Everyone Has Access to Culture

While reading the Bourdieu I noticed a connection to Russell Lynes’s “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow” article: the idea that mass media has made culture available to all. Lynes suggested this in his piece in 1949, and Bourdieu quotes a 1968 article by Suzanne Langer that also makes such a claim. I want to look at these two passages and consider the conditions under which it might have made sense in 1949 or 1968 to make such an argument, which I think today we (for good reasons) are probably very skeptical about.

In his piece Lynes talks about how the nervous highbrow wants “to protect the arts from the culture-mongers,” and Lynes suggests that “The fact that nowaways everyone has access to culture through schools and colleges, through the press, radio, and museums, disturbs him deeply” (21).

In Bourdieu’s book he quotes Suzanne Langer’s 1968 essay “On Significance in Music,” which makes the same case about accessibility of culture and does so almost in the exact same terms that Lynes uses: “In the past, the masses did not have access to art [. . .]. But now that everyone can read, go to museums, listen to great music, at least on the radio, the judgment of the masses about these things has become a reality” (qtd. in Bourdieu 31).

Like I suggested earlier, today most of us are skeptical about the claim that everyone has access to culture; we might respond to the claims of Lynes and Langer with nostalgia and proclaim them optimistic but a bit naïve. Everyone can read? Everyone can go to college? Everyone can go to museums? Those broad claims seem unlikely to me, as does the smaller claim that people who use technologies like television, radio, or internet have access to “culture” or Culture in the same way that elites did in the past. So, how does this make sense? Why did Lynes and Langer make such claims?

Lynes’s essay is very late forties, and his claim about accessibility is grounded in that period, too. For instance, did you notice that Lynes mentions school and college in 1949 whereas Langer didn’t in 1968? Part of this has to be the G.I. Bill, right? Invented in 1944, the Bill offered education benefits to all those who’d returned from WWII, so in 1949 it’s understandable that Lynes felt like anybody could go to college. The fact is, more people probably were going to college in 1949 than ever before. Still, Lynes’s claim is misguided: radios were not super cheap in 1949, and television sets would have been prohibitively expensive. And as Levine tells us, ever since the early part of the 20^th century, dirty and otherwise undesirable people were not welcome in museums—not everyone could go.

Langer doesn’t mention education or college in 1968. It might be for no reason at all, or it might be because by then people were more skeptical about the idea that anyone could go to college. Her emphasizing radio makes some sense: in 1968 cheap and portable Japan-made transistor radios were becoming available, FM programming was around the corner, and there were enough 50, 000-watt AM stations in the United States to reach not every, but most corners of the country. On the other hand, her claim that “everyone can read” seems uncomfortably misguided. On Wikipedia I found a chart that suggests that in 1968 about 35% of the world’s population was illiterate. We can assume that Langer is referring to Americans only, but even if she is, we know perfectly well that not everyone in the United States was literate in 1968: what about the kid in the Detroit ghetto? What about the middle-aged farmer in rural Mississippi?

Today the flaws in the claim of “universal access to culture” seem obvious, but the question remains, why did Lynes and Langer make such claims? Did the “newness” of media just overwhelm them or something?