Editor's Introduction
- Spectacular Vernacular: Literacy and Commercial Culture in the Postmodern Age
The controversy over postmodernism is often focused on the impact of consumer culture upon language. In this article, the historical relationship between commerce, language, and communication technology is explored. The struggle between mass and elite over the forms of literacy is outlined, raising questions about the sources of critical hostility toward postmodern culture. The author offers an alternative viewpoint, in which postmodern expression integrates words, pictures, and sound in a manner that is multidimensional, accessible, and communal.
Scott, Linda M. (1993), “Spectacular Vernacular: Literacy and Commercial Culture in the Postmodern Age,” International Journal of Research in Marketing, 10 (June), 251–275. Reprinted with permission from Elsevier.
Introduction
Much of the postmodernism controversy centers on the impact of a globalizing consumer culture upon language. Together, the drive to commoditization and the influence of commercially supported communications technologies seem to have irrevocably affected the means and manner of human signification. The culture of spectacle that results from the lavish imagery and wide reach of mass media is criticized as having subverted literate culture. The impact upon knowledge and aesthetics, and, therefore, upon meaning in the postmodern age is cast as profoundly devastating. We are left with a bleak picture in which humankind is estranged from knowledge, plunged into meaningless gesturing, reduced to chasing an obscene array of consumer goods that is the only remaining site of apparent value (Baudrillard, 1988; Debord, 1977; Featherstone, 1991; Firat, 1991, 1992; Gitlin, 1989a, 1989b; Hassan, 1980; Jameson, 1983; Lyotard, 1984; Venkatesh, 1989).
My purpose is to examine the historical relationship between commercial culture, language, and communication technology with an eye to explaining salient characteristics of postmodern gestures. Clearly, this is an enormous topic for an article-length discussion. Therefore, my strategy will be simply to sketch certain past trajectories, while questioning current criticisms and suggesting alternative explanations.
Looking More Closely at the Spectacle
The language of postmodernism is said to be constituted of images (Boorstin, 1975; Debord, 1977; McRobbie, 1986). Several peculiarities of Western thought on images and popular culture imbue this declaration with urgency. One is the longstanding mistrust of spectacle: circuses, pageants, masques, carnivals, and other forms of popular expression that meld sensuality, disorder, and display. Historically, the intellectual elite has viewed spectacle with contempt and alarm. This attitude has been brought directly into the twentieth century discussion of mass media, dressed variously in contemporary theorizing, but sharing an antidemocratic orientation toward “low” cultural forms (Brantlinger, 1983). Although actual spectacle has always employed picturing, speaking, music, and dramaturgy, critics consistently reduce spectacle to an all-encompassing synecdoche: the image (especially Boorstin, 1975; Debord, 1977). Letting “the image” stand for popular expression in postmodernity allows the critique to meet neatly with another Western prejudice, the mistrust of pictures. Because the impetus of Western visual art until this century has focused upon the development of conventions that represent observed reality (Gombrich, 1960), there has been a tendency from Plato to the present to view picturing as illusionistic—as seductive, but false representations of the observed world. This attitude, along with a more primitive, but equally consistent belief in the magical properties of images as effigies, icons, and the like (Freedberg, 1989), ultimately packs pictures with a powerful punch: visual artifacts become both false and dangerous. The resulting fear of figures has insinuated itself into intellectual life to a degree so pervasive it is nearly invisible, but is nevertheless a driving force in cultural critique (Mitchell, 1986; Morris, 1989).
Deriding figuration serves an ideological imperative, as well. To the extent that pictures can be set apart and made opposite to words, the culture of the text gains automatic ascendancy. “Here resides a kind of iconophobia, the desire to operate outside image-making in order to totalize, rank, and control the icon. But beneath this assumed rationality lies coiled a disguised rhetoric of domination and exclusion. There has always been a deep mutual mistrust between the iconic and the textual as they infiltrated one another’s borders” (Morris, 1989, p. 340). Western intellectual history has elevated and reified the written word until it is often made synonymous with all that is worthy in...
