Mind, Music, and Motion Pictures: The Making and Remaking of the Sensuous Consumer

Abstract

Mind, Music, and Motion Pictures:The Making and Remaking of the Sensuous Consumer Carter Ringle Joshua Yumibe. Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012. 230 pp. ISBN 9780813552965, $72.00 (cloth). Lauren Rabinovitz. Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. 256 pp. ISBN 9780231156608, $82.50 (cloth). Neil Verma. Theater of the Mind: Imagination, Aesthetics, and American Radio Drama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. 296 pp. ISBN 9780226853505, $90.00 (cloth). Timothy D. Taylor. The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. 368 pp. ISBN 9780226791159, $40.00 (cloth). In his 2013 Enterprise and Society presidential address, Kenneth Lipartito examined trends in business and cultural history and concluded that neither the focus on profit-seeking self-interest and organizational structure nor language, mentality, and symbolic structure alone were sufficient to explain the economic past. Instead, he made a case for the importance of practice theory in reintegrating “mentality and materiality in the study of history,” calling for a broader interpretive model through which cultural and business history can be viewed as inclusive. “What we can bring to this discussion,” he invited, “is the insight that what we call business or profit-making activity can be found on both sides of what others assume to be a clear divide between commerce and culture.” Furthermore, he argued that “cultural forms and practices have often been enacted through businesses.”1 In discussing the use of practice theory in history, Lipartito was careful to note that it is the historian’s job to “disentangle” certain elements that “come together historically” and “coalesce into a practice.”2 Only through analyzing power, language, symbols, [End Page 446] and categorizations can we understand business as a “field of practice” and how businesses accrue not only economic capital, but also symbolic capital. One must investigate how business interacts with other fields—education, art, religion, politics—to “give greater weight to what seem superfluous or secondary matters,” including “why firms acquire symbolic objects such as art collections, or how they express themselves in architecture or civic works.”3 Lipartito contended that this conversion of economic capital into symbolic capital needs to be examined, implying that agents within the field of business trade in all forms, or, as Pierre Bourdieu describes the inversion, “only those [cultural producers] who can come to terms with the ‘economic’ constraints inscribed in this bad-faith economy can reap the full ‘economic’ profits of their symbolic capital.”4 Lipartito connected economic and symbolic capital to better understand the field of business, referring to and expanding on Bourdieu’s analysis of the field of cultural production as it relates to an economy of symbolic goods, especially in the field of restricted production, which is most associated with highbrow art and its disavowal of economic capital. For Bourdieu, whose primary focus is the restricted production of highbrow art, or art and literature produced with little regard to acquiring economic capital, the field of cultural production “attracts agents who differ greatly in their properties and dispositions” but nonetheless have a common aversion to vocations in other fields, such as education or the bureaucracy.5 On the other hand, agents in the field of large-scale production are most commonly producers of bourgeois or middlebrow art, culture for the “average” public.6 In this field, cultural producers are less concerned with the trade in symbolic capital than in economic capital, and in many ways are subordinate to economics as controlled by business and the market.7 The field of large-scale, or heteronomous, production is what most interests my evaluation of the circulation of economic and symbolic capital as it informs culture and what I call the twentieth-century sensuous consumer—a consumer of both culture and goods, economic or symbolic. Similarly, Lipartito maintained that historians must “consider both the functional and the aesthetic when looking at technology or physical embodiments of capital.” He analyzed Tamara Plakins Thornton’s study of England’s West India Docks in the nineteenth century, [End Page 447] remarking on consumers’ changed perceptions of this new symbol of business. The...