Reconstruction 6.2 (Spring 2006)
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Chris Lehmann. Revolt of the Masscult. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. 79 pp. Softcover. $10.00. ISBN: 0971757577
<1> The good folks at Prickly Paradigm are certainly doing their job. Their stated objective is “publishing challenging and sometimes outrageous pamphlets,” and Lehmann's short piece fulfills this claim brilliantly, evoking intellectual mood swings that span from shouting for joy at a particularly lucid formulation to shouting angrily at the deftness with which Lehmann transforms his lucidity into suspiciously wrongheaded and reactionary assessments. The clinical bipolarity of this work, as we will see, is no coincidence: it is precisely the political entanglement of the subject of mass culture (“masscult”) that leads to both respect for one's opponents and suspicion of one's allies. This process is, of course, a profoundly useful one.
<2> Lehmann's subject is the recent recasting of the idea of mass culture as taboo. In recent decades, the phrase “mass culture” went from representing a positivistic statement of fact meant to describe a contested but contestable reality, to a phrase that even by its invocation – i.e. by the suggestion that such a thing as mass culture exists – touches such a public-cultural nerve in the United States that it has become essentially uncontestable. How is it possible for a public rage that one would expect to be reserved for “enemy combatants” and “sex offenders” to be deployed against those who would invoke a category as traditional and seemingly-benign as “mass culture”? Why does the idea – that something might have been lost on an aesthetic level in the transition from high modernism to an era marked by the massification and serialization of aesthetic experience itself – evoke such a shrill response?
<3> Lehmann cuts admirably through what would otherwise be a significant semantic tangle by adopting a straightforward definition: “mass culture is, above all, the culture of market prerogative, blotting out almost all elements of individual taste with prefigured consensus” (2). This simplistic definition allows the – patently true – assertion that the masscult is present and ubiquitous, regardless of efforts to repress the idea through overbearing consensus. However, Lehmann's definition remains admittedly at a distance from what has come to prevail in discussions of mass culture, although this distance is maintained not through the redefinition of mass culture, but rather through the elision of its very existence as a concept. This “depressing complex” which “continue[s] to bear all of mass culture's defining traits: ... formal imitation ... formulaic stereotypes ... instant stimulation ... [and] one-dimensional emotional responses” has been dramatically re-labeled as “popular” culture. The political and ideological import of this shift is evident: what once represented the harbinger of an impending nightmare for mid-century cultural theorists has come to be both positively valorized (as a freely chosen state of affairs) and fully naturalized and indeed ontologized: “Mass culture is culture; all culture is popular” (3).
<4> Sitting in perceived opposition to the popular, Lehmann finds a curious prevalence of what he deems “elitism without elites,” that is, of a variegated and amorphous perception of elite conspiracy which allows all sides of the cultural milieu to claim to be on the side of the masses, thereby producing “oddly interlocking precepts of cultural posturing” such as the simultaneous populist claims of both cultural traditionalists and postmodernists (8). Conspiracy theories, it has long been argued, facilitate immobilization and passive deference to the status quo, and Lehmann sees much the same operating in the hegemonic (if merely nominal) anti-elitism operating in the United States, as the simultaneous deployment of populist rhetoric by all sides leaves market forces untouched.
<5> It is through this framework that we are introduced to Lehmann's central example: the insanity of the debate surrounding novelist Jonathan Franzen's perceived slight against the queen of all things cultural, Oprah Winfrey. After having been selected for Oprah's Book Club, Franzen evidently expressed some second thoughts, which took the precise form of, firstly, a display of indie-rock authenticity (“Now that I've signed a big label deal ... how good could I be?”), and secondly, a derisive dismissal of that very same sort of authenticity claim (as a “perverse” and “fetishistic response to the obliterative ubiquity of buying in our lives”) (9-10). Franzen, then, quite rightly debunks both the role of the market as universal arbiter of taste and his own knee-jerk reaction which would elevate a notion of authenticity in place of the market. This bears emphasizing, given the way (well illustrated by Lehmann) that the controversy got out of hand.
<6> Despite the very reasonable-sounding misgivings expressed by Franzen, he was transformed overnight into the whipping-boy of amorphous anti-elitists of all stripes: “From what one might make out of the next several months of media coverage, however, it was as thought Franzen had donned a high waistcoat and periwig and loudly professed himself a loyal subject of the Queen” (11). Franzen was now a “hateful snob,” and Oprah was on the side of the people (12). But Lehmann's point about the market would remain a mere assertion (however correct) if his observations regarding the controversy were culled only from other cultural producers (e.g. from the New York Times, from fellow writer Andre Dubus III, or from Oprah herself).
