Mass Cultural Forms Research Articles

The Recursive Mode: Space, Time, and the Hyper-Commodification of Culture

This article argues that “evolution” in the production of mass cultural forms has become stalled in our postmodern, networked, and neoliberalized society. Popular cultural forms have historically developed and evolved in dialectical relationship with capitalism. This produced forms that although increasingly reflecting the prime dynamics of industrialization, were also authentically “new” and “diverse” in that they could gestate in spaces and times not already colonized and commodified by capital. Since at least the late 1970s, these spaces and times have been capitalized; indeed capital has also created immense “virtual” spatio-temporalities based on the Internet that are almost wholly commodified. Moreover, these spatio-temporalities, both virtual and real-world, function at accelerated speeds, a “network speed” to produce forms of culture-production and consumption that no longer have the space or time to evolve either dialectically in response to capitalism, or organically as new independent forms. The culture industries continue to flourish, of course, but as this article explains, they do so through the constant recycling of existing, ready-to-hand forms; remixing and reordering and remaking mass culture through an accelerating industrial cycle that leaves no room (or time) for forms that are genuinely new or different.

New religious formations as a form of modern massive culture

Let us analyze the latest religious entities (for example, non-Christian charismatic communities) in the paradigm context of mass culture, and find out the place and role of modern religiosity among the cultural phenomena of today. In order to answer the question: "Can new religious entities be considered a form of mass culture?", One should first of all analyze briefly the phenomenon of mass culture, its nature, its genesis, the tasks it solves, the methods it uses, and its practical manifestations. Since "mass culture" is a term used in contemporary cultural studies, the question in this perspective has not yet become an object of religious reflection.

An Experiment in Modern Vaudeville: Archiving the Wretched Refuse in John Howard Lawson’s Processional

John Howard Lawson’s Processional: A Jazz Symphony of American Life (1925) was an experiment in putting mass cultural forms to leftist avant-garde uses. But as the play negotiates the conflict between two basic principles for organizing mass culture’s stock materials – between vaudeville and the symphony – it stages a basic tension between an item-level approach to collecting “acts” and a collection-level imposition of structure on atomized parts. Lawson’s play staggers between an impulse to present a found poem of American popular, national, and industrial culture, warts and all, and an impulse to submit that culture to the kind of focused critique that could extricate the play from the vaudeville logic of the commodity fetish. This unstable but productive archival détente would give way in Processional ’s afterlife, when its vaudeville excesses, particularly its representation of stereotyped ethnic difference within the national collection, proved subject to a history of reappraisal and de-accessioning.

An Experiment in Modern Vaudeville: Archiving the Wretched Refuse in John Howard Lawson's Processional

John Howard Lawson's Processional: A Jazz Symphony of American Life (1925) was an experiment in putting mass cultural forms to leftist avant-garde uses. But as the play negotiates the conflict between two basic principles for organizing mass culture's stock materials – between vaudeville and the symphony – it stages a basic tension between an item-level approach to collecting “acts” and a collection-level imposition of structure on atomized parts. Lawson's play staggers between an impulse to present a found poem of American popular, national, and industrial culture, warts and all, and an impulse to submit that culture to the kind of focused critique that could extricate the play from the vaudeville logic of the commodity fetish. This unstable but productive archival détente would give way in Processional's afterlife, when its vaudeville excesses, particularly its representation of stereotyped ethnic difference within the national collection, proved subject to a history of reappraisal and de-accessioning.

Culture and/or deception the dialectic of enlightenment

This text deals with Adornos dialectic critic of culture, within which it tries to clarify the relationship between earlier bourgeois culture, on the one hand, and contemporary forms of mass culture, on the other. Adornos understanding of culture enables us to comprehend many specific social forms in their dialectic relationship and their mutual determination. The text itself, first of all, examines the changes that contemporary industrial society brought in regard to critic potential of culture, namely the way in which it achieves to convert, once useless-provocative, culture into useful-impotent culture. Here is analyzed the influence of manufactural industry of high and mass culture on individual consciousness - namely upon mass consciousness - as well as the way in which individuals are being fooled for the things that are said to be offered by the culture. It is asserted that the triumph of manufacturing in cultural industry fooles men for the offer it seemingly gives, and therefore, that it has today become almost impossible to practice individuation, and therewith to hold a critical distance toward ruling forms of material and spiritual manufacturing.

