The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture (review)

Popular culture is uniquely compelling in that it represents a reflective exaggeration of the dissonance between consumption and reception. The culture consumer is often characterized as highly invested in how popular art is portrayed while reacting with simultaneous fickleness about a product's legacy. The stream of cultural information is disseminated at such a rapid rate that one's attention to a particular representation of popular art rarely lasts more than one musical album, television season, or project. Fan culture reflects an anomaly to this tendency, but the average individual does not embrace popular culture as a whole. The "fan" often picks a few products at a time over which to obsess, while literally thousands of other cultural products pass by unnoticed.

Horkheimer and Adorno worried that such a perpetual stream of information had the ability to relativize one's judgment by providing a magnitude of fundamentally similar products. They argue that culture industries serve to limit alternative possibilities for thought by creating ubiquitous media that propagate the division of labor. If one finds glorified representations of one's fundamental experience throughout the day—even in recreation—one is no longer provided with the tools to question possibilities for change. The culture industries provide an expanse of the division of labor to the point where social conditions appear natural, even ideal. When patterns of resistance may arise, the culture industries reappropriate those modalities into the fold of capitalist consciousness. Such pockets of resistance are thus neutralized and relativized by not seeming like resistance at all; instead, they are just one of the many heads of the hydra of capitalist production. Horkheimer and Adorno provide a brilliant but centrally pessimistic view of popular art as a cog within the production of class consciousness. Their assessment of what they consider to be culture industry representations thus follow negatively, disproportionately so, and one could argue that their textual readings approach popular art from a structurally limited accusatory perspective. Their straw man examples may be thought of as caricatures more than accurate readings.

Henry Jenkins may be seen as a modern counterpoint to the traditional culture industry argument. Against historically dismissive academic circles he has provided an important intervention to approach questions of popular culture and fan culture as real material practices worthy of examination. Jenkins is not swayed from providing a close reading of popular art texts by, for instance, the suspicion that it may play a transient role in the perpetuation of class antagonism. In fact, Jenkins is predominantly cheerful about the effect of popular art upon the emotions in his new book The Wow Climax. Rather than attempting to subjugate popular culture into a lesser art used to control mass sentiments, Jenkins endeavors to understand the conditions in which aesthetic messages are produced and which emotions popular art wishes to give voice to. The book is less interested with defining a theory of emotions in relation to popular culture than acknowledging that the emotional reactions evoked by popular art are as worthy of investigation as, for instance, quantitative studies on television viewing habits. In order to provide his account he first makes a basic distinction between popular art and popular culture. For the purposes of the book, popular art is defined as a product disseminated to those at large and is further transferred into popular culture through interpretation and identification, resulting in fan culture.

The Wow Climax is broken into three sections, each giving voice to distinct arguments about emotions. Section 1 investigates the "Lively Arts" of video games and Matthew Barney's avant-garde reinterpretation of horror movie imagery. Beginning with the influence of Gilbert Seldes's writing on popular aesthetics, Jenkins contends that an aesthetic language of popular culture must emphasize the energy that goes into popular art attunement. Although popular art is widely consumed, it is still usually associated with lower arts. However, Seldes argued that it is the very transient nature of popular art that provides new energy to...