Howe, Irving. “Notes On Mass Culture.” Arguing Comics. Heer, Jeet and Kent Worcester, Eds. University Press of Mississippi: Jackson, Mississippi. 2004.
Howe’s paper is a textbook (almost literally) example of how the high/low culture split is theorised. He even references Adorno’s work on popular music, equates it to film and, by association, comic strips. In the very first sentence, he refers to “the pseudo-cultural amusements that occupy the American people’s leisure time” (43), and consistently defines ‘mass culture’ as that which is merely a distraction from the unpleasantness of being a member of the labour class, as merely a vessel of conformist messages that pacify that class, and as the opposite of ‘art,’ which stimulates the mind and inspires questioning instead of conformity.
The lure of this kind of model is that it has clear ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys.’ The bourgeoisie capitalists are the producers of unidirectional propaganda, and the labour class is the victim of that propaganda. It’s simplistic, but it can get one all fired up about how, to be fair, demonstrably manipulative and witless most mainstream entertainment actually is. There are, of course, serious problems with this approach, so I thought I’d take a minute to point them out as I see them.
At base, Howe’s definitions for ‘mass culture’ and ‘art’ are meaningless because they’re essentially just short-hand for ‘good art’ and ‘bad art,’ which is really just a falsely objective version of what they really mean, ‘art he likes’ and ‘art he doesn’t like.’ There are no surprises in his construction, though I’m sure there are many people, then and now, who would find it so self-evident that it needs no arguing. It pretty much requires that we assume artistic quality can be objectively demonstrated, if not measured. Given the power of trends and personal tastes and the vast variety of cultural and historical taste, that claim isn’t worth more than a paragraph.
The more insidious element, which runs counter to what I think we can assume is Howe’s goal, is that the unidirectional and manipulative model of ‘mass culture’ he offers implicitly assumes that ‘the mass’ that consumes it is stupid, monolithic, and incapable of subversive reinterpretation. Now, I do believe that limiting education is a great way to maintain class division, not only because it creates greater and greater cultural differences between the educated and the uneducated, but also because it funnels the upper class into executive, managerial, and generally high-status professions, and vice-versa for ‘the mass.’ Continuously flooding popular entertainment with witless crap does play into that divide by artificially exacerbating the high/low split in art that occurs part-and-parcel with the basic class split.
However, we simply don’t have to assume that popular consumers are unaware of that manipulation, or that they don’t manipulate the consumer entertainment they’re given to serve their own cultural ends. Long before mainstream culture started to “eat its young” in order to stake a claim to fringe culture, as Warren Ellis puts it, labour and ‘mass’ culture has been collaging high-culture for its own purposes.
Examples of this abound in the 20th century, but the most recent and most compelling is ‘sampling’ in hip-hop, a musical technique that violates some of the most basic assumptions about art: that it proceeds from inspiration, possibly from God, and through the vessel of the singular genius, the artist; that it is based on originality and personal vision, rather than collective view of a social context; or, on what I’d argue is an even more fundamental level, that ideas can be owned and parcelled out, like land or cattle.
In a similar vein, the original hacker mantra, “Information wants to be free,” assumed a world in which I am ethically allowed to copy into my computer anything that I can copy into my computer, that that act of copying constitutes a good act, a further dissemination of knowledge, and not in any way a ‘theft’; and that it’s logically impossible, to begin with, to steal an idea. Clearly, mass culture is perfectly capable of interpreting mainstream ‘signal’ in such a way as to, if not remove the conformist ‘noise,’ at least only listen to that part of the signal that can be put to their own purposes.
The other lure of Howe’s construction, though, is that he defines ‘mass culture’ in terms that we’d mostly agree are bad: it’s superficial, it encourages passivity, it discourages the questioning of authority, it neatly answers questions rather than posing them and leaving the audience to sort them out. But he never demonstrates that mass culture does suffer from these defects, nor does he really define how he determines what ‘mass culture’ was to begin with, before he defined it as ‘that which is bad.’ So though I agree that art that’s conformist and merely preaches to the choir isn’t very good for society in general, I’m totally unconvinced that all ‘mass culture’ is conformist, or that all ‘art’ is radical. Howe's dividing line between the two seems to consist of a convenient bit of circular reasoning.
Howe’s discussion isn’t of much use, considering it’s meaningless definition and tendency to lapse into Freud-inspired descriptions of the theatre space as a giant vagina, but it’s interesting in so far as it reminds me how easy it would be to cheer against mainstream entertainment, ostensibly in the interests of ‘the mass,’ but by doing so, would insult the intelligence of that same ‘mass’ of people.
Really, this is yet another version of the same old lesson, that instead of making grand proclamations about how ‘all’ art functions within some kind of false universal social context, we have to simply get on with the job of investigating individual examples, one at a time, and collating our data after the fact. Starting with generalisation is just waste of paper.
Posted by orion at March 6, 2006 4:46 PM