Amerikastudien / American Studies 59.3 Reviews D H , Consuming

Amerikastudien / American Studies 59.3 ★ Reviews

D H , Consuming Pleasures: how the rise of a consumer culture might re - Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Post - duce the American middle classes to passive war World (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, followers of emotionally empty conventions. 2012), xii + 491 pp. In The Anxieties of Afuence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939-1979 Almost from its eighteenth-century begin - (Amherst, 2004), Horowitz then traced the nings, the rise of a commercialized literary intellectual’s suspicion of unrestrained con - market has polarized critics into despisers sumption into the second half of the twenti- and defenders—those who associate ‘mass eth century. The present volume seems to be culture’ with the mindless consumption of a companion piece of sorts, focusing on how easy pleasures (in contrast to the emancipa - the more traditional moralistic attitude of cul - tory pleasures of a high-cultural aesthetic) tural consumption was gradually displaced by and those who praise ‘popular culture’ for its a “[p]ostmora[l]” sensibility, when between down-to-earth connection with the soul of 1955 and 1975 “American writers shifted their common folk (in contrast to an austere and attention from an emphasis on self-restraint to detached avant-garde). Daniel Horowitz’s the achievement of satisfaction through com - Consuming Pleasures , an intellectual history mercial goods and experiences” (x). of post-WWII cultural criticism in the United Horowitz’s inquiry begins with Bernard States (in transatlantic perspective), seeks to Rosenberg and David Manning White’s land - historicize this dichotomy by tracing a shift mark anthology Mass Culture: The Popular from the despising to the defending attitude Arts in America (1957). A “locus classicus” between the 1950s and the 1970s. He suggests (19) of the mass culture debates during the that during this period “writers came to envi - 1950s, this volume combined contributions sion popular culture and consumer culture in by Theodor W. Adorno, Leslie Fiedler, Her - fresh and provocative ways,” which led them bert Gans, Clement Greenberg, Irving Howe, to critique “cultural hierarchies and moralis - Dwight Macdonald, Marshal McLuhan, José tic approaches to commercial culture” and to Ortega y Gasset, David Riesman, and Ed - emphasize “playfulness and pleasure” (1) as mund Wilson. As Horowitz demonstrates, legitimate goals of literary-aesthetic recep - the Rosenberg-White anthology spanned the tion. It does not come as a surprise that the whole range of the despiser/defender rhetori - 1960s weakened some of the more rigid cul - cal repertoire, and its argumentative poles tural hierarchies, but Horowitz contextual- were represented by the editors’ opposing izes the shifting critical climate in a number viewpoints. Rosenberg’s vision of mass-cul - of signi cant post-WWII developments: the tural feminization, fetishization, and totali- social transitions that accompany the rise of tarianism stood against White’s debunking of consumer culture, the changing position of lit - elite paranoia (already Socrates denounced erary criticism as a source of cultural legitima- contemporary youth for their luxuries) and cy within the humanities and social sciences, emancipatory pretension (many German the tensions of political ideologies in the Cold Nazis and Soviet communists had high-brow War period, and an evolving sense of what it tastes, too) (cf. 24). After illuminating chap - means to speak about the popular. ters on Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Mar- Horowitz’s main interest lies in the chang - shall McLuhan, early Jürgen Habermas, Wal- ing views of consumption, an interest he pur- ter Benjamin, and C.L.R. James, Horowitz sued in two of his critically acclaimed earlier connects the debate’s argumentative drift books. His study on The Morality of Spend - to the in uence of David Riesman’s The ing: Attitudes towards the Consumer Society Lonely Crowd (1950). Riesman’s sociologi - in America, 1875-1940 (Baltimore, 1985) cal study was mainly received as a declension showed how the economic transformation of story about modern apathy: until the late the United States between the Gilded Age nineteenth century (an age of production and WWII was accompanied by a profound rather than consumption), people tended to dread of the commercialization of life: where internalize authority during their formative an earlier generation of nineteenth-century years, which helped them to grow into tough- social critics (from Tocqueville to Veblen) minded, self-reliant individuals who followed framed the moral dangers of money with im - an inner compass of norms and values. When ages of a lower-class lack of restraint, early social modernization heightened people’s ra - twentieth-century observers worried about dar for manners and conventions, even grown