<7> Very much to his credit, then, Lehmann places special emphasis on the response to the controversy by “the publishing industry proper, which lives and dies by blockbuster marketing strategies and so of necessity must regard Ms. Winfrey as nothing less than a secular saint” (14). These range from the shouting-down of any expressions of sympathy for Franzen, to the beatification of Oprah for encouraging the reading of literature, and to the blunt statement that “I'd like to punch the motherfucker” (14-15). What is crucial here is less the unenviable position in which Franzen found himself – an oddly-anachronistic novelist hated by the publishing industry on which he depends – but rather the manner in which the border between culture and industry are so fully blurred that cultural valorization and capitalist valorization effectively overlap. To “sin against the market” leaves one open to a frontal attack on the cultural battlefield, and Lehmann deploys the explicitly elitist and offensive statements of Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, which went largely unchallenged, to prove this point admirably (17-18).
<8> Lehmann's inversion of this equation (i.e. of Oprah with the popular sector) is as clever as it is stylish, as he reveals the way in which publishers, as “cultural gatekeepers,” collude in the cultivation of an image of Oprah as a sort of Maoist Maximum Leader for the new cultural revolution. This publisher's sleight-of-hand takes the form of a substantive elitism that dwarfs in importance and influence any indie-rock authenticity claim: such collusion crafts the “arch and condescending myth that Oprah, Mighty Oprah, by herself has bestowed blessed literacy upon the millions condemned to the outer darkness in the benighted American heartland” (16). The response by the industry to Oprah's cancellation of the Book Club shortly after the controversy is equally enlightening, as a representative of Publisher's Weekly – in a bout of what Lehmann would deem “Oprah-centric revisionism at its most thuggish” – argued “I really do blame Jonathan Franzen; but then anyone who has ever sniffed at one of her selections or whined about the Oprah sticker or any other such nonsense is also complicit” (77). This “oddly inquisitorial” tone, in which “criticism was now cognate with ill-specified thought-crimes,” is all the more striking when someone reveals it for what it is: market imperative in cultural clothing.
<9> As a counterpoint to the present state of ostensibly anti-elitist cultural hysteria, Lehmann defends a similarly-maligned figure: post-war cultural critic Dwight Macdonald. While attacked as a traditionalist and elitist, Macdonald's position was in fact a more subtle defense of treating one's audience as hypothetical equals, an enterprise which entailed criticism of both the right and the left, of “both the businessmen of Hollywood and the revolutionaries of the Universities and Left Review” (21). Macdonald would defend a notion of aesthetic autonomy, but his defense would be a far cry from art-for-art's-sake, taking instead the form of a disguised instrumentalism: “By recognizing culture as an autonomous realm ... we don't sunder the substance of cultural distinction from democratic politics. Rather, we furnish ourselves with the means to judge the experiential payoffs of formal democracy as it takes on the characteristics of a mass society” (21-22). The autonomy of art is not posed in opposition to (formal) democracy, but rather as its necessary counterpart.
<10> A central concern for both Macdonald and Lehmann is the possibility that eliminating “high” culture might “rupture the ordinary citizen's most basic sense of historical continuity” (22). Camp and kitsch are then shown, in a familiar manner, to be effectively complicit in simultaneously maintaining the forgetfulness necessary for the market and the comfortable familiarity required for its stable reproduction (see also 45-46). He strengthens his critique of the market through a demonstration of the interlocking character of mass culture and the capitalist work-day, thereby inadvertently invoking something like the early Régulation School's characterization of Fordist production as relying on a “consumption norm” (see, e.g., Aglietta, 1979). However, at this point Lehmann takes a strange turn, arguing that “the culprit responsible for our pitiable state of cultural amnesia” is neither capitalism nor communism, but rather “a creeping cultural populism ... a paint-by-numbers functionalist view of culture” in which mass culture is “deemed not merely a healthy adjunct force in American democracy, but the functional substitute for American democracy” (27-28).
