Donald Lazere - American Media and Mass Culture, Left Perspectives (1987).pdf - American Studies - scullytailedsquirrel

American Media and Mass Culture

Page 1 of 477

Preferred Citation: Lazere, Donald, editor. American Media and Mass Culture: Left

Perspectives. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1987 1987.

http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft4870067k/

American Media and Mass Culture

Left Perspectives

Edited By Donald Lazere

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford

Preferred Citation: Lazere, Donald, editor. American Media and Mass Culture: Left

Perspectives. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1987 1987.

http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft4870067k/

PREFACE

― ix ―

This anthology brings together the multiple strands of recent leftist criticism concerned with

the role of mass culture in both shaping and reflecting twentieth-century American political

consciousness. The emphasis is less on direct relations between mass media and politics (as in

news reporting on political events) than on the broader suffusion of political ideology

throughout everyday life in news and entertainment media, advertising, sports, music, and

other branches of the culture industry.

Most of the selections appeared originally in limited-circulation left journals and presses

within the past decade or so. Some, such as those by Neil Postman and George Gerbner's

research group, are not written from a left or any other partisan viewpoint but are included

because their findings substantiate the lines of argument presented here. The length of the

book was dictated by two needs: to convey the impressive scope of this critical school, and to

marshal a comprehensive counterstatement to the conservative thinking that has been in

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ascendancy since the seventies in both American cultural criticism and electoral politics.

Even in this large a collection, many worthy possible selections have had to be relegated to

recommended further readings. Articles were selected on the basis of literary quality,

humanistic approach to cultural issues, and contribution toward a cogent overview. In keeping

with the dialectical and unifying principles of the critical movement represented here, readings

are grouped within and among sections to create thematic continuity from beginning to end,

so that the individual works increasingly reflect off one another. My general and section

introductions stress these continuities and suggest other possible groupings of included and

recommended further readings for comparison and contrast.

This collection originated with a special issue of College English , a journal of the National

Council of Teachers of English, entitled "Mass Culture, Political Consciousness, and English

Studies" (April 1977). Favorable response and the subsequent proliferation of criticism in this

mode prompted expansion and updating, with the goal of a book addressed to a wide

readership of college students and teachers in all mass media or popular culture subject areas.

Although emphasis has shifted from the teaching to the criticism of mass culture, this volume

is intended to be a textbook as well as a scholarly collection, and an eye to issues concerning

education has been retained. While the interdisciplinary range needed to do the subject justice

is stressed—the contributors represent a dozen fields of scholarship and media activism—the

style of most of the readings con-

― x ―

tinues to be that of the critical essay rather than of social-scientific research; their focus on

literary, rhetorical, and semantic aspects of mass culture highlights the distinctive contribution

English and modern language studies can make to media scholarship.

The general political position shared by the editor and most contributors is what, in

America, is labeled "radical." We accept that label mainly in its literal sense of going to the

roots of problems, in opposition to the liberal tendency toward superficial, ad hoc expedients.

Although this book does not provide "equal time" for conservative or liberal views, it does

attempt to present those views accurately and judiciously in the course of disagreeing with

them. In terms of pedagogy, most American textbooks (like most American news media)

purport to express a neutral or balanced viewpoint, which often simply conceals the authors'

biases and fails to clearly delineate differing ideologies. We believe it is more conducive to

learning to expose students and teachers to a comprehensive, first-hand expression of one

particular viewpoint and let them evaluate it against sources representing other ones—

conservative, liberal, libertarian, and so forth.

The "left perspectives" here, then, refer to a position generally to the left of mainstream,

Democratic-party liberal capitalism as it has developed in the twentieth century. That is, most

contributors favor some degree or variety of social-ism—but socialism as defined in its

democratic forms, not the perverted version associated with Soviet Russia and other

Communist dictatorships. Similarly, Marxist cultural theory (whose main lines are summarized

in my general introduction) predominates here, but this fact needs to be qualified by

recognizing the multiple meanings of the term Marxism and its abuses by both left and right.

All Marxists are socialists, but neither all socialists nor all the leftist contributors to this book

are Marxists, although most draw to a greater or lesser extent from Marxist theory. In other

words, one can take Marxist theory seriously and find value in its critique of bourgeois society

[1] without necessarily espousing it whole (though some writers herein do so) or becoming

enmeshed in the endless disputes over fine points of doctrine that often blight Marxist

theorizing. Furthermore, although all Communist parties claim to be Marxist, not all Marxists

are Communists; indeed, most worthwhile Marxist criticism in recent decades has been written

in the cause of political and cultural freedom and in vehement opposition to the propagandistic

"Marxist culture" and "socialist realism" imposed in Russia under Stalin. Finally, although

Marxist cultural criticism cannot authentically be merely an academic endeavor detached from

active political commitment, neither does it necessarily have any affiliation with all the

governments, parties, and individuals around the world today that make claims to Marxism,

often in the most vulgar if not thuggish manner. [2] So although there is a great deal of

criticism of the United States and capitalism in this book—along with a great deal of affection

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for the country's better self—the criticism is motivated by the desire to see America live up

to its democratic potential and is not meant to imply that any present-day communist society

presents a preferable alternative to American democracy.