Amerikastudien / American Studies 59. Jg., ISSN 0340-2827 © 2015 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH, Heidelberg Reviews ★ Amerikastudien / American Studies 59.3 adults tended to remain hyper-sensitive to the pre-1940 working class culture and one threat- external authority of consumption-de ned ened after World War II” by the “candy- oss and mass-media inculcated peer pressure: world” of a modern culture industry (182). twentieth-century Americans declined into The discussion of Hoggart is a high point “other-directed” individuals with feminine in Consuming Pleasures , which presents The sensibilities and a uid sense of selfhood. Uses of Literacy as a centerpiece in its nar - Other-directed people were primarily driven rative of evolving cultural studies. Hoggart by “diffuse anxiety ”1 rather than clear convic- is seen as caught between breakthrough and tions. Horowitz’s point, however, is that Ries- relapse—he has defeated the highbrowism of man’s more lasting relevance for the shifting an older generation only to suffer a failure of critical climate consisted in the fact that below nerve vis-à-vis the new cultural practices of its more iconic declension story, the Lonely the young. But how do we get from Hoggart’s Crowd celebrated “the possibilities presented limited breakthrough to a fuller af rmation by consumption unfettered by the constraints of consuming pleasures? Horowitz suggests a of moralism or scarcity” (127). For example, number of avenues: the rst is a “shift from Horowitz suggests that Riesman anticipated the views of culture that relied on literary the counterculture of the 1960s by consider - criticism to those informed by anthropology ing sexuality as the other-directed personal- and sociology” (235). Horowitz represents ity’s “last frontier” against apathy (130). this shift with reference to Stuart Hall’s and A second stage in the evolving sense of pop- Paddy Whannel’s The Popular Arts (1964), a ular culture during the 1950s that Consuming work that demonstrates that the younger gen - Pleasures brings to the fore emerges with the eration of the Birmingham school was more publication of Richard Hoggart’s literary eth- at home than Hoggart with popular music nography The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of and lm, and Herbert Gans’s rejection of the Working-Class Life (1957), which Horowitz high-low distinction (in a mid-1960s essay characterizes as a game-changing event in the that later crystallized into Popular Culture formation of cultural studies. Hoggart had and High Culture , 1974) and reappraisal of been schooled within an Arnoldian-Leavisite lower-middle-class suburbia (for example, critical tradition that stressed literature’s rel - in The Levittowners , 1967). A second thread evance for the cultivation of society’s cultural Horowitz pursues is the incorporation of con - health. As a ‘scholarship boy’ who grew up in sumer culture by an international art world, humble circumstances and worked for years in which he associates with the rise of Pop Art adult education, he fashioned a warm-hearted in the United States and the writings and ex - ethnography of working-class culture that hibitions of the Independent Group of artists countered the Leavisite condescension to- in Britain (Richard Hamilton, for example, wards lay readers and popular literature. Hog- whose iconic 1956 collage of modern consum - gart’s book was path-breaking for the cultural er items, entitled “Just what is it that makes studies movement because it used the tools of today’s homes so different, so appealing?,” Leavisite literary analysis to praise the vigor, serves as Horowitz’s book cover). A third line beauty, and organic communitarianism of of development includes Tom Wolfe’s celebra - working-class lived experience. But Hoggart tion of lower-class pastimes such as stock car also remained committed to a more tradition- racing ( The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake al project of culture critique: he distinguished, Streamline Baby , 1965) and Denise Scott as Horowitz puts it, “between commercial Brown and Robert Venturi’s embrace of the culture that was good, because its authen- neon culture of Las Vegas ( Learning from Las ticity rested on its connection to the work- Vegas , 1972). Wolfe and Venturi exemplify for ing class, and that which was not, because it Horowitz the cultural establishment’s growing was imposed by capitalism” (181). Unable to fascination with styles of consumer bricolage transcend the limits of his subjective taste, or coming from below. his affective relation to his own social back- As one may gather from the juxtaposition ground, Hoggart drew up “a dramatic and of Tom Wolfe and Herbert Gans, Horowitz’s depressing contrast between a vibrant British line-up of authors seems less inevitable as we move through the second half of his book. 1 David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd Why, for instance, should Susan Sontag’s ca - (New Haven: Yale UP, 1950): 26; emphasis in reer be representative of what Horowitz calls orig. the rise of “Sexuality and a New Sensibility”

(306)? Is his in-depth discussion of Haber- us. As opposed to the more detached anthro- mas’s early journalism rooted in anything pological or cultural-history survey of higher deeper than the serendipity of archival visits? and lower taste cultures (which in Horowitz’s And where are the more iconic protagonists book is represented by the studies of Her- of the postmodernism and counterculture de- bert Gans), the logic of critique implies the bates (Leslie Fielder, say, or the Beats)? Still, sort of emphatic engagement with aesthetic Horowitz’s intellectual biographies do illumi- forms that inevitably produces a felt division nate and complicate the larger trajectory that between higher and lower cultural objects. separates the 1950s mass culture debate from Surely Hoggart’s acute sense that the newer the 1970s celebration of lifestyle consump- lifestyles are culturally empty follows a gen - tion, and even his more remote selections erational shift of sensibilities and practices (his discussion of Eco’s and Barthes’s 1950s that would seem hardly speci c to Birming- journalism, for example) produce interesting ham or the 1950s. The dilemma that contin- and sometimes surprising insights. Horowitz’s ues to haunt the genre of cultural critique is careful evasion of the decline or liberation this: the more we apply our aesthetico-moral narratives that structure these debates is help- sensibilities to evaluate a ‘scene’ of cultural ful and refreshing. production, the harder it is for us realistically One of the more intriguing dimensions of to gauge how much of our nausea or rapture generational succession that Consuming Plea- is at all relevant beyond our most immediate sures invokes is whether Hoggart’s dilemma is community of practice. not so much a failure of nerve as a structural problem of cultural critique that is still with Heidelberg Günter Leypoldt