Attitudes to Mass Culture
Rosenberg, Bernard
Morris Raphael Cohen, an extraordinarily gifted teacher, was best known as a critic of other philosophers. People would sometimes grumble about his "negativism": Cohen tore down systems of...
...Morris Raphael Cohen, an extraordinarily gifted teacher, was best known as a critic of other philosophers...
...The adoption of this perspective is an essential first step in coming to grips with mass culture...
...Here and there Wagner displays a nice sense of irony...
...Because they are very much better, that's why...
...and feel a deeper sense of entrapment and loneliness...
...People would sometimes grumble about his "negativism": Cohen tore down systems of philosophy without offering a clear alternative...
...There is no guide...
...They meet at the same low level...
...And, "As the level of general education in America rises, as it is rising annually, as things get done, as they eventually get done, so the position of the plutocrats of popular culture will become more and more insecure...
...Meanwhile, change, followed by barbarous accommodation, proceeds at an accelerated tempo...
...WAGNER'S FRESHEST CHAPTER is on the girlie magazines which proliferate so fast that even a full-time voyeur couldn't keep up with all of them: Night and Day, Scope, Pic, Eve, See, Glance, Cover Girls, Paris Models, Whirl, Lafi, Keyhole, Zip, Wham, Stag, Brief, Bare, Vue, Eye, Eyeful, Wink, Flirt, Titter, Rave...
...3. Democracy is responsible for mass culture...
...Inspect the pocketbook cover and you will see a nude native woman with Rubensian breasts...
...Before he can improve his mind it is being deadened...
...Mass culture is not only a wilderness—with oases here and there—it is a largely uncharted one...
...Since Wagner went to print a new genre has appeared which dwells upon lesbians dressed in riding attire, with spurs and whips, sadistically flogging their victims...
...But the truth is that Wagner is less perceptive in reading his betters than in reading comic books...
...What visionary ever dreamed that the Adamic curse could really be lifted from man...
...192 pp...
...No sooner do we assimilate a frag ment of the change than it leads to another innovation whose significance is likewise imponderable...
...It is enough that he know his wilderness...
...in the text Orwell is at pains to indicate how flat-chested Burmese women are, so much so that Westerners often mistake them for boys...
...Wagner has not considered the implications of his grisly parade...
...If we should chance to survive atomic radiation, the answer in a few decades may be, "Nobody...
...The author has a sharp eye for ripples on the tidal wave that is engulfing civilization...
...A deep if not direct connection exists between this kind of monstrousness and the comic strip which anounces, in Wagner's words: "So Chop-Chop exclaims as he wrenches off a commie's head in a Blackhawk book, 'Me study wrestling from television set.'" Such are the facts which Wagner approaches with a most peculiar ambivalence...
...Ambiguity is its key characteristic...
...Politics is a fairly reliable index to the differential assessment of mass culture...
...Drudgery, monotony, inanition and brutishness can then be dispelled along with the animal existence we used to lead...
...The rich and varied life he might lead is standardized and devitalized...
...Tocqueville was perhaps the first to make this persistent mistake, one shared by democrats who thought that vulgarity through leveling was the price that had to be paid for an otherwise beneficial system, and antidemocrats who thought the price too high...
...At present one can merely have hunches, and of these there is a plethora...
...Then again, "These men have subtle minds and they wax a shade polysyllabic for my taste...
...But any rational consideration of the probabilities leads to a fear that he will be overtaken by the mechanical furies that already beset him...
...On one such occasion he is said to have answered this complaint as follows: "My first name is an Anglicization from the Hebrew for Moses, and like Moses, I can lead you through the wilderness without bringing you to the Promised Land...
...Possibly the menace is greater than anyone supposed a few years ago...
...The political lines that have crystallized are approximately these: radicals (Dwight MacDonald, Irving Howe) who, like the arch conservatives (Ortega y Gasset, T. S. Eliot) although for opposite reasons, are repelled by what they commonly regard as tawdry and exploitative, whereas the liberals (David Riesman, Gilbert Seldes) take a predictable position in the middle...
...Mass culture is governed by a mania for simplification, which is ultimately expressed by an act like one to which Wagner alludes: elimination of the word "saga" from a famous title, The Forsyte Saga, as being too hard for the masses to understand...
...6.00...
...Wagner admits that his work is derivative, in fact that it is a popularization of the critics of popular culture...
...Neither national character nor the economic arrangement nor the political system has any final bearing on this question...
...Why...
...On a descriptive level, as "raw" material, his data are highly interesting...
...Frank Lloyd Wright may be correct when he predicts the paralysis of all our limbs except the pushbutton finger from whose sweat we may continue to live...
...No IBM machine, nor yet a Univac, will tell us whether the latest development is for good or ill...
...Moreover, at the end there may be no Promised Land...
...These repeated attestations strike a vulgar note, and not the only one...
...No effort to comprehend and evaluate it can start anywhere else...
...Yet none of this strikes such terror in the heart as an ad Wagner says US Camera has carried for the past few years side by side with foto offers of bosomy beauties...
...Geoffrey Wagner, an English writer and Fellow at Columbia University, is the latest to try an impressionistic interpretation of the popular arts.* Wagner deals serially with movies, comics, pin-ups, and TV, and makes marginal comments about other media...
...The point need not be labored...
...He can therefore attune himself to the familiar "upbeat" of most middle-brow writers...