Deliberation, Phrônesis, and Authenticity: Heidegger's Early Conception of Rhetoric

Interest in writings of existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger has been on rise in field of (Scult 199; D. Smith 2003). Several essays have been published over last few years exploring importance Heidegger attributes to rhetoric, especially in his major treatise, Being and Time (Hyde 1994; Ramsey 1993). These articles address relationship of to what Heidegger labels as the a form of mass culture which embraces societal norms in a nonreflective manner. Given that Heidegger associates speech or Rede with gossip and idle talk used by they, one must question whether play any positive role in fostering what Heidegger defines as an au thentic existence: a life conducted in accordance with one's own possibilities. Hyde and Smith address this issue in their piece: Aristotle and Heidegger on Emotion and Rhetoric. They argue that does not lead human being?or in Heidegger's terms, Dasein?toward an authentic existence. Rather the community of 'they' and go in hand (1992, 92). By focusing on everyday activities of they, rhetoric directs people to a temporal and spatial realm where their authenticity will be forsaken and forgot ten (92). is, thus, inextricably connected to those gossiping modes of conversation which embed Dasein within its inauthentic existence. Hyde, however, later qualifies this conclusion in essay The Call of Conscience: Heidegger and Question of Rhetoric (Hyde 1994). Here he finds that has potential to produce a of conscience which leaps forth and liberates others as a way of leading them toward an authentic existence (see Heidegger 1962, 164, 344). Rhetoric, used by an authentic Dasein who is 'communicating' and 'struggling' with others, bring about a 'modifica tion' of our publicness' (Hyde 1994, 382). In doing so, can sound a call that interprets complacency of our everyday world of common sense and common praxis and thereby summons us to choose, to act, and perhaps to change our lives for 'better' (382).

Historicising the spaces of leisure: open-air swimming and the lido movement in England

This paper presents an analysis of lidos—purpose-built, open-air swimming pools—in twentieth-century England. It draws on archival material on swimming and the lido movement in England and a spatial analysis of a lido in south London (UK). Lidos have often been neglected in sociological research on leisure and sport as they resist a straightforward equation with either rational recreation leisure provision or more democratised forms of mass culture. This paper applies Vignal et al's (2001) concept of ‘polymorphous’ practices in swimming to lidos to capture the complexity of the uses and meanings of lidos. It pays particular attention to historicising the lido movement and argues that we must do this in order to understand more fully the production of space at leisure sites. The paper therefore discusses the ways in which lidos are historically constructed social spaces that offer the swimmer and visitor a range of different experiences and encounters.

Pancho Villa Meets Sun Yat-sen: Third World Revolution and the History of Hollywood Cinema

Although today we tend to isolate them as distinct groups, Mexicans and Chinese in the US have often been linked. These links derive in part from similar histories of immigration and labor but also from related histories of revolution. Some dates are in order here: the Chinese “Boxer Rebellion” took place in 1904; Sun Yat-sen’s revolution occurred in 1912; the Mexican Revolution is conventionally dated to 1910–20; and the May 4th Movement began in 1919. The connections between Mexicans and Chinese in the US find expression in a variety of mass cultural forms including vaudeville, where Mexican and Chinese performers often shared the stage; in a film like The Son Daughter (1932), where Mexican actor Ramon Novarro plays a Chinese revolutionary; and in Hollywood westerns in which Chinese and Mexican villains are in cahoots. In what follows, I argue that the Chinese and Mexican revolutions helped to shape both Hollywood’s global hegemony and resistance to it. I find support for this claim in the careers of two Hollywood film workers—the Californio actor Leo Carrillo and the Oscar-winning Chinese American cinematographer James Wong Howe. I conclude by arguing for the need to rethink US film studies in relationship to anti-imperial struggle and by suggesting the critical importance of triangulating American studies, Latin American studies, and Asia Pacific studies. To both historicize the cultural and political economies of globalization in the Americas and to project future possibilities for radical transformation, the north/south orientation of American studies and Latin American studies must be supplemented, I conclude, by the east/west axis of Asia Pacific studies.

