Mass Culture Fragmentation and its Accompanying Illusions
Five things you can believe by staring at a deteriorating spectacle-machine
Since the invention of electronic media — such as, for instance, the radio, phonograph, telephone, television, and even the mass-market paperback, whose existence has depended upon electricity-powered offset lithographic printing presses — we’ve had a culture industry. Or, in less politically loaded words, we’ve had mass culture, or popular culture. But because of these same electronica media, mass culture has been undergoing a steady process of balkanization. Electricity has led to the creation of “mass man” on the one hand, but also to his fragmentation on the other.
The electronic world has seen a proliferation of many genres of entertainment and activity, and within them, sub-genres, and within them, sub-sub-genres. And if someone wants, he can get lost within some sub-sub-genre, because it has the potential to contain its own self-sufficient worldview. If it has a real-world social environment affixed to it, then one can get lost within it and stay lost.
Given the above, someone might ask: well, then, does that mean that mass man is no more? The answer is no. The balkanization of mass culture doesn’t necessarily arise from disgust or discomfort from it. It certainly can, but it can also arise from an infatuation with one or more underdeveloped elements within it. Sometimes, it can arise from both at once. And even if it amounted to a wholesale rejection of the mainstream, it would still rely on the mainstream as a foil. The growth of cultural tribes, with its potentially endless divisions and subdivisions, requires a mainstream culture of some kind to feed upon and distinguish itself against. It seems as though young people are increasingly aware of and comfortable with this situation, though I suppose time will tell.
Political discourse is a part of mass culture, though it works slightly differently: since politics requires endless contention between two opposed forces in order to maintain its potency, we have a bifurcated structure rather than a continuum of various entertainment forms. Much like the entertainment branch of mass culture, the political branch generates endless divisions and subdivisions, but they generally fall neatly into “left” or “right,” or in American parlance, liberal or conservative, respectively. Hard right-wingers love to pretend they’re too hardcore to be conservative, and hard leftists say the same of themselves vis-à-vis liberalism. But ultimately, these assurances amount to empty rhetoric. Eventually, they show their true allegiances, usually every few years whenever an election comes around. As for centrism, only a very small number of political subcultures can truthfully say that they fall into neither left nor right. This is because if they become influential enough, the lines will be redrawn so that one or another side claims them by default.
There is also the matter of when entertainment subcultures become politicized, and many, many people have observed that the arts tend to veer left-wing, particularly as they grow increasingly subcultural. The arts, mainstream and underground, are for the most part passively liberal (with a lowercase L), but they can often become actively mobilized toward some political end, and they have become increasingly aligned with the left in the past several decades, going as far as to shun conservative/right wing artists. This is a complex subject because it requires an analysis of real-life, “meatspace” political organization, and therefore it lies outside the scope of this discussion. I’m only trying to establish some basic principles, here.
Mass culture remains the most salient force, and even though plenty of subcultures break off from it, they pose no threat to it as individual units. However, the sheer volume of them put together has a deleterious effect on its strength, and so mass culture will occasionally borrow promising tidbits from its various subcultural offshoots to try and restore some of its lost power. It is best understood as a Schelling point undergoing an indefinite process of deterioration.
A Schelling point, to make things clear, is what people focus on in the absence of communication. So when you meet someone for the first time, or communicate in an environment in which only weak signals are possible, mass culture will remain the main point of reference. This is true across the western world. But if we become too entranced by mass culture, we can reach some faulty conclusions. Here are five of them.
I. Stuck Culture
Every film seems to be a remake, a reboot, a sequel, or a prequel. Same goes with every video game. Our culture is stuck, then, right? No, it isn’t. Only popular culture is “stuck.” Yet from it, a thousand offshoots are all bursting forth in a thousand different directions, and this boundless energy is accompanied by a compensatory deceleration of popular culture. “Culture is stuck” only if you find yourself staring at the mass culture industry, blinking occasionally, waiting for it to do something. If you’re disappointed by its speed, you should really be ashamed of the obstinacy with which you cling to such an aberrant mode of culture-production in the first place. Let me put this in perspective. Study the history of the Indian ragas. Study the history of Greek epic. Study the history of Assyrian bas-reliefs. Study Chinese Buddhist sculpture. Take note of how fast these things have evolved over time. In truth, man has always projected his myths and dreams outward collectively at a snail’s pace.
But our system is an exceptional one in that more art is being produced than ever before. During the 20th century, an outrageous, stupidly insane amount of classical music was written, far exceeding the amount made in the 19th, I believe several times over. Our minds struggle to comprehend the sheer volume of written and/or recorded material that was made, so we only focus on what was compositionally novel. Thus whenever someone says “I like twentieth century classical music,” an educated person typically thinks of Schoenberg, Bartók, or Stravinsky, i.e. someone “thorny” and “weird.” Few really can grasp just how meaningless the statement actually is. “I like twentieth century classical” can mean just about anything. And this is just one example.
