Uncommon Cultures

Popular Culture and Post-Modernism

Jim Collins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136037184
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Culture populaire dans l'art

Jim Collins argues that postmodernism and popular culture have together undermined the master system of "culture." By looking at a wide range of texts and forms he investigates what happens to the notion of culture once different discourses begin to envision that culture in conflicting ways, constructing often contradictory visions of it simultaneously.

One
Cultural Fragmentation and the Rise of Discursive Ideologies

Peter Sellars, Opera Director:
We’re living in a culture that is incredibly multifaceted. I grew up with John Cage and Merce Cunningham as old masters. But while they were giving birth to something, Norman Rockwell was also in his prime. With a push of a button we can choose some 18th-century Chinese lute music, the Mahler 6th, or Prince.¹

Bruce Springsteen, Rock Musician:
We learned more than a three-minute record baby than we ever learned in school … So maybe we can cut someplace of our own with these drums and these guitars, ‘Cause we made a promise we swore we’d always remember, No retreat, baby, no surrender.²

Tomas Borge Martinez, Sandinista:
Perhaps I could say that I was led to the revolutionary life by reading an author named Karl May. Karl May, not Karl Marx. May was a German who wrote novels about the wild West in the United States (without ever visiting America). I was about 12 years old when I read his books and they affected me profoundly. In the May westerns, the heroes were archetypes of nobility—courageous, audacious, personally honest. I wanted to be like them. But since in Nicaragua we didn’t have the Great Plains of the North American West, and since the injustices we were facing were different from those in Western novels, I decided to confront Nicaraguan injustices.³

Within the past decade a wide range of cultural critics representing radically different ideological perspectives have pointed to the crisis within cultural life. Culture is no longer a unitary, fixed category, but a decentered, fragmentary assemblage of conflicting voices and institutions. Whether described as the dissolving of the “mainstream” into a delta by an avant-garde composer like John Cage⁴ or the loss of a “common legacy” by the Secretary of Education,⁵ a widespread awareness exists that an “official,” centralized culture is increasingly difficult to identify in contemporary societies. Although explanations for this development differ quite drastically from theorist to theorist (as do their responses to it), the common denominator remains a recognition that our supposedly “common” culture is continuing to fragment.

Despite this consensus, few attempts to develop new models for cultural analysis to account for this situation have appeared, largely because most theorists have treated earlier, more homogeneous cultures as a kind of “paradise lost” that must be reclaimed. Consequently, most of the theorizing on Post-Modernism or “education reform” remains predicated on 19th-century presuppositions about society and cultural production. Most ideological analyses of popular fiction, for example, either insist on an all-pervasive cultural anarchy or continue to maintain the existence of a “dominant culture,” no matter how tortured its justification. Surface alterations have been employed to account for the recognized disintegration of such unitary structures, but the premises of such studies remain outmoded, rather like a remodeled, “modernized” Victorian house still resting on century-old foundations. In order to come to terms with the decentering and recentering processes at work in contemporary culture we need to develop new ways of theorizing “culture” that will recognize the impact of those processes on the construction of the texts and subjects that constitute it.

The quotations I have cited to begin this chapter appear to describe quite different cultural phenomena. The avant-garde theater director emphasizes the multiple-choice nature of contemporary cultural production, the rock star defends his music against the world, and the revolutionary explains the origins of his political commitment. While these perspectives may seem at best tangentially related, they all describe interconnected aspects of the same situation, where cultural production is no longer a carefully coordinated “system,” but provides a range of simultaneous options that have destabilized traditional distinctions between High Art and mere “mass culture.” This destabilization produces conflicts between competing forms of discourse as they try to “cut” a place for themselves, resulting in the need for a given genre, medium, or institution to promote itself as a privileged mode of representing experience. As texts define themselves over and against these other push-button choices, a legitimation crisis naturally occurs in which that text must justify not a social class, but its ability to perform a particular function, to fulfill a specific need within their culture. Once such a situation arises, individual readers, viewers, and listeners are inevitably drawn to specific types of discourse that may become the primary or base level of their consciousness. At this point they begin to recognize themselves not in their culture “as a whole,” but in the discourse of choice, whether it be Karl May Westerns, Harlequin romances, evangelical television, or the “Great Books” tradition.

The origins and/or causes of the profound changes in the “wholeness” of cultures have been attributed to any number of different factors. On a more specific level, a diverse group of literary and social historians have begun a thorough re-examination of the changing nature of “writing” and “reading” over the past three centuries. The seminal work of Robert Darnton⁶ and Carlo Ginzburg⁷, to mention only two examples, has brought about a far more subtle understanding of the diversity of cultural production and its possible uses. As brilliant and useful as this work is, the vast majority of such studies concentrate on shedding greater light on sharply delimited historical periods and therefore do not explain how we have arrived in this state of apparent “cultural crisis” in the latter half of the 20th century. If we are to develop satisfying explanations of the fundamental changes in how culture has been produced and consumed we need to piece togther the factors responsible for those changes and develop a historical continuum for appreciating those changes not as sudden breaks, but as culminations.

