The Foundations of Cultural Theory
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.
