Some Aspects of Mass Culture
Rabassière, Henri
Casting an indulgent eye on the merry-making of Flemish peasants, Breughel found it brutish, vulgar, lusty, gluttonous, bibulous and, possibly, dulling. Yet, nothing in his canvases suggests the...
...The truth is that at all times most public events are experienced vicariously and that each society has its special means of communicating to its citizens the preferred picture of reality...
...They first revealed the surface character of our experience, but now we have run full circle: in popular experience, manipulation is visible or suspected everywhere...
...they are known not for their unique substance but for that which the community of pals can understand...
...as a theory, expounded at nauseating leisure, it is misleading...
...Those heroes of yesterday never saw politics as a spectacle but went in there to fight it out for themselves...
...His may be a great discovery, occasioned by certain outstanding traits of perception which now are more visible than before...
...selves and others, begrudging the people their daily pleasures...
...They may differentiate, though...
...This is poor economics based on misunderstood technology, and primitive sociology too...
...They have no real quarrel with the world as it is, except that they pretend not to like it that way...
...culate Cyranos, and no Christian ever needed the voice of a poet or the song of a musician to conquer first his shyness and thereafter the bride...
...One may be an existentialist, a Marxist, a surrealist, a fascist— the crowd of frightened snobs will be so discriminating as not to discriminate against him...
...An honest parallel to the latter statement would have been: "The classical homeworker manufactured goods in order to reproduce the social conditions which force him to manufacture more goods...
...ANOTHER FACET OF THIS DEVELOPMENT is our loss of values...
...I understand he used to dine and wine with friends...
...these nonconformists in reverse usually get along fine with the older variety of nonconformists in forward gear...
...Everybody does, nowadays...
...Anders consistently idealizes and even idyllicizes the past...
...Certainly, Orson Welles's famous radio invasion from Mars says something about the United States in the 'Thirties—but have there not been panicky flights to the hills before, when a comet seemed to announce a new Flood...
...One has to be alienated to be counted...
...It is one thing to say that some modern inventions came as a boon to industry...
...Far from living in a world of phantoms, we are facing the danger of complete disillusionment...
...and, reasoning further, one such commodity seen by a thousand people in a movie theatre must bring less profit, hence be less capitalistic than the same picture appearing a thousand times on a thousand little screens...
...A TV program supplies one identical product to a large mass, just as the movies...
...it also may contain groping, unconscious adumbrations of tomorrow's means of expression...
...What nonsense...
...In similar ways, totalitarian governments may create events for political exploitation...
...reproduced virtually any number of times, it acquires the characteristics of an assembly-line product...
...they never went to a circus, never read novels, penny dreadfuls and Radcliffe, never relied on newspapers for their knowledge of the world, never believed a Napoleon or a Mussolini before radio...
...In the beginning, there was broadcasting," he says ironically, "and the world was made to suit it...
...clever producers even may exploit the real love affairs of a movie star or create suitable stories from the whole cloth to provide vicarious experiences for an audience that increasingly likes to have the proper feelings pre-assembled and delivered along with the "event...
...We condone superstition with reference only to our own culture...
...They all complained that the profanum vulgus was taking over...
...Kung Fu changed a few words in a simple calendar to express his political criticism and everybody can think of many superb works of art issued from the new media...
...Anders wishes to raise on a pedestal, is a completely phoney picture—a phantom, to use Mr...
...They refuse to see any transmission belt between popular and higher culture, or between popular ideologies and true ideals...
...All 'the indictments against "mass culture" are at least as old as Gutenberg—not to speak of Ovid...
...Moreover, throughout his essay, as in the last quotation, Mr...
...The real phantom which bothers our author is the little man behind the grey screen...
...The mere fact that so many millions now can become familiar with him, makes Socrates a base commodity: "When the event can be...
...Anders means to say is much less mystical than the transubstantiation of an event into a commodity...
...he does not want all of his customers to consume one and the same product (as in looking at a movie together...
...I do not wish to belittle the difference between reading and viewing...
...incapable of facing their own feelings, they have sentimentality expressed for them...
...and when we pay for having it delivered to our homes, it is a commodity...
