Is Kammen Resisting Adorno?

Kammen does something well worth admiring in this book: he puts forth a new model for us to envision popular culture, mass culture, and "proto-mass culture"—the point of transition. But sometimes I find this model convincing and original, and sometimes I don’t. In particular I’m troubled by what feels like “Diet Adorno”—that is, Adorno minus critique.

I like when Kammen emphasizes the roles of things like standardization and technology as catalysts for the move from popular or proto-mass culture to mass culture. He makes a strong point when he points out how regionalism and so on meant that, until the mid-twentieth century, the audience for culture couldn’t be as mass as it was after standardization. He suggests that the move from popular culture to mass culture was predicated in part on overcoming race/class distinctions and creating a mass audience, and that was accomplished through the mass production brought about by technology. Cool, I’m down.

But I don’t like Kammen’s active/passive distinction. It’s so troubled that Kammen himself has to keep revising it and offering provisos every few pages. His basic assertion is that popular culture was a more participatory, active culture than mass culture, which, to follow, minimizes audience participation and makes audiences more passive. The most vivid discussion of this is that passage from Aldous Huxley: “In the past when people needed recreation they were compelled to a great extent to provide it for themselves. [. . .] [But today] Recreation is provided ready-made by enormous joint-stock companies. The play-instinct, which found active expression in the past, is now passive” (88-89).

This idea makes good sense, but it’s a fairly typical view of popular culture vs. mass culture. It’s basically exactly what Adorno says in his “Culture Industry Reconsidered” essay from 1967. Adorno tells us that he favors the term “culture industry” “in order to exclude from the outset the interpretation favorable to its advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art. From the latter the culture industry must be distinguished in the extreme” (98). Adorno insists, in closing, “The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object” (99).

Isn’t this the same basic active/passive distinction that Kammen makes, that Huxley makes? Then why do we need a new model for it? Kammen’s active/passive binary just seems like a de-politicized version of Adorno. He makes the same active/passive point that Adorno makes but without the critique or the political urgency. Adorno is concerned about the passivity of the culture industry and says it’s domination. Kammen, on the other hand, seems almost to celebrate the overcoming of regionalism, etc. by mass culture. My question is this: why does Kammen stress the active/passive distinction of popular/mass culture but want to avoid the “commodification” point or “conspiratorial view” of the neo-Marxists (Adorno, et. al.) that he derides? (46). Isn’t it a problem that mass culture has made mass audiences massively passive?

And incidentally, if you want to talk about media and activity/passivity, you want to talk about McLuhan. His models of “hot” and “cool” media stress a point that Kammen makes: “The most meaningful distinction may very well be between active and passive audiences for a particular medium rather than between lowbrow and elite” (91, emphasis added).