Bread & Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay by Patrick Brantlinger & Professor Of English & Cultural Studies Patrick Brantlinger

Author:Patrick Brantlinger & Professor Of English & Cultural Studies Patrick Brantlinger
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780801415982
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 1983-07-14T21:00:00+00:00

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According to the crowd psychologists, the instruments that have evolved since 1789 to shape and express public opinion—the press, the schools, universal suffrage, the mass media—are failures; at best they merely lend the appearance of reason to irrational proceedings, like the imagery of dreams. Although Freud has little to say about mass culture in the narrow sense of the productions of the mass media, his social thinking focuses upon the antithesis between “the masses” and “civilization.” In showing human nature to be mostly determined by the unconscious, and in adapting crowd psychology to his versions of archaeological and sociological explanation, Freud created a powerful fusion of ideas that has influenced all subsequent social theory. Even theorists who reject psychoanalysis have to come to terms with it. Many critiques of mass society and culture—Karen Horney’s The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937), David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950), Alexander Mitscherlich’s Society without the Father (1963), Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1978), to name just a few—are Freudian to greater or lesser extent. Many others seek to combine psychoanalysis with its apparent opposite, Marxism; works in this category include Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1942), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964), and Lasch again. And if critics of mass society and culture have been influenced by psychoanalytic thinking, so have the artists and managers who run the mass media. According to the dictum of Leo Lowenthal, “Mass culture is psychoanalysis in reverse.”20 This is true in the sense that many of the products of mass culture—advertising, for example—function by stimulating wishful thinking, illusions, the irrational; it is also true in the sense that ad makers, movie directors, television producers, and public relations “image makers” all think in Freudian terms and shape their products accordingly.21 An aspect of contemporary mass culture which is obviously psychoanalytic in orientation, furthermore, consists of the hundreds of therapeutic techniques, associations, and cults for personality shaping and adjustment that take their inspiration at least distantly from Freud. Another name for what Cyril Joad, in his investigation of decadence, describes as “the ‘psychologizing’ of morals and thinking” is “the psychological society.”22

As recently as the middle of this century, theories of mass communications and mass audiences were still being framed by references to “crowd psychology,” “instincts,” and animal behavior, as in Robert MacIver and Charles Page’s chapter “Herd, Crowd, and Mass Communications” in their Society: An Introductory Analysis (1949). In an even more reductive fashion, overlaying the modern with the primitive, Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power (1960) ransacks anthropology and psychology to demonstrate the paranoid nature of the social bond itself. Having investigated group behavior and the general irrationality of politics among both primitive and civilized peoples, Canetti turns to Freud’s study of paranoia, the case of Daniel Paul Schreber, for his final model of the psychology of power, and hence for his final model of political organization.23 More recently still,

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