Mass Culture

Mass Culture, Popular Culture
03 Oct 1994 12:02
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Revisiting this notebook after many years, I find myself uncomfortable with this category, which I basically got from reading a lot of mid-20th century cultural criticism (McCarthy and Macdonald, especially). The idea, so far as I can reconstruct it, is that there is (or was) a separate sphere of "mass culture" or "popular culture", sharply distinguished in form, genesis or content from other spheres of culture. I suppose what I had in mind, roughly, is commercially-produced culture, most of whose consumers are not, themselves, also producers of the same kind of culture --- as, for instance, most people who listen to commercial recordings aren't also musicians, and music-making is a business. But calling this "mass culture" seems to have a very unfortunate connotation, which I don't (any longer) accept, that most people are passive consumers of the degraded products of the manipulative Culture Trust, accepting whatever they're given without thought. There is a Culture Trust, and of course those who run it would have easier jobs if that were how things worked, but it seems to me to be false to the realities of how culture is produced, received and reworked, and how cultural trends and styles emerge and are used by the various people involved. "Mass culture" also seems to carry a connotation that once upon a time we lived in a non-alienated condition, where there wasn't the same distinction between producers and consumers, which seems again to be false.

See also Cultural Criticism

Recommended:
Joan Didion
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
The White Album
After Henry
Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (eds.), Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler [Review: The Birth and (Hoped-For) Death of the Rebel Consumer Hero, or, Between Mencken and the Cultural Front]
Mary McCarthy, On the Contrary
Dwight Macdonald, Against the American Grain
Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: The Folk-lore of Industrial Man
Neil Postman, Conscientious Objections
To read:
Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism
Carol Flake, Redemptorama: Culture, Politics and the New Evangelicalism
Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism
Chris Lehmann, Triumph of the Masscult
Angela McRobbie, In the Culture Society: Art, Fashion and Popular Music
J. H. Plumb, The Commercialisation of Literature in Eighteenth-Century England
Karen Sternheimer, It's Not the Media: The Truth About Pop Culture's Influence on Children
John Storey, Inventing Popular Culture [History of intellectuals' ideas about popular culture]