Analysis of the Rise of Mass Culture - Essay Example

Mass Culture Mass Culture Mass culture may be described as a common set of behaviour, ideas and cultural values that stem from exposing a population to similar cultural activities, art, and music or communication media (Kim 2001, p. 7). It is usually influenced and defined by the popular or trending themes in the market and can also, therefore, be viewed as the sum of ideas which the masses in the mainstream consider favorable, mostly through an informal consensus. In this sense, it may as well be considered to be a culture that spontaneously emerges from the masses themselves. It rapidly became a dynamic and revolutionary force that broke down old barriers of tradition, taste and class. Mass culture is a relatively new concept, having been preceded by the more predominant “high”, or minority, culture. The two are among the most widely studied aspects of Western culture. Historically, the growth of mass culture has been promoted by popular education and political democracy, which worked together to break down the monopoly of the earlier upper-class culture. Newly awakened masses created viable markets for business enterprises while technological advances made the cheap and mass production of art, music, furniture, periodicals and books possible such that that market could be satisfied. New media, like television and movies, were made possible by modern technology in a way that they were well adapted to manufacture and distribute in mass (Wilinsky 2001, p. 132). This aspect distinguished mass culture making it synonymous to an item of mass consumption. This paper will consider the rise of mass culture and explore ways in which literary and cultural theorists such as Matthew Arnold, Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and F. R. Leavis responded to it. Mass culture generally arises as a culturally conservative and pessimistic response to technology, urbanisation and industrialisation characterised by the weakening of values (Anderson 2001, p. 19). Mathew Arnold opined that in such dynamic environments, people tend to get atomized, a concept he described as individuals who are isolated and do not share culture. Initially, the term had had a longer history in Europe, but was introduced into English literature by Arnold through his publication, Culture and Anarchy. According to him, mass culture is the result of responding to the moral vacuum created by the changing environment but, however, the change is inadequate in such a way that it only serves to enhance the problem the changes pose (Anderson 2001, p. 84). Therefore, he viewed culture as man’s disinterested endeavour of perfection. Arnold associates the rise of mass culture to political agitation, educational reform, imperial ascendancy, population explosion and scientific and commercial materialism. Through imperial ascendancy, the British Empire had brought more resistant, unruly and disparate subjects under the British crown from all continents they inhabited, forming the basis of culture becoming a contentious political issue. Arnold further felt that such pressures exposed traditional moral and spiritual values, as well as cultural tastes to an immediate extinction threat (Mulhern 2000, p. 112). This, he further feared, could culminate into a nationwide political disintegration, or anarchy. He was of the opinion that the solution could only come from high culture. His underlying idea was not the production of more high culture but, rather, to train the masses and leaders to react to the existing standard of great works as the remedy to mass society. Later, around the mid twentieth century, Leavis gave more expression to Arnold’s vision through his rebellious opposition to contemporary industrial life, backed by his assertion on English’s redemptive power. Leavis advocated vehemently for the same message for almost forty years up to the 1960s. His idea was that the moral core of school curriculum was English literature (Mulhern 2000, p. 93). In his publications, he demonstrated the manner in which he believed literary criticism needs to be done while trying to preserve the language as well as its responses. He was so fierce in his fight against mass culture that he used his ideas to influence a school curriculum. The curriculum was not only founded on literary criticism’s practice, but on the militant opposition to the presumably stifling consequences of mass culture. Leavis’ resistance to mass society later developed into class struggle and the enemy remained popular culture and commercial media (Hall 2006, p. 50). Arnold once wrote that to have culture implies that a population knows the best that has been thought and said in the world. This explanation is particularly literary and embraces philosophy. Presently, it is not very likely to be regarded as having been a significant element of high culture, or at least among the English-speaking cultures. According to Arnold, high culture was a force for political and moral uprightness. Another literary theorist, Williams, terms culture as being among English’s most complex words. In his attempt to describe the word, he split it into three groups: ideal, documentary and social. He explained ideal to be the best that is said or thought; documentary to be in response to how a population has lived or lives and social that which surrounds people (Hall 2006, p. 101). This description has actually helped to give a better insight into Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture, a reading by Leavis and Culture and Anarchy by Arnold. There is an implication of class