Those who complain of “stuck culture” don’t actually think the entirety of culture-production is stuck. What they crave is the subjective feeling of forward movement, and that feeling can only be attained if the pop culture industry decides to facilitate it. But why would it do that? Popular culture has maintained itself by mastering the art of managing expectations. You want it to go faster because you’re satisfied with what has been done thus far, and it has only left you wanting more. You’re a mark.
II. Such-and-such Art Form Is Dead
An art form could perhaps die once upon a time when mankind lacked the ability to record and preserve just about everything, ever. Now, it isn’t so. An art form is considered dead when it stops being a matter of serious importance to popular culture. When it ceases to be a household name, people say it has reached its demise and joined the choir invisible. Perhaps this statement could be understandable if death was taken to mean an evolutionary dead stop. Latin, for instance, is a dead language since it doesn’t evolve anymore; it’s perma-frozen in the neo-Ciceronian form that became standard during the Renaissance. But even this standard doesn’t seems to apply anywhere in the world of creativity. Every art form contains the potential to move someone. If an artist wants to make it so, he can seize upon the form and make it moving, and then innovation will come naturally as a concomitant effect. The energy of an art form is always a voluntaristic phenomenon, both in terms of what the artist puts into it and what the viewer/listener puts into his experience with it.
One interesting phenomenon is that when art forms cease to be recognized in mass culture and are in a clear downward financial decline, that is typically the moment at which they become politicized by left-wing artists and patrons. The progressive left has a knack for taking discarded modes of self-expression and injecting them with propagandistic content. In this way, the political branch of mass culture still props up its mainstream relevance, albeit indirectly. But it is nonetheless possible to bypass the fandom that these politicized artists play such a heavy hand in educating and find an altogether different audience. Just because that isn’t happening doesn’t make it unfeasible.
III. There Are No Geniuses Anymore
Let me be clear. There is no dearth of genius in the world, and amazingly, the contributions of geniuses are more visible than ever if one chooses to go seek them out. Before, we had plenty of geniuses whose genius would disappear without any trace at all. This is what Hegel’s “beautiful soul” was attempting to address. But the explosion of information we’ve seen in the last several decades, along with our constitutional inability to process/contextualize it adequately, has had the effect of cheapening genius and giving off the feeling that it somehow doesn’t exist. Someone might possess an unfathomable amount of technical knowledge that far outstrips your own and direct it toward profoundly creative ends, but who cares? If it’s all contained within a mode of expression that you lack the background knowledge to appreciate, then why even acknowledge it? It might as well be invisible!
This reasoning, of course, ignores that appreciating the genius of older art forms requires a familiarity with the rules and conventions through which it expresses itself, and this can only be achieved through self-discipline. Understanding a Bach fugue takes self-discipline, and if you don’t have that, you won’t get it. The other day, I was reading about how Chris Sawyer, the guy who created the Rollercoaster Tycoon game series, programmed the entire thing in assembly language. According to some programming nerds, this is a mind-boggling feat. Does this make him a genius? I have no idea. It’s a fun game, and you can spend a surprising amount of time playing it before it becomes boring. But I can’t comment on the genius behind it because I don’t know what the assembly programming language is like to use. It sure seems like an amazing accomplishment, but I’m completely out of my depths, here. Now, if I consider this one sparse, insignificant-seeming example and multiply it by about a hundred thousand, then I’d probably have a reasonable guess as to the number of things produced in the last thirty years that I’m completely unfit to judge but which might contain true traces of genius. You understand?
But on the whole, within mass culture, there genuinely doesn’t appear to be a whole lot of genius. With the rise of the internet, the culture industry has opted for security rather than risk-taking and gone out of its way to make its art as palatable as possible to a mass audience. Sometimes, it works; sometimes, it doesn’t. But little, if any of it displays genius.
In the realm of scholastic genius, each subject of intellectual inquiry has grown ever more complex and specialized, and the “public intellectual” is often one of the biggest fools you can encounter on television. The internal logic of our communications technology suggests that our greatest minds should be conversant in many spheres and make valuable contributions in all of them, but in reality, the best and brightest of our time are simply opting out of the limelight and burrowing themselves into some area of niche fascination. You can go find them if you want. But the people who claim “there aren’t any geniuses anymore” don’t actually want them. They want a broad, mass recognition of someone’s genius. Not the same thing.
IV. Love Cannot Be Found In Our Neoliberal (or whatever) Dystopia
This statement is similar to the last one: love is not broadcast to us through popular culture nearly so much as it once was, and so therefore it must be altogether absent. Female-led pop songs are often about being a girl-boss who doesn’t need any one man. Breakup songs are more popular than love songs. Elsewhere, the novels of Houellebecq do a decent job of capturing the desperation and emptiness people feel as a response to dating and hookup culture. And, additionally, the manner in which we find love and engage in the courtship process — increasingly through the internet and cellular technology — has become difficult to convey through an appropriate narrative form, so even subculturally it isn’t very well represented. Nonetheless, part of mass culture fragmentation is the variety of means through which we express ourselves, even in simple conversation, and mass culture currently lacks the narratological tools to capture that variety. I believe non-mainstream cultural forms will eventually gain that requisite ability.
