Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World

Abstract

The disdain that twentieth century intellectuals voiced for popular or mass culture is well known, as is the more recent acceptance—even embrace—of popular culture as a legitimate source of study and a vibrant world of cultural expression that developed alongside eroding notions of cultural hierarchy. Less well known is how this transition was negotiated. This is the story that Daniel Horowitz tells in Consuming Pleasures. Between 1950 and 1972, Horowitz argues, new ways of looking at consumer culture emerged, emphasizing symbolic communication, skepticism about moral judgments, an embrace of pleasure, and an exploration of the relationship between producers and consumers. In his rendering, this set of transitions is less a story about wholesale rejection, as, for instance, Andrew Ross suggested in his influential No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1989), and more of a step-by-step groping for more sympathetic and sophisticated understandings of popular culture. Horowitz's book is his third (following The Morality of Spending [1985] and The Anxieties of Affluence [2004]) in a series of examinations of evolving moral judgments about consumer culture. Here he sets the stage with Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White's edited volume Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (1957). Having outlined the prevailing mass culture critiques offered by Dwight Macdonald, Clement Greenberg, and the Frankfurt school, Horowitz embarks on a fascinatingly idiosyncratic overview of developing ideas about popular culture. His focus is transnational even when his subjects were not, yielding a great chapter on European thinkers—including Jürgen Habermas, Umberto Eco, and Roland Barthes—whose early works were lost in translation and thus had little impact on American thinkers at the time. Avoiding the familiar, Horowitz makes surprising and usually illuminating choices in tracing a developing set of ideas. Throughout, he is a well-informed, generally reliable, and often-incisive guide.