New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society by Tony Bennett & Lawrence Grossberg & Meaghan Morris

Author:Tony Bennett & Lawrence Grossberg & Meaghan Morris
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-05-28T16:00:00+00:00

Mass

In the early Middle Ages, mass had only a liturgical sense. But as early as the C14, it took on the sense, in such diverse fields as painting and the military and domestic economy, of forming or gathering individual pieces together. By the C15, it had a certain ambiguity, referring both to “an amorphous quantity of material” and to “a kind of matter capable of being shaped.” In the C17, it referred to “the generality of mankind; the main body of a race or nation” and, in the eC18, it was applied to human beings, particularly “a large number … collected in a narrow space” or “a multitude of persons mentally viewed as forming an aggregate in which their individuality is lost.” It was but a small step to identify the mass, in the eC19, not with the entire population but with “the popular or lower orders. ”

The term seems initially to be a simply descriptive one, referring to a substantial entity, such as a large mass of material, or to a large number of persons collected together. However, it also has a powerful evaluative dimension. Most usages centrally involve the idea of the way that being part of a mass involves the loss of individuality. This concern has deep historical roots. As early as the 1830s, there is anxiety that as “civilization” advances, power passes increasingly from the individual to the mass – to the point where the individual may get lost in the crowd. To be a member of a mass society or a mass culture is also to be addressed by powerful systems of communications and mass media; the question then is to what extent, in these circumstances, people can still properly exercise their rational faculties.

In such a society it is often argued that the mass of the people are corrupted by the blandishments of mass culture and may be governed more by their impulses than by any rational convictions. For elite cultural commentators, the problem posed by the massification of society is that it threatens to destroy the very foundation of the Enlightenment tradition of critical thought. This tradition is premised on the notion of the self-conscious individual taking informed and rational decisions. By contrast, the masses are seen as irrational, easily swayed, governed by their emotions, and, indeed, as subject to forms of mass hysteria, best analyzed by new disciplines such as that of mass-psychology.

To speak of the rise of mass society is also to refer to key processes in the rise of modernity. All the constituent features of what came to be understood as “massification “–, urbanization, industrialization, commercialization, and standardization – are central to the emergence of the mass cultures of modernity. The (un)natural home of all this was the city, now swollen with alienated and anomic crowds of those displaced from the secure communities of the rural past, and vulnerable, in their misery and confusion, to the manipulative power of the new mass media. These vulnerable masses are, of course, usually envisaged

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