culture is a process...

One of the things that I appreciated about Kammen’s text was the way in which he tried to make sure that it could be useful to an academic and non-academic audience. I thought that the ways he incorporated theorists/theories was done in an accessible way, that if you new about Adorno, Williams, etc. you could take what you knew of their work to enrich what you were reading, but if you had never encountered them before you could also understand. His conversational tone—“By now the nonspecialist may very well feel overwhelmed by a surfeit of citations and contradictory points of view. If such browsers are still bearing with me, they surely must sense that the study of popular culture is clearly thriving in institutions of higher learning” (6)—made his text really easy to follow since he would have tons of evidence but then states his conclusions from that evidence in very plain and concrete language. I thought that the work was an interesting hybrid of theory, interpretation, and explication that epitomizes, for me, what a good cultural analysis should do.

I thought that his discussion of the origins of the division of brows coming with the proliferation of print materials, when he brought up Ohmann and Radway, was really interesting. The Lady’s Magazine, published in England from 1770-1837, was a unique publication in which the works of its readership were published alongside the work of authors such as Coleridge. But more interesting was the sentiment that was echoed in its editors’ notes continually through its nearly 70-year long run, that self-improvement must spring from “laudable curiosity”:

Criticism… is not that process of abstract reasoning, which disdains the aid of facts or observations…. It is exercised in its most simple when, after we have perused a literary production, or witnessed the representation of a dramatic piece, or surveyed a work of art, we call to mind what has pleased and what has displeased us in those performances; but when, from a laudable curiosity, or a desire of being enabled to explain the reasons of our admiration or our disappointment, we attentively examine those reasons, we rise into regions of philosophy, and are induced to conclude that only those principles which are founded on this solid basis can form the standard of true taste.

This term, echoed in Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy—arguably the most elitist text ever published—emphasizes the idea that “culture” is not a static object to be achieved, but a process and a becoming. The fact that purchasing publications in order to facilitate that process is just a fact of social mobility. And maybe the date of social stratification could be bumped back a little bit further...

1. In spite of Kammen's efforts, I am not sure I completely get all the distinctions between popular
culture, mass culture, proto-mass culture, folk culture, vernacular culture and common culture.
Is it just a quantitative distinction? Is it just a class distinction? Is it just really about TV? It does not help his efforts that all these types of culture exist at the same time. People still bowl and play golf and go to amusement parks. There are still regional cultural differences. There are still
massive state fairs. Shows at Disney World always include a lame audience participation component. On the other hand, before the 1890s people went to square dances and to saloons. I also find unconvincing his argument that acting rowdily at a Wild West Show or radio-listening and movie-going--the quintessential entertainment activities of the 1930s and 1940s--are truly participatory. The concern that arises with all this overlapping is that a critic can find almost
anything he wants to critique in any time period.

2. In Kammen's view mass culture did not really last that long. It began in the 1950s and using own criteria it is clear that by the time he wrote the book it was disappearing. (Johnson) Electronic mailing lists, contrary to Kammen, spell the end of mass culture. They enable catalogs to be sent out to the tiniest niche markets. Surfing the Web, because of the proliferation of sites, is not a mass activity and it is not without its participatory aspects. Was it really worth all the attention and vitriol directed against it?

3. Kammen's typical and justified complaint is "Not so fast." You think consumer culture has arisen by the 1900s. "Not so fast." You think mass culture had arisen by the 1920s. "Not so fast." The historical record shows a much more complex development. Ideology, whether democratic, nationalist or Marxist, obscured this more variegated situation. Another factor is that when
"literary types" look at history they look for the unified symbolic structures of a finely wrought literary work instead of seeing the messiness of history.

4. Is commodification so bad? It would have been more participatory and "authentic" if I had
played my own blues music, but since I have no musical talent it was much better for me to
buy Muddy Water's LPs and listen to them. Admittedly Muddy was underpaid for his efforts and he should not have been, but there is no intrinsic link between this and commodification. Elvis was not underpaid or at least not nearly to the same extent. Before commodification most humans lived most of their lives literally covered in shit. To compare dark Satanic malls to dark Satanic mills is quite a stretch.

5. Even at the end of the semester I am still a "level up" elitist of sorts. I think we should start
with the great works of literature and and add in those works of popular culture that meet perhaps somewhat relaxed standards. Some will make the cut. Most will not. "Casablanca" will. "Porky's Revenge" will not.

