The stratification of media products

5.5 The stratification of media products

In 1933, when Hitler came to power, a group of German intellectuals known as the Frankfurt School opposed the new regime and attempted to explain the Fascists’ success by concentrating on the nature and effects of the mass media. They observed that the press, radio, films, comics and popular music were endorsing the influence of the family, which they felt nurtured the idea of the ‘authoritarian‘ personality from which fascism arose. It was their view that the mass media strengthened the habits and attitudes that made people susceptible to fascist arguments. When some members of the School emigrated to the United States as refugees from the Nazis, their views on the effects of the media were confirmed. To them, American mass culture appeared to be a corrupting influence that was undermining the elite and superior cultural tradition of Europe. ‘What was worse’, Seaton explains, was that they believed ‘mass culture produced precisely the kinds of personality

trait that made the population vulnerable to fascist domination’ 5 . The Frankfurt School felt that the conditions in the USA were conducive to it

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turning to fascism. The attitude of European intellectuals towards the products of the popular mass media in the United States was one of contempt and suspicion. This response was expressed by the literary critic, F.

R. Leavis, who, in an essay called Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture, said 6 :

The prospects of culture then are very dark. There is less room for hope, in that a standardised civilisation is rapidly enveloping the world.

Leavis’ attitude to American culture was formed largely by reading the book Middletown by Robert and Helen Lynd, which pointed out many of the effects of American mass culture upon society. They singled out the isolation of the individual and social fragmentation as two of the main effects. Two leaders of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, were prime movers in dismissing what was modern, mass and American. It was, they thought, the failure of liberalism that had created an individualism that was corrupt and selfish, and that the mass media had played a major role in this process by the vulgarising of societies’ culture. For the Frankfurt School, the function of the media was seen as aiding capitalism by influencing and controlling the public. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkhiemer believed that a ‘culture industry’ had been created that had lost its capacity to nurture true freedom and individuality, and that it was producing safe, standardised products geared to the requirements of the capitalist economy. The products of this industry (Hollywood movies, radio, mass-produced journalism and advertising) were only different at the most superficial level. The views of Adorno and Hockheimer were reflected by Leavis when he suggested a form of literary studies, later known as Leavisism, which re- disseminated what is now commonly called cultural capital, a term coined by Pierre Bourdieu. What Leavis advocated was an educational system based on the best examples of literature. He argued for the strict canon of work, which excluded modern experimental work and celebrated the great tradition of English literature – for example, Jane Austen, Alexander Pope and George Eliot. Leavis said that literature was not simply a leisure activity, reading works of a great tradition, but was a way of installing a concrete and balanced sense of life. Leavis and Adorno both believed that mass culture was the main threat to this sense of life. Leavisism was in tune with the social democratic power block, the predominant post-war British political stance of government. Intervention in the private sector both socially (health and housing) and culturally (education and the arts), and the expansion of the educational system in the 1950s and 1960s, was largely based on the Leavisite view of forming citizens and their sensibilities. Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams approached the Leavisite attitude with ambivalence; they were both from working-class backgrounds and educated in the ways of the

Mass media theory

dominant high culture. They accepted the concept of the canonical text as being superior to that of the so-called mass culture. However, they saw that Leavisism erased, or at the very least did not come into contact with, the communal background from which they had come. Hoggart’s book The Uses of Literacy demonstrates his schizophrenia towards Leavisism. The first part extols the values of his boyhood culture, and the second is a critical attack on mass culture. Hoggart believed that both high and low culture could exist alongside each other because they both stood apart from temporary commercial culture, and therefore were both under threat. In his article Culture is Ordinary , published in 1958, Williams draws our attention to the nature of the concept of culture. He says: ‘There are two senses of culture; there are two colours attached to it.’ He observes the ‘teashop culture’,

where he says 7 :

Here is a culture not in any sense I knew but in a special sense the outward emphatically visible sign of a special kind of people, cultivated people. They were not, the great majority of them, particularly learned, they practised few arts, but they had it and showed you they had it. They are still there I suppose, still showing it though even they must be hearing rude noises from outside from a few scholars and writers that they call, how comforting a label it is, angry young men. As a matter of fact there is no need to be rude; it is simply that if that is culture, we don’t want it, we have seen other people living.