being everything as well as a minority keeping. Regardless of whether culture is attempting to finish off classes and instead create an atmosphere of sweetness and light, or whether by dividing the population into Populace, Philistines and Barbarians, culture actually highlights class differences. Therefore, the class of a person is significant to their culture. It is worth mentioning that Leavis believed culture was in a crisis, which then gives the impression that he also blamed Americanisation for the crisis. He is especially critical of how the Aspect of Americanisation impacted and continues to impact on film, suggesting that it is the cause of dumping down of literature and films and, therefore, lowering cultural values. His main idea seems to stem from the belief that the high culture that is rapidly being lost will not be saved by mass culture which arose from Americanisation and modern life. An example of mass culture as shown by Leavis is the mass production of film that lacked enjoyable intellectual processes for the audiences’ consumption, unlike the case of reading a novel (Hall 2006, p. 99). Further, with the additional aspect of class significance and the continuously broadening gap between them, culture seems, according to Leavis, to be deeper in the crisis. From this point of view, mass culture could not be perceived in terms of productive capacity, emancipation, ordinariness, renewal from below and democratisation. Therefore, for all the literary and cultural theorists, it did not matter whether they were bent towards the political Right or Left; they had a common enemy in mass culture. Hoggart, another theorist, attacked the lack of depth in the teaching of English literature in Great Britain. He gave an outline of the approach he termed provisionally as Literature and Contemporary Cultural Studies. He claimed his approach bore some commonality with other approaches already in place but was, at the same time, not exactly like any of them. Hoggart was among the theorists who regarded cultural studies as an interdisciplinary endeavour and, hence, envisioned it as comprising of three parts. One part, which was also the most important, is the literary critical, followed by what he described as “roughly historical and philosophical and another, roughly sociological” (Hoggart 1970, p. 255). Through the British cultural studies that grew from the Centre for Contemporary Studies under his directorship, Hoggart notably advocated for the study of English, perceived as an academic discipline, to actively relate with its age. The cultural studies’ grounding is mirrored in what Hoggart described as a society characterised by elaborate divides of class distinction. According to him, Britain was a stratified society that had a powerful establishment. His opinion was that, be it in a conscious way or not, the mass media ought to strive for society that is culturally classless (Keith 2007, p.58). This, he added, was necessary even if for no other significant cause than the fact that the viability of the mass media was ultimately reliant on their capacity to remain appealing to heterogeneous sets of people. This notion cannot be doubted because Hoggart, as well as Williams, had first-hand experience of what it was to get into the university sphere from a working class background. This is much more pronounced when it is considered that it was in a society where the system sharply divided the population along lines of class. In his work, The Uses of Literacy, Hoggart attempts to bring about an understanding of the impacts of “massification” on culture in Britain. He described massification as marking a divide in the public view of class and culture and shifted and modified academic parameters (Owen 2008, p. 19). He argued that mass publicists are made more effectively, insistently and in a more centralised and comprehensive form than they earlier were. From this, he was of the opinion that the population was moving rapidly towards creating mass culture, which left the remnants of the previously urban culture open to destruction. His study focuses on movies, popular newspapers and magazines and pulp fiction, all of which he establishes contain drift. His argument laments the disintegration of communities that were closely knit and points to the emergence of a manufactured mass culture as the replacement of such communities (Owen 2008, p. 36). In particular, Hoggart feels that the success of Hollywood, advertisements and tabloid newspapers are the key alien factors that have robbed communities of their unique features. He is even clear enough to distinguish his attack as directed towards mass media, and not popular culture. He termed popular culture as a self-created notion that possesses basic integrity, having evolved in accordance with its own dictates and laws but not as a result of mass media (Owen 2008, p. 27). As seen from the arguments of Williams, societies are created by the forging of common directions and meanings by the members, and the growth of the said societies is debated actively under the pressures of discovery, contact and experience. From this definition, it can be drawn that his main idea stemmed from the thought that culture is composed of the known directions and meanings, of which the members are trained to. Further, culture can also be composed of new observations that are offered and tried. Williams is also objected to the notion that culture high culture, which includes literature, art and music, is the only culture, which he views as a means of retaining a division of power between the common and cultivated folk (Hall 2006, p. 47). It was later observed that Williams transitioned into discussing some of Leavis’ ideas that came to formulate his own thinking. He rejected Leavis’ idea that England became vulgar as it industrialised, plunging thinking and art into suffering. It is, however, evident that his rejection arises from his working class background, since, together with his family, they perceived technological growth and the moderation of labour through industrialisation as an advantage in the form of newly acquired power. This line of thought led Williams to suggest that pollution and ugliness are the price that must be paid by all cultures for the economic leverage granted by industrialisation. He, therefore, proposes a “responsible, less-abrasive and cleaner industry to the most viable solution” (Williams 1983, p. 69). According to him, the masses were constructed by the overcrowding occasioned by industrialisation, with the support of mass communication, which became a threat to its own familiarity. He further offers that there are actually no masses, but only means of constructing populations as such. Another theorist named Dwight McDonald agrees that the phenomenon of mass culture is atypical to modern times, radically different from what was previously referred to as culture or art (Logan 2009, p. 103). He also believes that mass culture started in a way synonymous to a parasitic or cancerous growth on high culture and, to some extent, still continues to be so. He mentions, and supports, other works that have suggested that a prerequisite for mass culture is the ready availability of fully established and mature cultural traditions. It is from such mature cultures that mass culture can take advantage of acquisitions, discoveries and perfected self-consciousness for its own benefits. He is, however, categorical that that connection is not for mutual benefit such as that which exists between a leaf and branch but rather, he compares it to that between a caterpillar and a leaf (Hall 2006, p. 75). McDonald thinks mass culture mines from high culture but has nothing to offer in return. From his point of view, the more mass culture develops, the more it draws from its own past, some of which evolves distantly from high culture. This gives it characteristics that make it more disconnected from high culture. It is McDonald’s belief also that mass culture is a continuation, to some extent, of folk art, which was the common people’s art up to the industrial revolution. However, he perceives folk art as having grown from below as the people’s spontaneous expression shaped amongst themselves and suitable to their own needs without the benefit of mass culture, whereas mass culture, he continues, is imposed from above. The audiences of mass culture are passive consumers whose participation is confined to the choice of either buying or not (Logan 2009, p. 91). The perpetrators of mass culture take advantage of the needs raised by the masses and use them to make profits as well as maintain their rule of class. Folk art was considered to be the institution of the people sealed off from the formal high culture of their masters. On the other hand, mass culture undoes the seal and integrates the masses into a degraded form of high culture. This makes it an instrument of political supremacy. Mathew looked to literature in Victorian England to ward off the crisis presented by secularisation (Logan 2009, p. 49). Mainly, this was because of literature’s idea of universality, coupled with the anticipation that it could welcome other classes into its sphere of moralising and humanising. To him, culture was an answer to the education and political life crisis. On the other hand, gives a description of culture as an inward condition not reliant on institutional machinery. However, his perception of culture as an antidote in the perceived disintegration fails to reconcile with the personal experience of culture. This becomes interesting because it is from the culture that the experience is extrapolated. For clarity, William’s understanding of culture can be said to be informed by a German conception, whose Bildung tradition is bourgeois and elitist. Here, Bildung can be taken to mean the establishment of a cultured individual as well as education’s traditional pretext. However, his version of culture takes on a more democratic trend. This is evident through his proposal to stretch bourgeois culture across all ranks of the society. This notion, he continues, will enable all people to leave in an environment of light and sweetness, using ideas freely and be nourished, rather than bound, by them. References Anderson, A 2001, The powers of distance: cosmopolitanism and the cultivation of detachment, Princeton UP, Princeton. Hall, S 2006, ‘Black diaspora artists in Britain: three moments in post-war history,’ History Workshop Journal 61. Hoggart, R 1970, Speaking to each other, Chatto & Windus, London. Keith, B 2007, Film genres: from iconography to ideology, Wallflower Press, London. Kim, U 2001, Culture, science and indigenous psychologies: an integrated analysis, Oxford UP, Oxford. Logan, P 2009, Victorian fetishism: intellectuals and primitives, State U of New York Press, Albany. Mulhern, F 2000, Culture/metaculture: the new critical idiom, Routledge, London. Owen, S 2008, Richard Hoggart and cultural studies, Palgrave Macmillan, London. Wilinsky, B 2001, Sure seaters: the emergence of art house cinema, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Williams, R 1983, Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society, Oxford UP, New York. Read More