which moral judgment must come into play...
...Can anyone in his senses, a human being who despite Leary's advice has not fully "blown his mind," help resisting when these Ad Alley physiotherapists lay their hands on him...
...Suppose the year is 1938: Stalin is a butcher, the U.S.S.R...
...NOTEBOOK Far Eastern ally...
...You cannot have a lot of both...
...Such enormous qualitative differences separate them that no common frame of reference is broad enough to encompass their works...
...Days after his printed attack, we met by chance at Cinema 16 where he and I had gone, for our delectation, to view Gold Diggers of 1936...
...Here we confront the champions of two debilitating and hazardous drugs: TV and LSD...
...To the end that we should have a transcendental experience hitherto denied the species—and find God...
...The Teatre National Populaire performs in tents outside Paris, proletarian theatrical enterprises have been revived in England, Shakespeare clicks in the Park or on the street...
...No human society, however miserable its environment, is devoid of art...
...is economically undemocratic but politically democratic, and getting to be economically democratic...
...After a few years of courtship McLuhan married the Mechanical Bride, a lady whose every gesture used to repel him...
...Kellogg sold them as dry cereal: a diet like this from infancy onward can deaden anybody's palate...
...He pointed out—with no mention of their notorious inadequacies—that IQ tests show an uneven distribution of intelligence in the population...
...A member of the Harvard faculty, Mr...
...The founder of sociology saw a world out of kilter and, quixotically, proposed to set it aright...
...I would suggest several lines of evidence to indicate they are not...
...You will recall that in 1942 China was our noble messages originating in television, radio and filmscirculate this way—in a kind of aquatic mazurka, taking two steps instead of one—has misled somestudents into believing that personal influence ismore powerful than the mass media...
...The same distinguished social scientist who acts as a prime consultant to the ad industry is capable of writing a book which purports to demonstrate that ads have no appreciable effect whatsoever...
...I think the answer, in one word, is to take a more respectful attitude toward our fellow man...
...Only to mass communications do some social scientists apply the pretense of utter detachment...
...also turns out to be radioactive (and not just from cultural fallout...
...My position is that the antidote to mass culture is high culture, that high culture means art and learning, and that these goods are potentially accessible to every person not suffering from severe brain damage...
...Read goes on, "The catalyst The editors of DISSENT are pleased to announce that MARTIN PERETZ has joined our roster of Contributing Editors...
...It is really distressing, however, that so many philosophers, historians, psychologists, and other academics should also be irremediably contemptuous of the people at large...
...It is like what happens to American taste buds...
...No one yields...
...IS MASS CULTURE AN ABOMINATION, a harmless anodyne, or a blessing...
...To what end...
...We must continue to do battle with them or become willing accomplices in the creation of "joyous serfdom...
...One per cent of the public views living drama with any regularity on the stages of North America...
...When detente comes, regardless of whether the Soviet dictatorship is more or less bloodthirsty, America will accommodate itself...
...When a Frank Stanton or a Leo Rosten phrases these feelings with greater elegance, we are still only slightly shocked...
...30 million Americans represent a large reservoir of superfluous goodwill: Red China could as easily be glorified tomorrow as it is reviled today...
...Pollsters recently discovered that 25 per cent of the American public believe Chiang Kai-shek still holds sway over mainland China...
...If Godard can do three or four low-budget films a year and make money-producing art, albeit not necessarily great art...
...However Sisyphean a job it may be, the present process which involves depersonalization, concentration, and deracination must be reversed, and as rapidly as possible...
...there are worse epithets...
...A heavy consumerof mass culture watches Ben Casey, listens toChet Huntley, or vibrates via old movies to ClarkGable, and perhaps influences others to smokeCamels, buy Ever-Ready Batteries, prize dimpledmasculinity, and abandon the undershirt...
...It is peculiarly difficult for the artist in society to accept this thankless task: to stand apart, and yet to mediate, to communicate something to society as essential as bread and water, and yet to be able to do so from a position of insulation, of disaffection...
...is a police state, its people are slaves...
...Blue-collar workers shun theaters and bookstores all over the Western world—which does not prove that they are constitutionally unresponsive to the drama or incapable of reading good books...
...Workers in Buenos Aires buy Argentine classics (deliberately priced low on an experimental basis) at kiosks instead of bookstores which they would never dream of entering...
...TV, which probably helps to derange the nervous system through constant interruption and certainly hastens the onset of glaucoma, This is an abbreviated version of an essay, entitled"The Public Taste," which appears in America Now, ed...
...August Comte, that brilliant neologist, coined two durable terms and unnaturally joined one to the other...
...NOTEBOOK IN THE THEATER OF THE ABSURD Martin Ess lin describes an unusual presentation of Waiting for Godot, a play that flopped on Broadway after the daily reviewers declared it to be excessively obscure...
...We are all implicated in a phenomenon which continues to revolt some of us as much as it pleases others...
...If the U.S.S.R...
...In this context, technology refers to modem means of communication...
...A demurrer from this nonsense in those days rendered us politically suspect, "premature anti-Communists...
...Dedicated artists and teachers realize all this...
...But there is a more vicious snobbery which converts "masses" into "slobs" feeding on cultural garbage prepared for them by their betters...
...John Kirk, to be published by Atheneum, © 1968...
...To the fore stepped Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...By 1943 "Uncle Joe" is an amiable autocrat...
...Some are, e.g., Ortega, the later incarnation of Dwight Macdonald, and Ernest van den Haag...
...If art is long, sub-art is longer and life remains incredibly short...
Vol. 15 • July 1968 • No. 4