<11> After issuing stinging critiques of those – like Edward Shils and Herbert Gans – for whom mass culture is a priori democratic (and indeed patriotic), and who, for example, highlight the housewife's self-actualization through home decoration (aided, of course, by housekeeping magazines), Lehmann rightly points out the role of advertising in such cultural vehicles as Good Housekeeping (36-37). We return, of course to Oprah, and here Lehmann's reversal is the same: emphasis on housekeeping magazines, while purportedly democratic through its mass character, relies instead on the presumption that such magazines are necessary for self-actualization: “the cringing American housewife is to be tutored in the barest rudiments of décor self-expression from the taste combines of Better Homes and Gardens and Redbook – underwritten by Johnson and Johnson and Colgate-Palmolive. She has to start somewhere, the poor dear” (37-38). By adopting the “heroic posture of redeeming the market choices of ordinary Americans,” such theorists reveal their own “inadvertent condescension toward the masses” (38). We agree, yes, but aren't we back to the market? Doesn't his critique of the erasure of class discourse (69) represent an inverse affirmation of the importance of the latter? While Lehmann had attempted to grant causal power to “cultural populism,” he has effectively shown that the latter remains fully inscribed within market imperatives. After all, Good Housekeeping relies on advertising revenue, not valorization by nominally “populist” cultural theorists. We will return later to Lehmann's ill-fated attempt to separate capitalism from the market.
<12> Lehmann comes to define culture through its negative coordinates, as what it is not: “(comparatively) uncoerced creative enterprises over and above the more forceful, less affective and most decidedly uncritical dispensations of the state, the corporations, and the market” (42). As we will see, Lehmann's parenthetical weakening of his own understanding of culture is telling. Moreover, he adds a crucial distinction: “the division of cultural hierarchies has always been different from the more fine-grained calibrations of taste. Taste moves independently through cultural hierarchy” (57). He seeks to revive a notion of taste from its current role as signifier of stuffy elitism, in which “judgments of taste are usually invoked only for the sake of their formulaic flouting of them as repressive, outmoded elitist tools of domination” (71). But this distinction serves as a segue into Lehmann's valorization of aesthetic autonomy, and we are certainly justified in interrogating the latter.
<13> In closing, it is worth laying out two related but distinct concerns with Lehmann's conclusions, the first having to do with an overly limited view of aesthetic theory and the way in which such a limited view constrains our horizon for action, and the second having to do with mapping Lehmann's framework too uncritically with regard to socio-economic difference and radical possibilities. Regarding the first, Lehmann runs into trouble when he claims that “it is, in truth, a far more democratic impulse to insist on cultural distinctions, taste judgments and the autonomy of culture from market forces” (17). The problem here, of course, is the manner in which he frames the opposition: while we are justified in worrying about the influence of the market, this worry does not automatically lead to a facile opposition between the latter and autonomous art. To make such a statement is to appeal to high modernism as the only, and indeed the most “democratic” alternative to the present state of affairs, which effectively ignores the fact that both aesthetic autonomy and the market contain inherently undemocratic tendencies.
<14> Lehmann's error runs parallel to those of many observers of modernism, in that the latter is portrayed as monolithic and univocal, and correcting this error allows us to slip out of Lehmann's naïve binary. Modernism is too often conflated with art-for-art's-sake aesthetic autonomy, with the effect of erasing the most radical elements of the modernist avant-garde. “High” modernism – a perhaps insufficient shorthand for the more anti-democratic and elitist elements of modernism – contains the negative faces of ostensibly positive aesthetic developments: aesthetic self-reflexiveness becomes “an hermetic and aristocratic mystique of creativity”; juxtaposition and montage yield “manipulative advertising and political propaganda, while the cult of novelty ... degenerate[s] into a worship of changing fashions”; paradox and uncertainty are “heightened to the point of apparent irresolution”; and the demise of the individual, ironically, transforms into a cult of the artist (Lunn, 34-37). Lehmann's conflation of “high” art with the avant-garde is fairly open (on, e.g. 32, 63), and its political implications are significant.
<15> In opposition to this “high” strand of modernism that is so often mistaken for Modernism itself, a branch of the radical avant-garde – from Cubists to Constructivists to Brechtian theater – would take diametrically opposed positions to those outlined above, in which the demise of the individual manifests as an attack on the cult of the artist qua isolated genius, the attack on the cult of creativity and innovation, and through both of these (which together represent an attack on aesthetic autonomy itself), the use of paradox and uncertainty as markers of a world made and re-makeable by humans through radical praxis (Lunn, 119-120). Indeed, one influential theorist defines the avant-garde as precisely this: an attack on art as an institution alongside an attack on the organic totality of the individual work of art (Bürger, 83-84), whose ultimate goal is to “reintegrate art into the praxis of life, reveal[ing] the nexus between autonomy and the absence of any consequences” (22). Hence “engagement” will be central to Bürger's view of the avant-garde, and Brecht emerges as its best example.