One of the most comprehensive attempts to construct such a continuum for understanding the changing nature of what constitutes culture is set forth by Terry Eagleton in The Function of Criticism.⁸ He situates the origins of this cultural fragmentation in the 18th century, specifically in regard to the changing role of criticism. In defining the nature of “culture” in the Enlightenment he utilizes the term “public sphere” (borrowed from Jürgen Habermas) to describe that network of social relations and institutions that constitute “public opinion.” The distinguishing feature of this sphere in England in the 18th century was its “consensual character,” and the body of opinions concerning things cultural was relatively homogeneous due to the cohesiveness of the educated class that produced and circulated those opinions. The critic was still cultural rather than “literary,” owing to the lack of intense specialization that would begin in the 19th century, but also because “culture” was a relatively stable, commonly held set of beliefs within polite Enlightened society. But this cohesive public sphere begins to fragment by the end of the century. Eagleton develops the political and economic factors responsible for its gradual disintegration in regard to the British class structure and the change from a literary patronage system to one in which the professional writers could be supported by their publics. He also signals another fundamental change regarding the varying levels of literacy in the 19th century.

There were naturally many degrees of literacy in eighteen-century England, but there was an obvious distinction between those who could “read” in a sense of the term inseparable from the ideological notions of gentility, and those who could not. The nineteenth-century man of letters must suffer the blurring and troubling of this reasonably precise boundary. What is now most problematical is not illiteracy … but those who, capable of reading in a physiological and psychological but not culturally valorized sense, threaten to deconstruct the fixed oppositions between “influential persons” and “multitude.” What is most ideologically undermining is a literacy which is not literacy … a whole nation which reads, but not in the sense of reading, and which is therefore neither quite literate nor illiterate, neither firmly within one’s categories nor securely without. (pp. 51-52)

While Eagleton’s account of the changing nature of criticism is quite comprehensive, he underplays the significance of another factor in the fragmentation of the public sphere that had a direct impact on the differences in “reading” among the various factions within British society. Just as a cohesive, homogeneous reading public fragments into a series of reading publics, “artistic expression” fragments into a network of competing discourses. The consensual public sphere disintegrates when textual production as well as textual consumption ceases to be unified by notions of “culture” or polite letters. Variations in “reading” were attributable to variations in what was read by those publics, involving a very similar blurring of “literature” and “non-literature,” specifically in regard to popular fiction. Tony Davies,⁹ in a fascinating article on railway fiction (popular literature sold in train stations) examines not only the shifting relationship between serious Literature and popular fiction, but the diversification of the latter as reading publics become increasingly gender-specific in the 19th century. To read narrative, then, is not necessarily to read great Literature. What Eagleton says of criticism in the 19th century could just as appropriately be said of fiction. “Criticism [fiction] needed such legitimacy because of the collapse of the public sphere which had previously validated it; but without such a common set of beliefs and norms there was no authority which criticism [fiction] could legitimate itself to. Its discourse was accordingly forced to be self-generating and self-sustaining” (p. 81).

This self-legitimation process is nowhere more obvious than in the various forms of popular narrative that appeared as the Enlightenment public sphere was beginning to fragment in the late 18th-early 19th centuries. Without a unitary tradition to align themselves with while they competed for overlapping and ever-shifting audiences, the new forms of popular narrative again and again sought to justify themselves as privileged, “legimate” modes of representing the world as it was or should be. In the 20th century, the hierarchies of class and aesthetic discourses that had begun to break up over the course of the 19th-century had at last disintegrated. The factors contributing to this disintegration are interdependent: once literacy becomes widespread regardless of economic station, books become available in inexpensive editions, and publishing houses are outside direct state control, class distinctions become increasingly less important in determining audience. Once the means of production, distribution, and consumption all defy class orientations, correlations between class and genre begin to dissolve. This process begins to snowball with the advent of film, and particularly television, when problems of literacy and accessibility have virtually disappeared. Vestiges of such correlations appear in the 20th century, but they have been, for the most part, of rather limited duration. The emergence of film and television exemplifies the temporary resurgence of social/artistic hierarchies. Both were initially considered inferior art forms, mere sideshow attractions for the great unwashed, as opposed to “Literature,” or “Theater,” yet both have acquired a different status through the development of a highly heterogeneous audience.

