American Media and Mass Culture(1)

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American Media and Mass Culture
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Preferred Citation: Lazere, Donald, editor.
American Media and Mass Culture: Left
Perspectives.
Berkeley: University of California Press, c1987 1987.
American Media and Mass Culture
Left Perspectives
Edited By Donald Lazere
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford
© 1987 The Regents of the University of California
Preferred Citation: Lazere, Donald, editor.
American Media and Mass Culture: Left
Perspectives.
Berkeley: University of California Press, c1987 1987.
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
―
I
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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