Page 139 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

commodity-based capitalist culture as being inauthentic, manipulative and
unsatisfying.This inauthentic mass culture is contrasted to the authenticity claimed
for high culture (as well as to an imagined people’s culture). In this context high
116 culture is understood to be the peak of civilization and the concern of an educated
minority. Further, both the authentic culture of the people and the minority culture
of the educated elite are said to have been lost to the standardization processes of
industrialized ‘mass culture’.
For traditional cultural and literary criticism the romantic idea of the ‘artistic
object’, produced by the ‘artistic soul’, is allied to a sense of the complexity and
authenticity of the work of art. It is argued that the quality work is distinctive in the
subtlety, complexity and adequacy of its formal expression of content. This in turn
requires the necessary skills and work by readers in order to access a genuine
aesthetic experience. By contrast, mass culture is seen as superficial and unsatisfying
as a consequence of both its formal inadequacy and its production by capitalist
corporations seeking to maximize their profits by selling to the lowest common
denominator. Thus, ‘mass culture’ is held to be inauthentic because it is not
produced by ‘the people’, manipulative because its primary purpose is to be
purchased and unsatisfying because it requires little work to consume and thus fails
to enrich its consumers.
These are the views of conservative critics like F.R. Leavis but they are not
dissimilar from those of the Marxist-inspired Frankfurt School on this issue. Thus,
Adorno and Horkheimer coined the term ‘the culture industry’ to suggest that
culture is now a production of capitalist corporations who produce commodities
that purport to be democratic, individualistic and diversified, but are in actuality
authoritarian, conformist and highly standardized. Thus mass culture is mass
deception. This involves not just ‘meanings’ but the structuring of the human
psyche into the conformist ways of the ‘authoritarian personality’.
On the whole, cultural studies has argued against seeing culture as ‘mass culture’
and has adopted the more sympathetic concept of ‘popular culture’. This is in part
because the judgements of quality on which the idea of mass culture is founded are
derived from an institutionalized and class-based hierarchy of cultural taste. Indeed,
judgements about aesthetic quality are always open to contestation so that universal
evaluations are not sustainable. The concepts of beauty, harmony, form and quality
can be applied as much to a machine as to a novel or a painting and are thus
culturally relative. Elite cultural critics have commonly by-passed popular cultural
forms for social as much as ‘creative’ reasons.
Rather than be in the business of aesthetic judgement, cultural studies has
tended to develop arguments that revolve around the social and political
consequences of constructing and disseminating specific discursive constructions
of the world. Nevertheless, the relativity of ‘value’ within cultural studies leads to
a dilemma. On the one hand, there is a desire to legitimize popular and non-
Western culture as valuable in the face of a traditional Western high cultural
aesthetic disdain. On the other hand, there is a reluctance to sanction a position in
which we are disbarred from making judgements about the products of the culture
industries. Of course, cultural studies does make value judgements about cultural