...He is wrong, I submit, in trying to make a double discovery—namely, that these features are characteristic of the present society...
...I should have liked to meet Socrates...
...In this connection, Mr...
...but if we live by them, not TV is to blame but the erosion of virtue that preceded popular culture...
...Though this difference may be decisive, it is precisely one where our mass culture and our nonconformists stand on the same side...
...GRANTED THAT THE NEW inventions may create opportunities for manipulation or tend to cripple our sensorial experience of the world...
...Is Gary Cooper less real than Robin Hood...
...Consider this sentence: "The classical homeworker manufactures his wares in order to secure a minimum of consumer goods and leisure...
...He has developed an interesting theory of cognition which may apply to human nature...
...In friendly competition, the two elites are trying to outdo each other at deriding the "mass...
...Manufacturers of such ersatz satisfaction surely would have us accept their wares for the real thing...
...The walls of the city and the walls of the home have been laid down...
...Mass entertainment can be debased by commercial or by political interests, but only if and while these interests retain their monopoly of communication...
...Thus stated, we still have the primitive sociology, but at least the evil cycle of the producer society would be compared with the evil cycle of the consumer society...
...He concludes: "Were one of us to try and go forth in quest of the real world.., he soon would be disappointed...
...The ideals of our society may be less admirable than the virtues of ancient Rome...
...As a witticism the aperyu might be superb...
...The loss of substance and certainty which characterizes the age began to be noticed eighty years ago by a generation of artists which did not call itself avant-garde but in relation to which our critics of TV are a sorry rear-guard...
...1 obviously means to inform us of a more shattering discovery than the fact that the electronics industry is interested in the sale of television sets...
...Plato's Socrates, whom Mr...
...they are consciously presented and accepted as illusions, not as truth...
...These phantoms were built up by the pseudo-radicalism of the snobs to justify their flight into the cultural preserve, a Messianic religion, political or other nihilisms...
...He might not be less great for that...
...Anders, though everywhere else he insists on the modern-age nature of his phantom world...
...Contemporary indictments of jazz often are literal repetitions of similar pronouncements on the waltz 130 years ago...
...The material content of some escape literature even points to pre-conscious states of rebellion...
...Members of their bipartisan club display in their home a copy of Partisan Review together with a painting conceived in an advanced style (as to records, progressives favor Bach while new-conservatives may boast a Shostakovitch concerto played by Oistrakh), and are conversant with words such as alienation, popular culture, pseudo-whateverfashionis, anxiety, crowd, absurd and a few others, judicious use of which will silence the uninitiated and bring recognition from those who belong...
...The ultra-left culture snobs from the start concede this monopoly to the interests...
...There is no cross-fertilization, no participation in a creative process, but only the surrender to the narcotic effects of a merchandise...
...Conformism has come around full circle: one dares no longer be "conformist," enjoy any product of the entertainment industry, see differences between the two major parties, admit opinions which might be shared by the multitude...
...Anders does...
...Only professional philosophers turned theologians make such elementary mistakes in elementary logic...
...The technical characteristics of printing, photographing, filming, broadcasting, televising, recording do not restrict, but enlarge the range of our experience and the possibilities of expression...
...We know that our environment is being manufactured for us, and after some more years, TV-experienced people may tend to believe nothing, just as they have become fairly immune to propaganda of other sorts...
...3) "Mass production of the mass man himself was speeded up," meaning that by watching TV we acquire, without being aware of what is being done to us, the character of the crowd...
...FOR THE NEWEST FASHION in mass culture is to scorn mass culture...
...needs a mass broken up into the largest possible number of customers...
...Anders implies quite another thing—that these inventions were so conceived, and we consumers were so conditioned, that the greatest number of goods can be sold at the highest profit...
...No one ever t11 dares to defy its edicts...
...Yet, nothing in his canvases suggests the suspicion that the feudal lords might have devised the popular culture of their time the better to keep the peasantry in submission...
...Ortega y Gasset added elegance and Anders adds brilliant confusion, punning happily along Heidegger alley where all lights are fueled by free association...
...Those who cannot possibly be radicals of the left develop at least a radical or "new" conservatism...
...Anders makes the shrewd remark that Socrates is being made over into a pal on TV and in popular science literature...
