Mass Culture: The Experience of the Theory of Relativity

Abstract

The phenomenon of mass culture, consi dered in the scale of “big time”, helps understand the place of mass culture in the history of culture, mainly russian, its relations with folk (traditional) and elite cultures, the transformation’s origins and mechanisms in different cultural and historical periods. Mass culture is investigated in the light of the author’s conception of architecto nic of culture and relativistic cultural studies. This provides an opportunity to reconsider the traditional understanding of mass culture as a phenomenon of the 20th — 21st centuries and to show the relativity of all the concepts that explain the processes of massification and individualization of culture, closely interconnected. The relativistic conception of cultural studies, presented in this article, aims to prove that culture, throughout its history, is multidimensional and internally differentiated. It always tends to individualize (personalize) and mass the values, norms and meanings. Its architectonics includes several levels: the elite, popular, mass, folk, and “forgotten” kinds of culture, the boundaries between which are blurred and uncertain. Between the “floors” of each actual culture, there are social and cultural “elevators”, which make the value status of mass and elite, folk and popular cultures variable, historically conditioned. In some cases in the history of culture, a two-layer “amalgam” can be formed, combining the texts of mass and elite cultures into a single phenomenon, which will show its surface and deep structures to different “slices” of its audience and own a “dual code” connecting metanarrative and ironic discourses and having functional versatility in relation to any cultural “register” and the general context of culture.