I am very interested in how Kammen accounts for the extent of participatory of people in culture. In American Culture, American Taste, Kammen reveals two debates in 1950s and 1980s when they discuss the degree of passivity/interactivity of people to mass culture. This topic reappears in the books we’ve read this semester. Both Kammen and earlier, Levine, see the immediate active reactions of the audience toward a performance as some kind of characteristic of popular culture. For Levine, the elites’ disciplining of audience behavior led to the transition of the status of Shakespeare from popular entertainment to high art. Kammen sensed a danger here. For him, though the passivity of audience in front of high culture indicates decorum, the audience’s lack of interaction of mass culture equals a passive acceptance of mediocre cultural products, which implies an ideological inversion. One reason he provides to this phenomenon is that audiences’ genuine diversity is often ignored.

I am not so sure about the situation over ten years ago when this book was published. But I find Kammen’s quote from Herbert I. Schiller seems quite fit the circumstances:
“The audience does count… The managers of the cultural industries are acutely sensitive to the moods and feelings of the nation’s many publics. It is their job, for which they are paid handsomely, to make day-by-day, if not hour-by-hour, assessments of these feelings. When they are mistaken, as they frequently are, they lose their jobs.” (90) Imagine how this saying would strengthen Steven Johnson’s argument that pop culture is getting increasingly complex! As Johnson demonstrates, popular culture is growing more and more sophisticated in the last century, which in a way proves that in this interaction between consumer and producer, with the boosts brought by technology, both sides are taking progressive steps.

I just think the agency of the audience in front of cultural objects is more complex than just be generalized as “passive acceptance”. Raymond Williams’ formulation of the simultaneous pressure of dominant and counter-hegemonic currents is relevant to this inquiry: The most interesting and difficult part of any cultural analysis, in complex societies, is that which seeks to grasp the hegemonic in its active and formative but also its transformational processes. Works of art are often especially important as sources of this complex evidence. (Marxism and Literature 113-14)