...the exciting moment of a live concert is not recorded along with the sound track...
...Not multiplication of the event, but vulgarization of its stand-in, not communication of an experience but predigestion of experience results in the stunted sensibility of mass culture...
...While the possibility of deception is ever-present, the danger of deliberate manipulation and of "conditioning" through unconscious suggestion might even be declining...
...To be amused by Groucho, to be excited by Armstrong, to be moved to tears by Molly Goldberg (or Werther, for that matter), amounts to backwardness, lack of sensitivity, vulgarity and cultural treason...
...at all times did people rely on teachers, travelers, pictures and other second-hand information to form their view of the world...
...The great men, he says, no longer are revered for their greatness but inserted into a world of appearances...
...Unable to escape the insanity of their existence, they purchase escape by the hour...
...In their dread of being caught in a profane mood, would-be intellectuals alienate themselves from the sources of national experience and risk forfeiting their share in forming it...
...The hypocrites...
...isn't it difficult to realize how he got there, economically speaking...
...Both fear nothing so much as yesterday's conformity...
...Our spectator sports, the Roman circenses, are opium for the crowds...
...but did not Goethe get hundreds of letters fronj imaginary Lottes and did not would-be Werthers actually commit suicide...
...the idols of the market and the idols of the cave have been blown to pieces—Mr...
...many will grant you such recognition to be recognized themselves...
...A sociological analysis of knowledge must start out from sound sociology and careful use of history...
...and neither the event nor Rembrandt's conception of it has become a commodity...
...Like any other enterprise, the entertainment industry does not count its customers, but the sales value of its product, no matter whether it is divided into many or few lumps...
...I deplore it as much as Mr...
...the second "in order to," however, expresses the mystical power of the Iron Heel...
...an "art appreciation course" substitutes learning for spontaneous perception...
...they all hated them...
...All this is true, and serious, too...
...in both cases the admission price is calculated on the basis of cost and profit...
...Yet, popular culture may be a watered-down, vulgarized version of yesterday's class culture...
...from escapist literature to tabloids, people at all times preferred to read and believe what reassured them, rather than what might shake their complacency...
...But worse: How did "the mass producer" convert his "need" into a desire of his customers...
...after all, automobiles and refrigerators are sold without any "phantom" assisting...
...The television camera constantly prompts the experienced viewer to cheer the editor who switches to promising angles and selects the most interesting viewpoints...
...Today's mass media and extreme mobility potentially increase our sources of information to the point of universality, where cross-checking has become easy and wilful distortion has become difficult...
...Today nobody thinks that the picture on the little screen represents the real world...
...Certainly we pity the old ladies who start knitting baby clothes when their favorite soap opera heroine is pregnant...
...Kitsch, by the way, is most children's avenue to artistic expression—some never get beyond that stage, and much of the so-called folk culture, which often is favorably compared with our "mass culture," really is or was the mass culture of civilizations which knew few fashion changes...
...In the German version of his essay, which is more complete, however, he speaks of important mimesis phenomena which belong here...
...Yet, not so long ago, the printed word was held almost sacred by the masses...
...That touching picture of the happy family, gathered around the big oaken table, seems never to have been marred by the tragedies which constitute up to 90 per cent of the thematic material in 19th century Iiterature...
...For out there he would find nothing but models modeled after the pictures of which they are supposed to be the originals...
...According to Gunther Anders (in DISSENT, Winter 1956), e.g., a dark conspiracy has foisted television on us for the purposes of profit, deception and subjection: 1) "The mass producer...
...He might have addressed his reproach to Aristophanes, and he might have quoted in support of his own views any number of antique writers, beginning with Plato...
...For here is art, there is entertainment...
...yet I feel that the published fragment does not do justice to Mr...
...Strangely enough, the totalitarian implications are not discussed by Mr...
...even the children who used to believe in Santa Claus know that Hopalong Cassidy is an actor...
...Anders's words...
...They like it exactly in such a desperate state that they can lament about their impotence in facing it...
...The reproduction which pretends to be the original merely reminds us of it...
...he wants all to buy identical products" (as in watching television separately...