Americanism, Popular Culture and the Primitive: Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, Madame D'Ora (1904)

Johannes V. Jensen's novels Madame D'Ora (1904) and Hjulet (The Wheel, 1905) represented some of the most popular works of early twentieth-century Americanist fiction in Europe. Taking Jensen's first novel, Madame D'Ora, as my focus, I show how his work participated in an ambivalent construction of America as an imaginary space of both danger and cultural renewal, one that combined the modern (technology) with a dangerous, ‘atavistic’ influence. Through an investigation of Jensen's use of tropes of primitivity, in particular, I argue that such literary Americanism in fact represented an effort to work through changes taking place within Europe itself. Specifically, Madame D'Ora deals with the rise of new forms of mass culture and popular entertainment – such as the cinema – and their effect on traditional European intellectuals. Within this context, Jensen represents the new ‘American’ forms of technology and popular culture both as a hope for overcoming European decadence and as a dangerous form of cultural and psychic primitivization.

Cracking the Code: Technology, Historiography, and the “Back Office” of Mass Culture

This article contributes to the project of historicizing the emergence of printed books as a mass cultural form in the 20th century and after, in addition to exploring the political‐economic struggles both occasioning and occasioned by their constitution as such. In doing so, it both models and reflects on what a possible historiography of technology “after social constructionism” might look like. More specifically, it attempts to account for the behind‐the‐scenes or “back office” processes through which commodification takes place in the sphere of book distribution, and it does so by focusing principally on communication and information technologies such as the international standard book number (ISBN) and machine readable bar codes. This history, overall, complements the more hopeful narratives of mass culture’s democratizing potential, by telling a story about how increased opportunities for middle class social advancement depend on intensified—and intensely technological—work processes for those employed in the sphere of commodity distribution. This essay demonstrates, moreover, how dominant metaphors and frameworks that have guided Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) research (e.g., “actor‐networks,” “seamless webs,” and so forth) must be amended to account better for power, contradiction, and antagonism within the history of technology.

Toward an Ethics of Postvisuality: Some Thoughts on the Recent Work of Zhang Yimou

Taking as its point of departure the unresolved problematic of ethics in poststructuralist theory, this essay approaches ethics from the perspective of mediated visuality in contemporary cultural politics. Noting how the sensitivity to otherness—be it in the form of mass culture, gender, or race—has often been accompanied by iconophobia, a fundamental distrust and rejection of images, the author offers an analysis of the contemporary Chinese film Happy Times, directed by Zhang Yimou, as an instance of a kind of ethical film practice in which a responsible, noniconophobic thinking about visuality and its implications may be traced. In a culture caught between the forces of globalization and its own attempts at modernization, such as contemporary China's, Zhang's work contributes to an ethics of what may be called postvisuality.

Women through the lens: gender and nation in a century of Chinese cinema

Women through the Lens raises the question of how gender, especially the image of woman, acts as a visual and discursive sign in the creation of the nation-state in twentieth-century China. Tracing the history of Chinese cinema through the last hundred years from the perspective of transnational feminism, Shuqin Cui reveals how women have been granted a privileged visibility on screen while being denied discutsive positions as subjects. In addition, her careful attention to the visual language system of cinema shows how has served as the site for the narration of nation in the context of China's changing social and political climate. Placing gender and nation in a historical framework, the book first shows how early productions had their roots in shadowplays, a popular form of public entertainment. In examining the Red Classics of socialist cinema as a mass cultural form, the book shows how the utopian vision of emancipating the entire proletariat, women included, produced a collective ideology that declared an end to gender difference. Cui then documents and discusses the cinematic spectacle of woman as essential to such widely popular films as Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine and Zhang Yimou's Ju Do. Finally, the author brings a feminist perspective to the issues of gender and nation by turning her attention to women directors and their self-representations.

