Way of seeing other people as masse

Way of seeing other people as masses

There is a curious unity in the understanding of popular culture as mass culture from both the political left and right. The Left sees the masses as manipulated and unable to play the revolutionary role that certain versions of Marxist analysis say they are destined to play. The Right sees the masses as a threat to social privileges and as potential polluters of the sacred sphere of culture. The perspectives developed by Arnold, Leavisism, Eliot, the Frankfurt School, and Macdonald condemn the same things, but for different reasons. Popular culture as mass culture is attacked because it threatens cultureal standards and social authority, and/or because it depoliticizes the working class and thus maintains the iron grip of social authority: “obedience to the rhythm of the iron system . . . the absolute power of capitalism” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979: 120).
The influence of seeing popular culture as mass culture is very difficult to overestimate: for more than a century it was undoubtedly the dominant paradigm in cultural analysis. Indeed, it could be argued that it still forms a kind of repressed “common sense” in certain areas of British and American academic and nonacademic life. The principal problem is its working assumption that popular culture as mass culture always represents little more than an example of cultural decline and potential political disorder. Given this assumption, theoretical research and empirical investigation only ever confirm what they always expect to find. It looks down from the splendid heights of high culture to what it sees as the commercial wastelands of mass culture, seeking only confirmation of cultural decline or the need for regulation and social control.