<16> Given Lehmann's claims and concerns regarding democracy, we would benefit from laying out precisely what that means. In his defense of the democratic value of cultural autonomy, Lehmann asserts that it is through the latter that “we furnish ourselves with the means to judge the experiential payoffs of formal democracy as it takes on the characteristics of a mass society” (22). Here, we are struck by two things. Firstly, the role of art is surprisingly muted, limited as it is to the role of an observer whose direct political impact depends upon the proper functioning of the very formal democracy that it is meant to be judging. That is to say, we are left with an understanding of culture that is either blandly apolitical, or – as seems to be more in line with Lehmann's intent – an understanding in which culture is (naïvely) presumed to have a political importance, but one which rests on a contradictory reliance on the object of its gaze. This latter view yields something of a disconcerting cultural parasitism that severely undermines art's ability to escape the present.
<17> Secondly, we are struck by the fact that, despite its self-affirmed autonomy, culture in Lehmann's view somehow remains “ours” to use despite the fact that we have not made it ourselves. This contradiction is best approached through positing two very different views of aesthetic democracy to emerge in the course of (Marxist) modernism, those of Lukács and Brecht. “Culture was not seen by Lukács as qualitatively redefined by self-determining, collectivist production, but as the passive quantitative distribution of the given traditional literary forms ... Brecht, on the other hand, had very early broken from th[is] patronizing concept ... which merely reinforced the pervasive social training in passive consumption. A modernist insistence upon leaving his dramatic works 'open-ended,' with contradictions to be resolved by an intellectually aroused audience, was related to the most strongly libertarian and radically democratic components of Brecht's complex political makeup” (Lunn, 126). This is, in short, a substantively-democratic view of culture in opposition to one which is merely distributional.
<18> This distinction is infinitely useful when it comes to cutting the Gordian knot of many contemporary approaches to aesthetic theory, bound up as these tend to be with the facile high vs. mass opposition. It allows us to recognize the anti-democratic tendencies inherent in both (but also their liberatory potential), and to confront these properly through the idea of engagement. Much like Benjamin, Brecht would see the radical possibilities inherent in the technological developments that had made mass culture possible, but in doing so he did not uncritically endorse the latter, as do many of the targets of Lehmann's polemic. Rather, Brecht's notion of engagement (at odds with any idea of aesthetic autonomy) serves to vaccinate this guarded optimism against wholesale reincorporation and domestication in the mass cultural market. While Lehmann remains entangled in his erroneous opposition, mourning (in a suspiciously patronizing manner) the masscult's tendency to “rupture the ordinary citizen's most basic sense of historical continuity” (22), a Brechtian response would be one in which this continuity is not taken for granted, but is rather placed back into the hands of those whose responsibility it is to make it.
<19> Lehmann, then, unfortunately recreates the very error that he attacks by appealing to artistic appraisal of the high-modernist type. Much of his polemic is aimed at (correctly) diagnosing the paranoid fear of an amorphous elitism that is used to denounce all those who would critique the masscult, but he then paradoxically endorses the very same sort of entity as a source of artistic valorization. He of course denies this: “standards are not top-down impositions of effete and alien puppetmasters stage-managing the culture's progress” (71). The image he paints of culture, however, is far too rosy to square with reality, as “taste standards are the outcome of – and the ongoing occasion for – public argument” (72). In confusing this normative view with reality, by inexplicably neglecting the fact that such standards are often top-down (and that the market itself often constitutes this “top”), Lehmann effectively unravels his entire critique. After all, what is at the heart of this critique if not a warning against the fetishization of the concrete, an anti-Hegelian warning that what is and what exists is not necessarily ideal or democratic? By retreating to aesthetic autonomy, Lehmann is merely placing judgment into the black box from whence it came, and in doing so he is eliminating the possibility for even his own negative project of excavating the ubiquitous influence of market forces.
<20> A second concern, more brief than the first, is also worth mentioning. While I am clearly very sympathetic to Lehmann's critique of the market, an emphasis on engagement allows us to see that an over-emphasis on the market might tend toward equating the latter with mass culture, thereby facilitating a slide back into the naïve mass vs. high opposition. While market influence is always worthy of mention, my point is that it ought not to serve as an irremediable mark of damnation, and must first be placed into a properly politically-engaged context. I am thinking here of hip-hop culture and rap music, and my worry is that aesthetic categories are all too often uncritically applied to cultural forms whose relation to mainstream society is one marked by political asymmetry. This concern is twofold.
