Culture, Society, and Democracy by Isaac Reed Jeffrey C. Alexander

Author:Isaac Reed, Jeffrey C. Alexander [Isaac Reed, Jeffrey C. Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317261698
Google: 4zYeCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-12-03T02:51:13+00:00

Chapter 4

From Mass to Public

Rethinking the Value of the Culture Industry

Ronald N. Jacobs

For most of its history, sociology has adopted a suspicious attitude toward mass culture. For many theorists, in fact, the products of the culture industry have tended to be the profane “other” of a more enlightened culture. Marx, for instance, approached the problem of mass culture through the twin concepts of reification and false consciousness. Weber understood trends in popular culture through the concepts of rationalization and disenchantment. And, in perhaps the most influential denunciation of mass culture, members of the Frankfurt School combined Marxian and Weberian approaches in order to develop a theory of the “culture industry” as an agent of mass deception and distraction.

In the last twenty years or so, however, the idea of mass culture has begun to be replaced by a theory of public culture. This new theoretical orientation has its origins in three separate research literatures: (1) structuralist and poststructuralist theories about intertextuality and polysemous texts, (2) empirically driven audience reception studies, and (3) Habermasian and neo-Habermasian arguments about the public sphere. The result is a sociology that moves beyond a normative consideration of the kinds of culture that people should be consuming, and toward a serious consideration of the cultural texts that individuals actually use in the lifeworld and the public sphere.

Still, I want to suggest that there remain traces of the old approach, in which the idea of mass culture exists primarily as a topic for denunciation. My aim in this chapter is to identify these traces and to replace them with a more fully concretized theory of media culture and civic life. I begin with the Frankfurt School theory of the culture industry, as well as other variants of mass society theory. Next, I describe the main problems with those theories and develop an alternative approach that is more attuned to the processes of cultural exchange that take place in civil society and the public sphere. Finally, I identify important traces of mass society theory that continue to linger in current approaches to the public sphere, and I propose a more culturalist fix to the idea of mass-mediated public communication.

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