...The mad chase for newness in "original creations" is fittingly aped on the assembly line of popular fashion...
...He still believes in the omnipotence of the overlords: his new version of the Iron Heel even gives them credit for a far more ambitious scheme: mass production, Mr...
...Someone paid to put him there, so he must be a "commodity...
...their policies often are designed to confirm the dream world where they keep their subjects...
...it still does not follow that mass communication methods doom our intelligence to misorientation...
...Sometimes in curiously inverted forms Al Capp, through his "Li'l Abner" cartoon, projects the immolated image of humanity into crudely ironical utopias...
...Mass production processes in the entertainment industries make its content repetitious, self-perpetuating, inflexible...
...Anders says, has been so devised that "mass consumption produces mass man...
...Anders claims that these old and wholesome walls, the protectors of the penates, have been replaced by a wide screen where the idols of the theatre simulate an unreal world...
...Non-conformist tolerance leaves a choice of many peculiar ways to exquisiteness...
...Finally, these intellectual giants had no occasion to look at the world in an "idealistic" way, but were always aware of the reality behind the pictures that supplied their limited opportunities of information...
...Certainly the latter opens more opportunity to suggestion...
...through marginal differentiation between various crowds, each of them very distinctive, the crowd of the anticrowds constitutes itself as an effective instrument of terror...
...too sluggish to rebel against their impotence, they watch Superman conquer space and time...
...the implication is that capitalism needs unrealisic subjects who live in a "phantom world," as the title of the essay says...
...Pious monks might have believed that the Devil was to blame, but no serious historian would credit such views today...
...But again—is the display of profligacy on big and small screens a cause or a symptom of the decline in the stature of our heroes...
...If I buy the print of a Rembrandt etching, not the meeting of Christ with the disciples at Emmaus is reproduced but its likeness...
...What Mr...
...Yet, these vicarious gratifications also express a yearning for a different world and reflect a search for a different humanity...
...Anders...
...That noble worker in the Lord's vineyard seems never to have been conditioned by the ideologies of his terrestrial and spiritual overlords...
...those who don't either are writing a book on mass culture or collect early jazz records...
...Casting an indulgent eye on the merry-making of Flemish peasants, Breughel found it brutish, vulgar, lusty, gluttonous, bibulous and, possibly, dulling...
...the modern homeworker consumes a maximum of leisure products in order to help produce the mass man...
...everybody knows that the President uses make-up and teleprompter...
...The illusions which we buy—a perfume, a movie, a popular song, a comedian on TV—do not fool us...
...Neither the economics nor the technical facilities of mass communication are to blame for the use which their owners make of them...
...It is a gross overstatement that the alienation process in popular culture has gone too far for remedy and return...
...Those lovers, before radio, must all have been highly arti...
...We, on the other hand, are not helpless, powerless and hopeless in front of inexorable forces unleashed by industry's ingenuity or the Iron Heel's clever scheming...
...Certain experiences—enjoying a work of art, meeting a great personality, reading a profound book—cannot be duplicated...
...It may be unfair to polemicize against something that was not published...
...Baroque" once had a meaning similar to our "kitsch," and already the suggestion has been made that the first half of this century may be known to, and admired by, posterity as the "Age of Kitsch...
...Anders is blind to the immense widening of our perceptive capacities through the camera...
...There is no conformistic material that cannot be turned into non-conformist outcries...
...Occasionally they fall for their own phantasmagoria and walk into an abyss where they had seen a road to glory...
...Popular culture no longer is entertainment which we provide for ourselves, but has become the supply of entertainment which we buy...
...What had Hitler or Stalin that Cromwell or Cortez did not have...
...The first "in order to" refers to the worker's intentions...
...It produces no original material but, on the contrary, transforms its consumer into a passive recipient of sense stimuli...
...Of their own volition they gave the manipulators a monopoly of information...
...Not popular culture but their own craving for "alienation" keeps their eyes away from the realistic, "materialistic," Mr...
...Assertion No...
...2) "The method allegedly intended to bring the object close to us, actually serves to veil the object, to alienate it or slowly to do away with it...
...Anders might say, conditions which must be changed...
Vol. 3 • July 1956 • No. 3
