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Post card from Coney Island

All of our authors this week tackle the changing cultural landscape of turn-of-the-century America, which witnesses the emergence of a mass culture that often superseded older cultural forms. In particular, each author is concerned with whether or not these changes in the way culture was produced and consumed were democratic in nature. Larry Levine in Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, sees a transformation from the heterogeneous audiences of American theater in the 19^th century to the tightly controlled highbrow entertainments of the elites, saying, “Art was becoming a one-way process: the artist communicating and the audience receiving” (195). No longer did audiences participate in the performances of material such as Shakespeare or operas, but instead, as dictated by elite tastes, sat in silent reverence to watch inflexible performances of these now-dubbed classics. For Levine, the elites responded to the disorder of urbanization and massive immigration by placing strict controls on cultural forms.

            But culture and art did not transform into a one-way process of creation and reception as Levine claims. It’s true that cultural categories are contingent upon their historical context, and Levine does a convincing jobs of tracing the movement of cultural forms from one category to another. But culture did not completely lose its democratic nature, and other authors trace the dialectic between cultural forms and cultural receivers by studying the new forms of mass amusement that emerged at the turn-of-the-century. Most interesting is the tension between Progressive reformers’ impulse to educate the immigrant and working classes and these same group’s wholesale embrace of new cultural forms. In his study of Coney Island, Amusing the Island: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century, John Kasson begins by examining the City Beautiful Movement and the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893. Planners intended Central Park and the White City to pastoralize and instill awe in their visitors, but the Midway Plaisance, harbinger of Coney Island, overflowed with visitors.

Luna Park, one of Coney Island’s most popular amusement parks. The park’s electric illumination could be seen from miles away.

Indeed, these new amusements, like Coney Island, brought heterogeneous groups of Americans together at the same time that Levine observes a cultural bifurcation. Mass amusements may have controlled and guided visitors through the walls of their amusement parks and the mores of social behavior, but Americans, especially the working class, voted with their pockets and their feet as to which cultural forms they enjoyed most. Further, Coney Island and other new public spaces of amusement allowed Americans to mix with each other and create new heterosocial spaces. The argument can validly be made that vendors programmed leisure time just as readily as employers programmed work time, but at least the illusion of choice existed for those seeking pleasure in Coney Island and other public amusements.

Kathy Piess captures the dichotomy between freedom of choice and oppression in her book Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn of the Century New York. As wage earners, working class (immigrant) women found themselves with the capital to participate in the new culture of mass amusements and mass production. Women used their newfound economic freedom (or semi-freedom, depending on whether or not part of their wages went to their families) to purchase fashionable clothing or take part in new social amusements, like dance halls and movies. This allowed them a new freedom in leisure time, a relative social autonomy that they had not experienced when cultural and economic norms dictated they work and socialize in the private sphere. The so-called freedom came with a price, however, as the ability to participate in these new social forms did not prove to be as affordable as at first appeared. Often women starved themselves to save enough money to enjoy leisure time and, even more predominantly, a system of treating arose where men paid women’s way in exchange for sexual favors. This system created a delicate balancing act for women, who had to reciprocate to men without tarnishing their honor.

Patrons pose for a picture at a turn of the century dance hall.

Even as old cultural forms bifurcated into low and high, new cultural forms emerged to fill the vacuum, creating new standards of behavior, freedom of choice, and instances of oppression. Every mechanized reproduction meant that cultural forms lost their aura as cultural products moved further from the original. Like Theodor Adorno, elites tried to preserve the aura of cultural artifacts they deemed genuine and classic by isolating them from the rowdy masses and dictating to those who participated how they should imbibe things like Shakespeare, opera, and art pieces. But as observed by Benjamin, mass culture allowed a new class consciousness to arise. It may not have been revolutionary, but the working class and immigrants, especially young people like young women, emerged as demographic markets to be both catered to and taken advantage of. Culture remained a highly contested place one of newfound choice and carefully calculated limitation.

This semester I’m taking two independent readings courses to satisfy the requirements of my minor fields. One of the courses, Popular Culture and Collective Memory, requires that I write reaction papers to my weekly readings and discussions. As a thought exercise, I will be posting them here.

When Walter Benjamin writes about the “Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” his argument about the usefulness of mass culture is not always initially clear. As I originally did, some read it as a lament about the loss of the aura of the authentic in regards to traditional cultural forms, i.e. paintings. But what Benjamin is really doing is marginalizing the function of the traditional cultural form in favor of new mass cultural forms. As Benjamin begins his essay, he writes in the Marxist tradition, and believes mass culture is the new vehicle which will help engender mass consciousness within the working class, who will experience class consciousness as a result of experiencing this mass culture.

The question then becomes: why didn’t this happen? It might be argued that mass culture was not prevalent enough in the 1930s at the time of Benjamin’s writing, and only now do we see a wide enough spread of mass cultural forms through processes like cultural globalization that might successfully engender a working class consciousness. But Benjamin does not address the problem of cultural hegemony as raised by Antonio Gramsci. Can class consciousness be raised if the masses are simply buying into the capitalist messages being fed to them by the capitalist cultural producers that they are embedding in their products, i.e. the star system of film, etc.?

Theodor Adorno takes a much more negative view of mass culture than Benjamin, who he is responding to directly. He believes mass culture is an instrument that keeps the masses passive, and that mass culture follows a set formula that is meant to do so. For him, traditional culture like art is an important way to express individualism, to challenge individuals in their thinking and to encourage them to actively engage with a cultural form instead of passively imbibing it (of which Benjamin would say the complete opposite).

How do these views of the advent of mass culture help us understand the study of mass and popular culture? How can we apply them to case studies of mass and popular culture, i.e. film and popular music? And as Gramsci and Lears, and also Levine inquire, how does this help us judge the content of mass and popular culture? Content matters, and though Adorno and Benjamin are fundamental theorists of the field, they do not really examine the content of mass and popular culture. Levine makes an important distinction when he calls for analyzing the content along the folkloric tradition to see how mass culture engenders both individual and collective consciousness. For him mass and popular culture are not supposed to lead to a revolution but instead reflect the way people think about themselves.

It is important for historians of popular culture to remember that popular culture is a dialectical process, not just a hegemony, in which “the masses” and cultural producers speak to one another through the process of consumption to help shape popular culture together. It is correct to say that people buy into dominant culture forms, but they help shape these dominant cultural forms because their consumption dictates the forms that popular culture takes. On the other hand, the range of choice is provided from those selected by cultural producers. In this way popular culture is a joint project.

As to whether or not popular culture is a revolutionary force, arguments can be made for both sides. High culture is important to challenging audiences and promoting individualism, but neither Adorno no Benjamin address the ways in which high culture can become mass or popular culture, i.e. myriad reproductions of the Mona Lisa. This capacity challenges the way we think of aura. Does a piece of artwork retain its aura if it is reproduced in this way? Does it remain both high and popular culture? We can see other mass apparatuses fermenting revolution, such as the internet and social media has during the Arab Spring, but what kind of consciousness are these movements engendering? Perhaps more importantly, are they successful? And are mass cultural forms like film playing a role in these revolutions?

As noted, the most important thing to take away from all of these readings is that mass/popular culture is a process. The masses and cultural producers speak to another other, just as audiences both engage with and receive cultural forms. Mass cultural forms are capable of producing new consciousnesses, but they are not always mass consciousnesses, and the mass consciousnesses can be passive or active. The individual can also take an active role in mass culture. And hegemony is not a static condition, it is also a process in which different groups exert control and individuals and masses find meaning.