Post-Sixties Narratives as Cultural Criticism by Lin Xiang

Author:Lin Xiang [Xiang, Lin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology, Social Theory
ISBN: 9781000040005
Google: Y4vVDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 48806039
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-03-09T01:40:14+00:00

The cultural mass of the 1960s

What is special about Bell’s post-Sixties narrative is that he creates the trope of “cultural mass.” He uses the traditional trope of “mass” in the New York intellectuals’ mass culture critiques, but he changes the meaning of this word. “Mass” originally means the majority of the consumer’s society who passively receive what is offered by the cultural elite. Or, it may mean the lowbrows, the uneducated, who lack tastes and standards to pass judgment upon cultural products. But in Bell’s “cultural mass,” “mass” does not refer to the majority of society, neither in terms of number nor in terms of its intellectual level. Bell gives his definition of cultural mass as follows:

By “cultural mass” I mean, in the first instance, an audience large enough to sustain a world of cultural production on its own. In an occupational sense, this cultural mass would consist primarily of those persons in the knowledge and communications industries who, with their families, would number several million persons.

Sociologically, this cultural mass has three components. It comprises not the creators of culture but the transmitters: those working in higher education, publishing, magazines, broadcast media, theater, and museums, who process and influence the reception of serious cultural products. It is in itself large enough to be a market group which, as writers, magazine editors, movie-makers, musicians, and so forth, produces the popular materials for the wider mass-culture audience.

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