<21> Firstly, rap music disrupts cultural binaries through its very constitution. This is explicitly the case when it comes to distinctions that involve the market, that is, commercial vs. anti-commercial distinctions. The debate over commercialism is particularly relevant in rap, precisely because the latter blurs such boundaries, and in this context, the binary opposite of the commercial emerges as the “underground.” However, the two are far from hermetically-sealed off and separated, and while this might be the case with many art forms, it is accentuated in the case of rap music by the existence of a massive black market for mixtapes. Mixtapes – self-produced compilation CDs which are generally sold on the street for far less than a commercially-produced CD – might seem to epitomize the “underground” were it not for their impact on commercial rap. Indeed, those rap artists who make a big splash in terms of record sales often have a history of widespread underground distribution, as was the case with 50 Cent, who had released dozens of mixtapes prior to being signed to a major label (see, e.g., Reid 2003; Boucher 2003). Mixtapes represent a vital feedback mechanism between the underground and the industry, playing the crucial role of the democratic gadfly, and thereby short-circuiting our facile aesthetic distinctions (I discuss this role of mixtapes elsewhere, see Ciccariello Maher, forthcoming).
<22> Secondly, even if commercial rap were able to be sealed off from the underground, we must be careful not to neglect the way in which this maps onto the aforementioned political asymmetry. The reason for this is simple: black capitalism is not the same as white capitalism, and cannot be dismissed out-of-hand. A black-owned record label (such as, e.g., Jay-Z's Roc-A-Fella Records prior to its sale earlier this year) is not to be judged according to the same criteria as a white-owned record label (such as, e.g., Def Jam/Universal, which bought out Roc-A-Fella) (Muhammad 2005). They simply do not operate on the same political terrain, and this is something that Lehmann misses in his universal condemnation of efforts to find agency in consumption (50-51). Black owned business as a political strategy has a long legacy, marked most indelibly by the do-for-self ideology of the Nation of Islam, which persists heavily in rap music and defies most attempts to categorize the latter. Radically-engaged aesthetics, and radical thought in general, can only move forward by taking such political asymmetries fully into account and recognize their materiality. To overstate the threat posed by the market vis-à-vis other dangers, and thereby to neglect either of the concerns posed here with regard to rap, leads to erroneous (and yet fairly common) celebrations of an underground which is defined by little more than lack of record sales. This represents precisely the sort of indie-rock authenticity claim that Jonathan Franzen meant to parody in his interviews about the Oprah Book Club. When seeking to understand rap and its political import, we would be more advised to follow the lead of someone like Talib Kweli – as genre-defying as rap itself – who insists that “it's not commercial or underground, it's true” (Kweli, 2002).
<23> To be clear: Lehmann's illustration of the Oprah-Franzen affair is a useful one, as is his critique of the market. Peter Bürger critiqued Adorno's tacit acceptance of the distribution apparatus of capitalism, and saw this acceptance as ensuring the domestication of Adorno's ostensibly radical aesthetic theories (83-94). As we have seen, Brecht issued a similar critique of Lukács, and was no doubt the inspiration behind Bürger's comments. My critique of Lehmann lies most fundamentally in a similar move: he offers a critique of the market, but this is strikingly incomplete. While Lehmann attacks intellectuals like Herbert Gans for making intellectuals the enemies of democracy (34), he fails to recognize sufficiently the ease with which those same intellectuals (himself included) can become complicit with the very structure he hopes to reveal: the market.
<24> We will give Lehmann the last word, ending with the phrase with which he ends this frustrating pamphlet, a phrase so laudable in its intentions, but one which unfortunately applies to Lehmann's own valorization of aesthetic autonomy: “Let the culture divide and recombine placidly over our heads; let culture warriors pout, rage, preen and triangulate; let us glory indiscriminately in a market we never made; let a thousand Oprah's bloom. It's lullaby hour in red and blue America” (79).
George Ciccariello Maher
University of California, Berkeley
Works Cited
Aglietta, Michael. A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The U.S. Experience. London: New Left Books, 1979.
Boucher, Geoff. “The Freshest Spin.” Los Angeles Times. Page E1. 20 April 2003.
Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde (M. Shaw, Trans.). Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Ciccariello Maher, George. “Brechtian Hip-Hop: Didactics and Self-Production in Post-Gangsta Political Mixtapes.” Journal of Black Studies. Forthcoming.
Kweli, Talib. “Good to You.” Quality [CD]. New York: Rawkus Records, 2002.
Lunn, Eugene. Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
Muhammad, Cedric. “Hip Hop Fridays: Dame Dash Stands on a R.O.C.” BlackElectorate.com.. 28 June 2005. <http://www.blackelectorate.com/articles.asp?ID=1293.>
Reid, Shaheem. “Mixtapes: The Other Music Industry.” MTV News Online. 28 June 2005. <http://www.mtv.com/bands/m/mixtape/news_feature_021003/index.jhtml>