Of Flows, Bodies and Shows: Incipient Mass Cultures in Early Twentieth Century East Asia: An Introduction

Shying away from an excessively constrained definition of mass culture, this paper finds in Tanizaki an unexpected point of entry. Tomoda and Matsunaga, a novella published in 1926, unfolds as a tell-tale allegory combining the paradigm of quantities (series and duplicates) with one of malleability (a-centredness and transversal circulation). Yet, in spite of elaborate statistical instruments in early twentieth century East Asia, mass culture is difficult to assess through the mere law of big numbers, and its birth remains questionable as does its point of departure. Likewise, while available sources make it hard to provide the 'thick descriptions' capable of unlocking grand homologies (cultural practices, social groups, univocal signification), uneven patterns of distribution are still to be recognised. Beyond some differences, China, Korea and Japan offer a remarkably homogeneous configuration of mass cultural forms and norms. Before proletarian or ultra-nationalist programmes took hold of their forces, it brought to the fore a consistent period (ca1890-1930) when East Asian mass cultures were, more or less, in a state of freewheeling.

Of Flows, Bodies and Shows: Incipient Mass Cultures in Early Twentieth Century East Asia an Introduction

Shying away from an excessively constrained definition of mass culture, this paper finds in Tanizaki an unexpected point of entry. Tomoda and Matsunaga, a novella published in 1926, unfolds as a tell-tale allegory combining the paradigm of quantities (series and duplicates) with one of malleability (a-centredness and transversal circulation). Yet, in spite of elaborate statistical instruments in early twentieth century East Asia, mass culture is difficult to assess through the mere law of big numbers, and its birth remains questionable as does its point of departure. Likewise, while available sources make it hard to provide the ‘thick descriptions’ capable of unlocking grand homologies (cultural practices, social groups, univocal signification), uneven patterns of distribution are still to be recognised. Beyond some differences, China, Korea and Japan offer a remarkably homogeneous configuration of mass cultural forms and norms. Before proletarian or ultra-nationalist programmes took hold of their forces, it brought to the fore a consistent period (ca1890–1930) when East Asian mass cultures were, more or less, in a state of freewheeling.

Serial Murder, Serial Consummerism: Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991)

Bret Easton Ellis is a representative blank fiction writer whose novels deal with violence, indulgence, sexual excess, decadence, consumerism and commerce. In American Psycho (1991) he focuses on the phenomenon of the serial killer. The aim of this paper is to look into the ways in which the seriality of the serial killer’s murders is linked to the seriality provided by different forms of mass culture: talk shows, daily news, advertisements, pop music, magazines and consumerism in general. Our society’s never-ending serial consumerism is mirrored by the serial killer’s never-ending killings. Taken to its ultimate consequences, consumerism includes everything, which dehumanises people and blurs the difference between consuming objects and consuming human beings. The concept of seriality is deeply embedded in our culture, and is shared by serial killer fiction, mass cultural productions, and by consumerism, which may account for the current popularity of the serial killer.

Berthold Auerbach’s Deutscher Volks‐Kalender: Editing as Political Agenda

An analysis of Berthold Auerbach’s Deutscher Volks‐Kalender (1858–69) reveals how Auerbach attempted to participate in and to shape the discourse on national identity. One of the most popular writers of his day, he used his position as editor to carry out a political agenda that advocated German unification. He attempted to unify the diverse strata of society by providing specific ideas and values – above all on German unification and emigration – that would be understood and accepted by the practical as well as the literary reader. Many stories and essays called directly or indirectly for a united Germany. Others dealt with the hot topic of America during the Civil War as a means to encourage Germans to remain in Germany. Auerbach routinely engaged like‐minded contributors from the fields of politics, science, sociology, and the arts to create a multidisciplinary forum on nationhood. By employing images of family, friendship, and the organic and also by conjuring up a common literary tradition in Friedrich Schiller, Auerbach projected his concept of nation onto a popular form of mass culture – the calendar.