...Even if the incu'bus of hydrogen war could be removed, these specters would still hover over us...
...All that really matters is the most recent industrial revolution which will soon be superseded by the next one...
...They come cheap, thirty for two dollars...
...That such a step in human evolution could take place is what makes the greater likelihood so much more tragic...
...In none of the archeological ages has human society been so revolutionary as at present...
...That everyone could enjoy an adequate diet and expend relatively little effort to Secure it would have been unimaginable in any earlier age...
...There is more to this story than Wagner tells...
...Develop their sensibilities...
...Both academicians and detached intellectuals are finding it increasingly necessary to ask themselves whether the quality of American life has not been decisively altered by mass circulation magazines, comic books, detective fiction, movies, radio and television...
...since it also tends to femininize men and masculinize women, sexual homogenization may be added to the list...
...Today, wherever modern tools are introduced and superimposed upon any culture, the mixture seems to be deadly...
...Differences between backward and advanced countries become attenuated...
...It flourishes wherever the appropriate technological apparatus emerges, whether slowly or suddenly, and nowhere more so than in Soviet Russia which institutionalizes kitsch...
...Deepen and broaden themselves...
...Man since his origin has had to struggle for the means of subsistence, like every other beast and like the post-graduate ape he was...
...Students of "mass culture," whose subject matter is not the universe but only an increasingly significant part of it, should feel much as Cohen felt when he found himself unable to give sweeping answers to every question...
...America, it turns out, will remain flexible and free because, unlike Germany, this country does not have a deep psychological love of the machine—whatever that mystical affirmation may mean...
...Maybe at a higher stage of development society will be "ready" for industrialization, with consequences very different from those we see all around us in the here-and-now...
...were selling like hot-cakes off the newsstands and in the drugstores of the USA, The Pocket Book of (Art) Masters was seized as obscene in Dubuque, Iowa...
...Cultivate their minds...
...A Study of Popular Iconography in the USA, by GeoffreyWagner...
...Only now, with mechanized agriculture, artificial photosynthesis, the consumption of algae and other sea food, can we speak of a well-fed population much larger than ours...
...Wagner cites they fate of George Orwell's wonderful novel Burmese Days, which in the reprint edition is subtitled "A Saga (the word is permissible in a subtitle but may account for the poor sales that followed) of jungle Hate and Lust...
...Hardly, and for the same reasons...
...If men are finally freed from manual labor and from the struggle with nature, what will they do...
...His advice is to read the books of Gilbert Seldes, Herbert Marshall McLuhan, and Gershon Legman in preference to his...
...Not at all...
...Today more than ever political stances and cultural choices are part of a much larger gestalt symbolized by the relentless advance of modern technology...
...When our physical environment has been subdued we may become hypersentient beings...
...The post-modern world offers man everything or nothing...
...From such a standpoint we may clear the air of a few erroneous assumptions: 1. Capitalism is responsible for mass culture...
...It very nearly has been...
...The study has other merits...
...Having guided us through the comic books' chamber of horrors with its strangulations, flagellations and decapitations, Wagner observes that while "the above booklets * Parade of Pleasure...
...WAGNER DECLARES that he has no politics, and that may explain why he has no frame of reference...
...This breeds anxiety, and the vicious circle begins anew, for as we are objects of manipulation, our anxiety is exploitable...
...I think it is...
...Perhaps...
...The tentative technological determinism implicit in this formulation may be valid only for the present...
...Jr ONE CAN HAZARD a single positive formulation, it would be that modern technology is the necessary and sufficient cause of mass culture...
...For even before man can transcend himself he is being dehumanized...
...Still more fundamental is the attitude toward Toynbee's Great West Wind, i.e., machine civilization, which blows with cyclonic force over the whole world...
...Library Publishers...
...For instance, he notes the appearance of a new androgynous comic type parading in aprons and skirts, Dwight MacDonald has already commented on age and class homogenization as a characteristic of mass culture...
...This is the new universal culture described by Clement Greenberg in his pioneer essay on avant-garde and kitsch, a culture which connects the East African who leaps out of his stone age hut into the movie house, with residents of Hong Kong, Berlin, Bogota, and New York...
...The mass grows: we are more alike than ever...
...Utopians used to speculate about who, in their good society, would do the dirty work...
...He finds the other men "not entirely optimistic," which, if it is not an extreme form of understatement, must be obtuseness, since he quotes a typical passage from McLuhan two lines later, "The misleading effect of books like George Orwell's 1984 is to project into the future a state of affairs that already exists...
...It stresses not only the heavy tonnage of sub-art dumped on the American consumer, but also what happens to real art when it gets massified...
...2. America is responsible for mass culture...
...That the level of general education has been rising and that things have got done simultaneously with the growth of a collective hypnosis (there will be 50,000,000 TV sets in American homes for the next Presidential campaign) does not dismay this iconographer...
...But things tend to get wrapped up in polysyllables in our avant-garde journals and if there is one thing I can swear to with my hand on nay heart, that is that I am not an avantgarde writer...
...This one entices the reader to buy sets of German atrocity pictures...
...He wishes to damn mass culture in America while confessing to his "absolute engouement with the American people and all they connote and do .. . "It seems to me almost undeniable that America is the greatest country in the history of the world...
Vol. 3 • January 1956 • No. 1