At the same time, however, opposition to communism does not justify the blind rejection

of every form of Marxism. It does not justify a monolithic good-

― xi ―

versus-evil view of the cold war or of Third World revolution. It does not justify the stifling of

radical voices—whether communist or anticommunist—in American public discourse. Above all,

it does not justify the collapse of critical standards in regard to capitalism, the United States,

and right-wing forces both here and abroad that has increasingly characterized

neoconservative thought. (This trend is typified by Commentary magazine's recent panegyrics

to John Wayne and Clint Eastwood as true-blue Americans, its making of common cause with

the Moral Majority, and its defenses of right-wing dictatorships that sound like parodies of the

wide-eyed enthusiasm of American leftist visitors returning from tours of cosmeticized

Potemkin villages in Soviet Russia.)

This clarification of the book's politics is necessary because, in the present American

political climate, it is depressingly predictable that those who dare to assert the slightest

validity in Marxist thought will not encounter substantive evaluations of their arguments but

shrill invective drawn from an arsenal of stock responses, including accusations of doctrinaire,

jargon-ridden writing, hatred for American democracy, and guilt by association with every

communist or terrorist atrocity. (Here again, conservative rhetoric has tended to become an

echo of the very vices conservatives attribute to leftists.) We can only hope that stating our

position on these matters clearly at the outset will help avert prejudiced responses to this

book.

The fact is that recent left cultural criticism encompasses not only a diversity of precise

political positions but a wide variety of topics, analytic methods, styles, and tones. The

attempt has been made here to convey this diversity, and particularly to avoid sectarianism

and dogma. The editor does have a bias, however, against jargon and in favor of clearly

written, concrete analysis. Although the Frankfurt School has been the dominant influence on

the writers here, its leading figures viewed American culture through foreign eyes and

generally wrote of it in German or a Germanicized English that put off many readers. The

contributors to this collection have assimilated Frankfurt School and other recent European,

Latin American, and British criticism, but most of them are Americans speaking in their native

voice about their native culture. This bias in favor of clarity and familiarity also explains the

minimal inclusion of the more arcane varieties of recent Marxist, structuralist, and post-

structuralist cultural theory (much of it written in the most tortured academic French or in

imitation thereof), which in any case have received more than adequate attention in the past

few decades in comparison to the lines of left criticism emphasized here. The distinctive

mission of leftist intellectuals is to translate theory into practice and into discourse that, at

some stage of mediation, is relevant to the daily life of ordinary people and intelligible to

them. If this anthology succeeds in its intentions, readers will find in it a fulfillment of that

responsibility.

Thanks are due to Richard Ohmann, who commissioned the original College English issue

on which this book is based, and to Ernest Callenbach, my sponsoring editor at the University

of California Press, whose patient support and wisdom about film and other cultural theory

were invaluable, and whose Ecotopian optimism for the future somewhat tempered my own

pessimistic bent. Two great mentors, Dwight Macdonald and Herbert Marcuse, died while this

book

― xii ―

was in progress. Macdonald first stimulated my interest in mass-culture criticism in an

undergraduate writing class at Northwestern, and he continued in later years to encourage me

and many younger critics, prodding with his inimitably acerbic editorial comments. Marcuse

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has been unjustly denigrated since the sixties, largely on the basis of a couple of foolish

sentences in Repressive Tolerance , which his attackers invariably dredge up in order to

dismiss the whole body of works by one of the most important thinkers of our time. We hope

that this book will mark one step toward restoring due stature to Marcuse and his Frankfurt

School colleagues. Among the contributors, Charles Eckert is no longer living and Robert Cirino

is too ill to write; the fine work of both will be missed. The editors at Pantheon Books, and

especially Tom Engelhardt, are to be commended for singlehandedly accounting for a large

percentage of the books by leftist political and cultural critics published by major American

trade presses since the end of the sixties; several of our selections have also appeared, usually

in different versions, in Pantheon Books.

Brandon Jones, Michael Pemberton, Greg Parras, Hope Myers, Connie Davis, Linda Porter,

and Nancy Hart contributed valued research and clerical assistance. My indefatigable editorial

assistant, Sauny Dills, merits special commendation, as does Charles Dills for helping cope

with word-processing complications. Finally, thanks to Barbara Ras and Anne Canright at the

University of California Press for scrupulous manuscript editing.

A source note for each article identifies the journal or book in which it was originally

published. These articles are reprinted with the permission of the original copyright holders.