Class distinctions are increasingly less influential in determining who reads what due to basic changes in publishing and literacy, but perhaps even more fundamentally, their influence has continued to decrease in the 20th century with the gradual redefinition of those very class distinctions. Kenneth Roberts et al. argue quite convincingly in The Fragmentary Class Structure that traditional class distinctions such as blue collar/white collar or working class/middle class are no longer sacred givens in regard to how groups of individuals perceive themselves within a given social formation.¹⁰ The authors assert “the working class is splintered by numerous cross-cutting internal divisions. Some are hierarchical, as between different levels of skill, while others are lateral, as between different but equally skilled trades” (p. 97). The lack of coherence within a specific “class” is also the result of “the absence of a clearly defined other side…. For the working class the them in the us/them equation is not easily identified. The working class is not a caste and its boundaries are blurred” (p. 98). While class cohesiveness may be disappearing, no great leveling process is at work in which all classes slowly fade into one; thus the book resists any scenarios that posit the “embourgeoisement” or “proletarianization” of society as a whole. Distinctions remain, but the borders have shifted: “The days when it was realistic to talk about the middle class are gone. The trends are toward fragmenting the middle class into a number of distinguishable strata, each with its own view of place in the social structure” (p. 143).

The cohesiveness of the unitary public sphere was dependent upon a notion of “culture” as a relatively closed set regarding its rules and players. As soon as the categories of literature and public begin to diversify and multiply, “culture” becomes a fundamentally conflicted terrain. Standard literary scholarship lavishes critical attention on the tensions that arise when specific movements collide and catalogues the various “battle of Hernani” situations, but either ignores or minimizes the perpetual ongoing conflicts that are the rule rather than the exception in cultural production. Edward Said, for instance, insists that

the western novelistic tradition from Don Quixote on is full of examples of texts insisting not only upon their circumstantial reality, but also upon their status as already fulfilling a function, a reference, or a meaning in the world.… All texts essentially displace, dislodge other texts, or more frequently they take the place of something else. As Nietzsche had the perspicacity to see, “texts are fundamentally facts of power, not of democratic exchange.”¹¹

Said’s analysis of how texts by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oscar Wilde, and Joseph Conrad exemplify such struggles is compelling. But the battles here appear to be fought by great artists, rather than being endemic to the majority of texts in varying degrees of intensity once discourses are no longer content to fulfill specific co-ordinated functions in some kind of master system. Rather than isolatable anxieties of influence, the struggles texts engage in to “clear a space” for themselves within specific semiotic environments are the direct result of an all-pervasive anxiety of confluence that affects all cultural production.

My argument is that texts have always demonstrated a knowledge of their “worldliness,” and have asserted their status in relation to an imagined “world” or context; but from the end of the 18th century and on to the present, the need for such assertions has been intensifying as the “world” becomes increasingly complicated due to competition among different discourses for the same status, for fulfilling the same or similar functions for a given culture. Since the latter half of the 18th century, this competition has become commonplace as a result of the steady collapse of any kind of hierarchy of narrative discourses that link up neatly with any kind of social hierarchy of consumers. The homologous hierarchies constructed by Jan Mukarovsky,¹² in which discourses knew their place and social classes knew their proper reading material, have collapsed. One such hierarchies cease to exist, no unseen hand regulates which discourse can assert the fulfillment of which function, nor which individual can read which discourse, nor how individuals might decode them.

Fictional texts become, at this point, doubly “ideological” in that they vehiculate a particular political position, but also promote themselves as forms of discourse, generating their own set of distinctive values, sustaining their own stylistic uniqueness, constructing very particular subjects. To account for the impact of self-promotion on a public sphere, or even a “mass consciousness” in the most general sense, we need to develop a coherent notion of discursive ideologies. Earlier analyses focus on how a text manifests an ideological system that is both non-aesthetic and pre-existent rather than examining how an aesthetic discourse like detective fiction generates its specific ideology as reaction to other competing ideologies within a given culture. The investigation of aesthetic ideologies is a first step in a much larger project of developing a theory of decentered cultures predicated on the conflictive heterogeneity of cultural production. By focusing on seemingly minor problems concerning the tensions among different aesthetics discourses, I hope to reveal the insufficiency of most contemporary cultural analysis, and to demonstrate that the very presence of such tensions suggests a radically different notion of culture than previously theorized. Very few studies have yet examined how the competition among different aesthetic discourses for ever-shifting audiences has affected the construction of those discourses and the very cultures that gave rise to them.

Inside the Grand Hotel: The “Mass Culture” Critique and Its Fantasies

The fragmentation of a unitary public sphere into multiple reading publics and diverse forms of narrative is clearly linked to the emergence of a “mass culture” the convenient cover term used to describe cultural production in the industrial and post-industrial eras. Yet the vast majority of the theories of mass culture have explicitly failed to recognize this fragmentation, instead emphasizing the standardization of cultural production resulting from the increasing technological sophistication in both its production and distribution. Rather than conceiving of the transition from the Enlightenment to the Industrial Age as a shift from one public sphere to multiple spheres, critics of mass culture, from Matthew Arnold to Jean Baudrillard, have characterized this transition as a profound fall from grace, in which the twin evils of mechanization and commodification have eliminated any kind of cultural heterogeneity. The diversification and proliferation of popular culture that begins at the end of the 18th century seems an appropriate starting point for examining the changing nature of what constitutes culture, but one of the basic tenets of mass culture theory effectively precludes any such inquiry— namely that popular culture itsel...