He is critical of the fussiness of this teashop culture, their trivial differences of behaviour, their trivial variations of speech habit. He is critical of those who, like him, would dislike the teashop culture, but would in turn pacify and categorise culture and bar it from ordinary people and ordinary work. He extols the culture of his boyhood home: ‘I know from the most ordinary

experience that there is interest there, the capacity is there’ 7 . For him, that old social organisation in which these things had their place has been broken. He says: ‘Culture is ordinary through every change, let us hold on

to that’ 7 . The other sense of colour of the word ‘culture’ he associates with the only words that he says rhyme with it, sepulchre and vulture. A sepulchre is the act of burying the dead in a special place for the dead, and of course a vulture is a carnivorous scavenging bird. Culture is ordinary, and interest in learning or the arts is simple, pleasant and natural; a desire to know what is best and to do what is good is the whole positive nature of man. While at Cambridge, Williams was influenced by two things; Leavisism and Marxism. Marxism informed him that a culture must be finely interpreted in relation to its underlying system of production, that a culture is a whole way of life and the arts are part of a social organisation which

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economic change clearly affects. It was self-evident that most of the English working class was excluded from the powerful bourgeois English culture, although the doors were slowly opening. However, to say that the English

working class is excluded from English culture is nonsense. He said 8 :

They have their own growing institutions, a great deal of English cultural institutions and common meanings are in no sense the sole product of the commercial middle class.

Williams rejects the Marxist perspective element of culture; the advocacy of a different system of production is in some way a cultural directive. He says 9 :

There was an old, mainly agricultural England, with a traditional culture of great value. This has been replaced by a modern, organised industrial state whose characteristic institutions deliberately cheapen our natural human responses, making art and literature into desperate survivors and witnesses while a new mechanised vulgarity sweeps into the centres of powers.

He says in true social democratic vein: ‘The only defence is education’ 9 . Williams questions the elitist view of the failure of progress, which he points out has released the working classes by offering them choice. Contrasted with the Frankfurt School’s perception of the mass media, Williams’ is a view that states that there is nothing fundamentally in the structure or character of high culture that distinguishes it from popular or low culture, or vice versa. If this is held to be true, then it is also important to understand that there are likely to be economic, political and historical motifs that operate to establish a society’s sense of that distinction. The belief underpinning this idea is that television tends to blur the boundaries between high, popular and working-class culture through ‘flow’. This theory, developed in the 1970s, suggested that the very nature of television makes it difficult for most viewers to select their viewing and restrict themselves to particular programmes. If setting out to explain the grammar or form that television takes, it would be imperative from the beginning to suggest that its prime component is not the single programme, but the much larger sequence of which that programme is part, and which is a much more complex presentation altogether for the viewer to relate to. It was also felt that the problem encountered of not switching off the television set when a programme had finished had produced a drug-like effect in the audience. Raymond Williams argued that it was better to perceive the real unit of television to be the ‘flow’ of an evening’s programmes, rather than the single programme unit. The form of an evenings viewing is therefore not the one imposed on the audience by the programme planners, but one of accidental

Mass media theory

positioning of items in the sequence produced by the pattern of flow on each channel, and the viewers’ selection from that flow. It was also suggested that the audience for programmes made up of essentially working-class material (programmes with their roots in the music halls and working man’s club tradition and sporting events) did not draw their audiences exclusively from the working class. One effect of television was to make uncertain the boundaries between high, popular and working-class cultural objects. It was also proposed that if television could change working-class cultural material into popular culture, then the object of popular culture could be elevated by television to the status of high culture. In the post-war period this theory was applied to movies, notably those featuring Bogart, Chaplin, the Marx Brothers et al. These films became worthy of discussion and debate as art objects, and became the material of retrospective examinations of the work of a particular director or actor. However, the blurring of the boundaries between high and popular cultural object does not always have obvious stages. Raymond Williams cites television drama as one of the main elements in this process. Most people have access to high cultural drama through television. It has also been pointed out that, although the mass audience encounters drama through television as though it were an intrinsic aspect of day-to-day life, it is a particular sort of drama that they are presented with. The major part of the material they watch in the form of series, police adventure series, soap operas, situation comedies etc. is significantly naturalistic in style and content. The relationship between these programmes and the realistic novel (often in its most naive and popular form) is felt to have been a major factor in television’s failure to develop its own intrinsic televisual form. The process of change was not only upwards; the blurring of the demarcation between the three strata of culture could be directed to the transition of high to working class and vice versa. This process of television changing the status of cultural material must be seen in the context of a larger historical process. In this process, one class and its interests ultimately prove to be the controlling factor in the cultural domination of the mass media. Television in particular has been prone to this process. In its early years it was undoubtedly influenced by middle-class values, which resulted in an overall process of ‘bourgeoisification’ of its material. It has been said of television during this period that if it was a window on the world, then the windowpane has a particular middle-class tint. Williams elaborates this point when he states that the British early experience of becoming an industrialised society with a complex communication infrastructure covering

a small area produced a nationalised culture which was controlled by the establishment.

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