INTRODUCTION:

ENTERTAINMENT AS SOCIAL CONTROL

Donald Lazere

― 1 ―

One of the more durable offshoots of the American New Left in the sixties was a revival of

mass culture criticism, which by the eighties has grown into a full-blown theoretical

movement. The distinctive emphasis of this movement is on the central role of the culture of

everyday life in shaping political consciousness, not only through the subject matter of cultural

works but also through their structures, genres, linguistic and perceptual patterns, and the

class relations embodied in cultural institutions, creators, and audiences.

Other approaches to mass culture have, to be sure, proliferated in the academic world,

under a bewildering array of labels: mass media, communications, popular culture, the popular

arts, and so on. Unfortunately, Media and Communications seem to have carried the day as

rubrics for university courses and markets for scholarly books, thus inhibiting a broader

emphasis on cultural issues. The departmentalization of academic studies has further

obstructed a coherent, humanistic perspective. Departments of journalism, communications,

and speech—at least until recently—have typically focused mainly on media institutions and

technology, and their curricula have emphasized empirical research or pre-professional

training more than criticism. [1] Media sociology and political science have produced a large,

useful body of scholarship, but here again, much of it has consisted of "value-free" and

quantitative studies detached from critical evaluation. [2] Mass culture has become a productive

but still small subfield in history, philosophy, and American Studies. In English, popular song

lyrics have been studied as poetry, while film, science fiction, comic books, and other popular

genres have been studied for dramatic, semiotic, or social-psychological significance.

Freshman English anthologies have incorporated various popular writing genres as models for

expository techniques, style, and rhetoric, and essays about mass media as models for critical

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analysis. Mass culture as a whole, however, remains extremely marginal in English

undergraduate and graduate curricula and in the professional organizations and prestige

critical journals—especially considering how many leading twentieth-century literary figures

have written criticism on the subject.

In these various academic approaches to mass culture, the prevalent attitude has been

the accepting, often affirmative, and even celebratory one best exemplified by the Popular

Culture Association and the Journal of Popular Culture , which were founded in 1969. This

approach tends to reject or ignore the distinctions earlier critics made among highbrow,

middlebrow, and lowbrow culture and between folk or popular culture—the spontaneous

expression of common indi-

― 2 ―

viduals, directed to their peers—and mass culture, manufactured and marketed commercially

by impersonal business interests. (I will henceforth use the term popular culture in reference

to critics to designate the affirmative position, in contrast to mass culture , connoting the more

negative attitude.) The sources for the popular culture attitude include Marshall McLuhan,

Susan Sontag's "One Culture and the New Sensibility" (both of which have been somewhat

oversimplified and vulgarized), the countercultural mutations of the 1960s, and "new

journalists" like Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson, who satirize but ultimately validate mass

culture by appropriating its own language.

The popular culture approach has provided a legitimate corrective to criticism by such

cultural elitists as Ortega y Gasset, Q. D. and F. R. Leavis, Dwight Macdonald, T. S. Eliot,

Ernest van den Haag, and the Marxists of the Frankfurt School, a body of criticism that

considered the effects of mass culture to be wholly negative. Certainly national publications,

film, radio, television, and the phonograph, along with the spread of higher education, have

made millions of Americans, especially in provincial locations, more worldly and critical-

minded. The last few decades in particular have seen the most widespread diffusion of

cosmopolitan tastes in American history—one positive feature of the "yuppie" (young urban

professional) phenomenon. The old highbrow/middlebrow/lowbrow and popular culture/mass

culture distinctions have had to be revised at least somewhat as a result of the improved

artistic quality in some products of commercial culture, such as Hollywood films and the more

inventive popular music of the sixties, with a concomitant increase in appreciation of these

forms on the part of highbrow critics. High art has increasingly incorporated popular culture

and vice versa, often with vitalizing effects for both. Middle America has discovered

Baryshnikov and Brie, while intellectuals praise "Hill Street Blues" and Larry Bird. In Los

Angeles, long synonymous with everything lowbrow, the 1984 Olympics were accompanied

with predictably vulgar hucksterism but also with a first-rate international festival of classical

music, ballet, theater, folklore, and painting.

Even with all that is valid in the affirmation of popular culture, however, its recent

advocates have tended to play down persistently troublesome aspects of the politics of culture.

(In this respect the rise of the popular culture movement forms part of the general

depoliticizing of American academic discourse, as well as of both high and mass culture

themselves, that has characterized the cold war period.) In their intensified study of popular

culture, left analysts have maintained a more critical political and aesthetic perspective than

has the Popular Culture Association school—a distinction that tends to be ignored by the

editors of journals like the New Criterion and Partisan Review , who seem to equate increased

attention to popular culture with the abandonment of critical standards toward it. The scholars

in the present collection bear little resemblance to the leftist intellectual straw man created by

neoconservatives, who is alienated from and misunderstands everything American. On the

contrary, they share with the popular-culturists an aficionado's immersion in the national lore

that inescapably shapes us all, for better and worse; they are simply more cognizant of the

worse, particularly on the political plane.

― 3 ―

The changing critical focus has served to stimulate leftists to reformulate the political issues in

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