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Western Kentucky University TopSCHOLAR® Philosophy & Religion Faculty Publications Philosophy & Religion January 2010 The olitP ics of the Romanticization of Popular Culture, or, Going Ga-Ga Over Pop Culture: A Critical Theory Assessment Eric Bain-Selbo [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/phil_rel_fac_pub Part of the Philosophy Commons, Political Science Commons, and the Religion Commons Recommended Repository Citation Bain-Selbo, Eric. (2010). The oP litics of the Romanticization of Popular Culture, or, Going Ga-Ga Over Pop Culture: A Critical Theory Assessment. Unpublished. Available at: http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/phil_rel_fac_pub/10 This is brought to you for free and open access by TopSCHOLAR®. It has been accepted for inclusion in Philosophy & Religion Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of TopSCHOLAR®. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Politics of the Romanticization of Popular Culture, or, Going Ga‐Ga Over Pop Culture: A Critical Theory Assessment Eric Bain‐Selbo, Western Kentucky University AUTHOR’S NOTE: This paper is a revision of one given at the 2010 meeting of the Popular Culture Association. It remains a work in progress. DO NOTE CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR. The debate about the value or merit of popular culture has persisted for centuries. One might even see Plato’s criticism of poets in his day as an early example of popular culture bashing. More recently, writers like Matthew Arnold (19th century) and Dwight MacDonald (20th century) leveled damaging critiques against the culture of the masses. This paper will take as its starting point Frankfurt School philosophers like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Their critique of mass culture and the culture industry influenced a significant number of cultural critics from the mid‐20th century on. In many ways, a number of contemporary theorists have sought to redeem popular culture by celebrating the “silver lining” of the otherwise “dark cloud” of mediocrity and manipulation that passes as culture in American society. Whereas theorists like Adorno and Horkheimer may have bordered on the hyperbolic in their condemnation of mass culture, developing a too one‐sided critique of popular culture, some more contemporary theorists have swung to the other extreme, developing one‐sided celebrations of popular culture. The work of John Fiske, beginning in the 1980s, is an example of the swing to that extreme. I will summarize the criticisms of his approach to popular culture that can be and have been made. A more recent champion of popular culture is Henry Jenkins, whose work has focused on developments in computer technology and social media. Yet, his work is subject to many of the same criticisms that can be made in regard to Fiske’s work. In this 1 paper, then, I will argue that contemporary efforts from the 1980s to today to romanticize popular culture threaten to obfuscate the powerful and detrimental effects of the capitalist culture industry—and that we desperately need a more measured critique of popular culture in order to attain a fair assessment of its costs and benefits. I will pay particular attention to costs and benefits as they pertain to the health of our democracy. While they certainly were not the first or the last theorists to critique mass culture or the culture industry, Adorno and Horkheimer remain excellent examples of those thinkers who see popular culture as a dangerous and enslaving element in Western societies. In their famous essay “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the culture industry (that which produces mass or popular culture) is fully within the control of wealthy and powerful people and corporations. Those in power use the culture industry as a way of controlling or pacifying the general population—all the better to then exploit them for economic gain. The key to this control or pacification is the mindless or vapid character of what the culture industry produces. The products of the culture industry do not spur the imagination or creativity of the consumers, and they certainly do not elicit any reflective or critical thought. Even worse, the very desire for the pablum of the culture industry is produced by the culture industry itself. My use of the word “pablum” is particularly fitting in this case. The root of the word is from the Latin pabulum, meaning “foodstuff.” In the 1930s, pablum became a trademark for a processed cereal for infants. Metaphorically it since has been used to refer to entertainment or amusement that is bland, unappealing, or lacks taste. It perfectly describes what Adorno and Horkheimer thought about the products of the culture 2 industry. Those products are bland and unappealing, in part because they cater to the lowest common denominator of the masses (e.g., crude humor, slapstick comedy, uncomplicated narratives). And like the infants to whom pablum was fed, consumers lack any real freedom or choice in the transactions conducted with the culture industry. “The consumers are the workers and employees, the farmers and lower middle class,” Adorno and Horkheimer write. “Capitalist production so confines them, body and soul, that they fall helpless victims to what is offered to them [by the culture industry].”1 In this way, the consumers are not subjects able to exercise their freedom but objects that are manipulated by those in control of the culture industry.2 While one might think that the pleasures of mass or popular culture provide consumers with an escape from the drudgery and tedium of the work week, they actually are part of the system that imprisons them. As Adorno and Horkheimer conclude: “Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It is flight; not, as is asserted, flight from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance.”3 We can reject this product or that form of entertainment, but we increasingly are incapable of critically assessing or resisting the dominant ideology4‐‐the ideology of never‐ending consumption as a means to personal fulfillment and happiness. 1 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (translated by John Cumming, New York: Continuum, 1994), 133. 2 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic, 142. 3 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic, 144. 4 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic, 166‐167. 3 Adorno extended and perhaps sharpened this critique in his later essay “The Culture Industry Revisited.” He argues that the “dream industry [culture industry] does not so much fabricate the dreams of the customers as introduce the dreams of the suppliers among the people.”5 Even worse, nobody seems to care that their dreams (read “wants” or “desires”) are not their own but are the dreams of commodity producers. As Adorno affirms, “The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object.”6 It is in this sense that Adorno argues that the culture industry is not a consequence of human desires, it does not conform itself to the wants of the consumer, rather it conforms the consumer to itself. Adorno concludes that “the culture industry is not the art of the consumer but rather the projection of the will of those in control onto their victims.”7 In such a situation, there is no freedom, no resistance, and no genuine democracy. Little wonder then that Adorno prophesizes: The neon signs which hang over our cities and outshine the natural light of the night with their own are comets presaging the natural disaster of society, its frozen death. Yet they do not come from the sky. They are controlled from earth. It depends upon human beings themselves whether they will extinguish these lights and awake from a nightmare which only threatens to become actual as long as men believe in it.8 5 Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry (New York: Routledge, 1991), 93. 6 Adorno, Culture, 99. 7 Adorno, Culture, 185. 8 Adorno, Culture, 96. 4 The arguments made by Adorno and Horkheimer about mass or popular culture probably are not fully applicable today. Popular culture today is far from homogenous and repetitive. Popular culture today is more varied and creative than it was in 1950. However, what Adorno and Horkheimer still might have right is the effects of popular culture on its audience. It still may be true that consumers of popular culture generally are victims, that they are robbed of their freedom, and that it is used as a way of facilitating the exploitation of the labor force. One of the best examples of the romanticization of popular culture can be found in the work of John Fiske. He identifies popular culture as the process by which consumers make their own meanings (a liberating act) out of the products they are given. He argues that popular culture is “made from within and below, not imposed from without or above as mass cultural theorist would have it. There is always an element of popular culture that lies outside social control, that escapes or opposes hegemonic forces.”9 From this position, the arguments of Adorno and Horkheimer are wrong or at least overstated. Fiske contends that popular culture is more about meaning than product. In other words, the culture industry might have control over the products that it makes, but it cannot control (at least not completely) the uses and meanings that people find for those products. As he says, “All commodities are consumed as much for their meanings, identities, and pleasures as they are for their material function.”10 Blue jeans, for example, 9 John Fiske, Reading the Popular (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 2. 10 Fiske, Reading, 4. 5 do not simply serve as a garment that protects us from the elements.

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