Samba

This paper traces the development and diversification of the squatter housing form — favela — and the music form — samba — in Rio de Janeiro from the late 19th century to the present. It is posited that in reflecting (working class) endogenous attitudes and (middle class) exogenous social mores, these two forms have shared a parallel if not precisely time-phased evolution. Evidence is presented to show that poverty, black identity and spatial exclusion from wider society were essential contributors to the origins of the favelas in the late 19th century and the samba in the early 20th century. During the 1940s and 50s when public attitudes to the favelas and their inhabitants were strongly negative, with many favelas being eradicated under public housing policy, protest themes and songs against poverty and marginalisation in samba were suppressed by the Rio authorities. In more recent times, with official attitudes towards the favelas improving and the favelas diversifying in socio-economic and cultural terms, the samba has begun to incorporate other music forms and to widen its cultural basis. Just as attempts are now being made by the city hall to integrate the favelas with the formal city, the samba, assisted by Carnival, has become accepted as a form of mass culture, enjoyed not only by the city of Rio but also by Brazil and the world at large. The close, if not parallel, development of the Rio favelas and samba, encourages a consideration that samba can be seen as a metaphor for the favelas themselves.

On Translation in a Global Market

�� ranslation in a Global Market” focuses on the extent to which global artists, video makers, and writers consciously or unconsciously build translatability into their art forms. This special issue of Public Culture finds inspiration in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s midcentury critique of the American “culture industry” in the famous chapter, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” of their Dialectic of Enlightenment.1 But whereas Adorno, Horkheimer, and the Frankfurt School more generally focused their critique on how emergent capital logics were encoded in mass cultural forms, they paid little attention to questions of translatability across the complex cultural and social terrains of capital. The question of how one achieves a mass cultural object—a cultural object that can be translated across linguistic, cultural, and social contexts —still begs to be answered. This special issue explores a number of interrelated problems that arise from the question of a global market in cultural and aesthetic forms. These problems include the marketing of national literature, the politics of publishing (with emphasis on the postcolonial dominance of Anglophone or standard-language publishing houses), and the question of an emergent internationalized aesthetics. When the problem of a globalizing mass culture and public culture is approached from the perspective of translatability, new and important

Lynda Nead. Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in Nineteenth-Century London. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2000. Pp. ix, 251. $35.00. ISBN 0-300-08505-2.

Book synopsis: In this fascinating and innovative look at nineteenth-century London, Lynda Nead offers a new account of modernity and metropolitan life. She charts the relationship between London’s formation into a modern organized city in the 1860s and the emergence of new types of production and consumption of visual culture. She considers the role visual images played in the creation of a vibrant and diverse urban culture and how new kinds of publics were created for these representations. Shifting the focus of the history of modernity from Paris to London, Nead here argues for a different understanding of gender and public space in a society where women joined the everyday life of city streets and entered the debates concerning morality, spectacle, and adventure. The book draws on texts and images of many kinds—including acts of Parliament, literature, newspaper reports, private letters, maps, paintings, advertisements, posters, and banned obscene publications. Taking a highly interdisciplinary approach, Nead explores such intriguing topics as the efforts of urban improvers to move water, air, traffic, goods, and people in the Victorian metropolis; the impact of gas lighting and glass on urban leisure; and the obscenity legislation that emerged in response to new forms of visual mass culture that were perceived as dangerous and pervasive.

The Rhetoric of Culture: Some Notes on Magazines,Canadian Culture and Globalization

Through an examination of the government's most recent attempt to defend the Canadian magazine industry (Bill C-55), this essay considers the politics of defending Canadian culture in the era of globalization. It argues that the defence of Canadian culture cannot be taken as synonymous with the defence of ways of life that are opposed to the profit-driven logic of global capitalism. Rather, struggles over Canadian culture can impede our understanding of Canada's place in globalization by distracting us from the real issues. This is shown in the defence of the Canadian magazine industry on the grounds of its importance to national culture. Magazines are exemplary mass cultural commodities whose form and content both express the consumerist values of contemporary capitalism. This paper argues that worries about Canadian content are often articulated at the expense of a more general examination of the function of culture within capitalism and of the implicit politics of the forms of mass culture.