But in order to gain this ability, people will probably need to reevaluate the nature of love itself. Starting sometime in the 12th century with the poems of the Occitan troubadours, western civilization actually simplified love through its poetry, reducing it more or less to eros, though the Greeks themselves had a more complex and multifaceted understanding of it. Of course, in any long-lasting romance, agape plays just as much of a role as eros, but the former doesn’t lend itself well to a good story. So love, with its innate resistance to artistic representation, has been given short shrift.
Popular culture has done an outstanding job throughout the twentieth century of milking the western love tradition for everything it’s worth, debasing and malforming it into a grotesque parody. Now it is going through the process of deconstructing the same romantic love that earlier on it helped strain beyond recognition. But even this “deconstruction” is not so new. The excess with which western poets and artists convey passionate love has already engendered self-critique. Read Jeun de Meun’s continuation of Guillaume de Lorris’s Romance of the Rose and see for yourself.
But away from the world of shadows, here in the three-dimensional world, love continues on with all of the depth and complexity that, frankly, most western literature and art has failed to convey for nearly a thousand years.
V. Future Historians Will Look Back On This Time And Say That I’m Right
I’ll end with one of my personal favorites: the appeal to “future historians” who will one day look back upon history and say that the guy making the appeal is right about everything. This rhetorical flourish has been around for quite some time, but it won’t go away; in fact, it seems to be growing only stronger.
The “future historians” appeal is a coping mechanism in response to the way various groups will choose to remember an event and form a narrative around it. It is adjacent to the concern about living in a “post-truth” society. That concern is mainly about the fragmentation of public perception. According to this view, people are subscribing to various political subcultures that invent imaginary versions of reality and then reinforce them by feeding the people information that exploits their confirmation bias. The fragmentation of public perception is taken for a dangerous threat, since it means that truth is increasingly irrelevant and epistemological anarchy is unleashed upon the world.
But let’s be serious for a moment. Truth will never become irrelevant, because everyone cares deeply about it. But there are many discrete truths, and there is The Truth as the political branch of the mass media presents it in its bifurcated, symmetrical manner described above. If you don’t have the desire to be politically influential, there is not too much of a reason to decry the mass media’s presentation of The Truth, since it is but one of many possible presentations, and it is typically valid in its way. And indeed, most alternative presentations of The Truth rely on the mass media as the foil from which they differentiate themselves. The mass media sets the standard; others respond. When someone attacks the mass media for some account of an event, and then his account of it is later “vindicated,” this means that the mass media has slightly altered its story to more closely match that guy’s version — the same mass media who just a moment ago was supposed to be completely invalid.
Understand that not everyone concerned about the “post-truth” landscape words it this way, since the term itself is quite politicized, but the same basic anxiety persists all the same, across the political spectrum. One accompanying concern is that the most supposedly relevant facts (regarding some situation) will not one day become narrativized and canonized in a definitive, authoritative manner. And that is the concern that leads to the “future historians” self-reassurance.
The relevance of a fact depends on one’s point-of-view, and that can differ depending on one’s region and identity. And as new identities blossom, there is increasingly no definitive point-of-view, though one or two might be politically privileged. Thus, there can never be an authoritative record of anything, since some facts will always be more important than others depending on one’s perspective. It is impossible to turn history into a matter of science. At the turn of the 19th century, Goethe acknowledged this implicitly when he suggested that new histories of the same subject ought to be written every few dozen years or so when changes to the present situation necessitate a new look at the past. Then, in the early 20th century, guys like Dilthey finally figured it out that despite whatever the neo-Kantians think, there can be no scientifically perfect history. We’re still reeling from this discovery and its implications.
After all, it’s an unpleasant thing to think about, and a whole lot of people desperately want there to be one stalwart History Of Everything with one definitive record. So the concerned speaker reassures himself that eventually a common presentation of reality will be restored when “future historians” (where? when?) come to their senses and decide that so-and-so is right and such-and-such is wrong. In this appeal, it never occurs to the speaker that some future historians will conclude one thing somewhere while others conclude another thing somewhere else, and then maybe those camps will be superseded by some other historians who say a different thing, and so on.
Again, if the guy making the claim really thinks about it for five minutes, he’ll recognize that what I’m saying is true. But for him, the thirst for vindication from a higher authority — even if it must happen long after he’s dead — is just too strong. The “future historians” are the ones who will reside over the mainstream narrative, which is aligned with mass culture. The “future historians” guy is being an optimist who essentially says, “There will always be mass culture, and my team will regain control over it.”
But even if we grant the first clause in his thought process, I would still have my own prediction to counter his: future historians will look back on this time and say something dumb about it, because they’ll be dumber than our current historians. That seems pretty pessimistic for a moment, but maybe both are true. Maybe his enlightened “future historians” will show up first, then mine will show up afterwards. Or the reverse. But then, of course, some different future historians would show up after that.
My point is, real stuff does happen in the world, and thus truth and falsity will always matter. But history itself is contingent. And the appeal to future historians betrays a severe discomfort with contingency, even as the inconclusive world we currently inhabit suggests that contingency, selectivity, and subjectivity are our destiny, shooting away from a fragmenting center in a thousand points of light. At least for the foreseeable future.