Enzensberger on Mass Culture/ A Review Essay

STANLEY ARONOWITZ ENZENSBERGER ON MASS CULTURE/ A REVIEW ESSAY1 America may be the scene of the emergence of mass culture as both a determinant and fundamental component of social consciousness, but Americans stUl have a curious aversion to admitting it. Mainstream and radical sociologists rarely study mass culture in terms of its larger social and political implications. Instead studies of such institutions as organized sports, electronic media, fashion and popular music are subsumed under microsocial categories such as communications theory or special areas of sociology where the focus is on the structure of information, forms of interpersonal interaction or questions of organization theory, areas of study that are often viewed in themselves rather than in terms of their historical context. Or, television in particular is examined for its effects on specific aspects of social behavior. The past few years have witnessed a plethora of reports, studies, diatribes purporting to show that TV violence contributes to all sorts ofjuvenile UIs ranging from delinquency to the stultification of the capacity for conceptual learning. None of the findings are particularly conclusive or even persuasive, nor does the collective tiieoretical basis depart significantly from the presuppositions of behaviorism. In almost none of the important works in this genre can the reader discover a searching self examination of the behaviorist doctrine itself. Researchers are either unaware of the phUosophical tenets from which their investigation departs, or regard them as so self-evident as to preclude the necessity ofjustification. Thus, by well-known empirical sociological methods, doubtful conclusions are drawn from collections of data that reinforce certain moral codes rather than constitute rigorous research. The study of the artifacts of mass media is generally avoided by most literary critics and cultural theorists, except to show them as degraded forms of high art. Here, the propensity for aversion is justified on the ground that scholars are constrained to choose only those works of art that they like, or alternatively have a mission to employ their critical faculties to defend the great traditions of literature and art in the hope of rescuing these from the tendency of the culture industry to reduce them to banal productions or worse. Film may be the exception to the general rule that mass culture is not regarded as a serious object for literary investigation. But even though the starting point of all film criticism in the past several decades has been the standard Hollywood product, it cannot be claimed that the treatment of the movies as a form of high art is an American discovery. The work of Rudolph Arnheim, Andre Bazin and Sigfried Kracauer was based both upon American ARONOWITZ 91 and continental sources at a time when most American cultural critics were insisting that popular art was not a proper subject matter for aesthetic discourse . Those Americans who ventured forth into this unknown and dangerous territory such as James Agee, Robert Warshow and Pauline Kael were forced to work in the genre of film reviews designed for tourists and suburbanites looking for a night out. It was not until Andrew Sarris and others published die journal Film Culture in the 1950's that criticism found a degree of respectibility. In 1957, Rosenberg and White published a pioneering anthology, Mass Culture, which, with the exceptions of a few essays by Americans , notably Dwight MacDonald's "Mass Cult and Mid Cult," still featured die work of Europeans. What distinguishes French and German literary and sociological theory and criticism in this field from that of our own is the global character of the former. The historical and tiieoretical sweep of the work of Theodore Adorno, Henri Lefevre, and Herbert Marcuse may be attributable in part to the marxian sources of their analysis. But it is also a function of the impact of the use of mass culture by the fascists and eastern European countries in the 1 930's and 40's that has propelled a consideration of tiie relationship between mass culture and social consciousness. In contrast, Americans treat these issues in somewhat parochial terms when they are not subsumed by purely aesthetic considerations, and often dismissed on those grounds. Americans rarely seem to feel the need to discuss die questions of...