Taste, Consume... Indegestion

First, I have to admit, after reading Kammen's VISUAL SHOCK a few years ago, I was more than excited to get in to the nuts and bolts of American Culture American Tastes. I don't want to sound too much like a fan-boy, but VISUAL SHOCK was one of the few cultural studies books I could get my hands on while in Korea, and it's a book I keep coming back to in terms of the direction and style I hope to implement in my own writing. This is not completely unrelated to my post. One of the streams that has run through almost all the texts for class is this relationship between how owning something (purchasing it vs. creating it) has an invariable impact the ways we construct our identities. I'm reminded of something one of my good friends once told me about meeting new people... She said “It doesn't matter what the person IS like, what matters is WHAT they like.”
In American Culture, American Tastes, Kammen is interested in this very relationship. I'm drawn to page 66, where Kammen states that, “By the 1920's, however, four decades of intensive immigration had opened the eyes of manufacturers and marketing people to the process of Americanization as an opportunity for expansive consumerism.” The impact of modernity upon personal identity, and it could be said collective identity (the way we identify with others), is largely hinged upon this ideas of social and relational designation through consumption.
Within democratic capitalism, its striking at how essential consumption is in designating not only class, but things like religion, sexuality, and ethnicity as well. However, sticking with just one of these, for the sake of brevity and the title of the book, let's stick to this idea of “American.” The general consensus I've gathered from the text is that this shift in niche marketing to immigrants and children of immigrants redefined what it means to be “American “within the nation's collective consciousness. No longer did American mean someone with citizenship who held a set of core ideals similar to those of other Americans. To be American meant, and I would argue still means, to consume and participate within Fordism and the inevitable Post-Fordism that followed. The national identity of those hoping to exist outside such a system has traditionally been called in to debate, slandered, and excised from the healthy body-politic. Black-listed, harassed, or even exiled. How democratic is consumer hyper-capitalism if it doesn't allow for anyone or anything to exist outside of it?
I can't believe I'm going to end my last post of the year with a quote from the flawed film 12 Monkeys, but... Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt's character) while locked down in the asylum erupts, “There's the television. It's all right there - all right there. Look, listen, kneel, pray. Commercials! We're not productive anymore. We don't make things anymore. It's all automated. What are we *for* then? We're consumers, Jim. Yeah. Okay, okay. Buy a lot of stuff, you're a good citizen. But if you don't buy a lot of stuff, if you don't, what are you then, I ask you? What? Mentally *ill*. Fact, Jim, fact - if you don't buy things - toilet paper, new cars, computerized yo-yos, electrically-operated sexual devices, stereo systems with brain-implanted headphones, screwdrivers with miniature built-in radar devices, voice-activated computers... “

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).

to what end?

Back in 2002 I sat in on a reading group of some students in the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design which included a couple books by Neil Postman. We read Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology and another collection of essays. Given that Johnson mentions a different book, my comments might not apply. Postman was asking TO WHAT END are these forms of media the means?

We can criticize their content -- the games teach us how to pragmatically negotiate the achievement of social rewards (commodity fetishism). Was anyone else horrified at the guy who spent all his "leisure" hours clicking to virtually mine ore, make tools to sell, and purchase a new virtual home? CLEARLY, the video game gives him something his dead end job doesn't (the illusion/feeling of progress). This doesn't mean it should be celebrated; it should be seen as a pathological symptom of life in the garbage heap of late capitalism.

Postman followed in the footsteps of EP Thompson who saw oppressive social relationships embedded in the technologies themselves (as did the luddites who resisted them) and the way they became the foundation for further entrenchments of class domination. His focus was more on how culture now tends to be determined more by its participation and dissemination through high technological means (and produced by those with the means to high technology). His book was about the social and ecological relationships on which these technologies were based, NOT how these technologies and virtual entertainments can teach us how to better negotiate the world (and on its terms). Their goals are opposite.

Our kids supposedly get cognitive exercise while electronic waste floods the developing world with heavy metals doing actual brain damage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_waste

My question is really: who cares? What are the problems these games are helping us to solve? At best they come closer to mimicking the life we already live but presenting it in a way that obscures our REAL relation to it *cough*Althusser*cough*.

Here are two "false morels" a couple friends and I found today in Frick Park (this great 3 dimensional and topographically challenging interface with hypertextures and multi-sensory engagement). We were, of course, looking for REAL Morels. These false ones will put you in the hospital if you improperly ID them. The humidity conditions weren't right (although they ARE growing further away from the dry city).

Have You Fed Your Real Baby Today?

“Games are teaching critical thinking skills and a sense of yourself as an agent having to make choices and live with those choices.” – James Paul Gee

Although I was quite intrigued with Johnson’s explanation of the complexity of video games and the opportunity video-game users have of practicing, albeit subconsciously, critical thinking, I still remain skeptic that popular culture is making society smarter. Only several weeks ago, a couple in South Korea was arrested for neglecting their 3-year-old baby daughter, who died of starvation. What shocked me the most about this case was that the couple had devoted countless hours raising a virtual girl character online to the extent that they barely found the time to feed their real daughter. This is pretty unsettling to anyone, regardless if you are a parent or not.

Although I am sure that Johnson would call the noted case an outlier in his research, the very fact that cases such as these are a reality causes me to question whether the critical skills acquired through video games can be transferred to the real-world setting. I definitely agree with Johnson that video games have increased in sophistication, and I am constantly amazed by how realistic and involving these systems have become, but there is no denying the fact that technology is also causing mental, and also physical, atrophy to a certain extent. I believe that many people have become so captivated and mesmerized by the sophistication of technology that they have fallen victim to apathy and complacency, spending countless time mastering complicated digital objects, yet unable (or even unwilling) to sort out real-life problems, some of which are much less complicated.

What I believe Johnson leaves out are the negative consequences of the rising complexity and sophistication of technology. If more and more time needs to be devoted to adjusting to newer and better technology in order to achieve the rewards for doing so, does that mean less time is devoted to confronting the demands of real life? To me, it is all about transferability, and it seems as though sophisticated technology has made people desensitized to the real-world instead of enhancing applicable critical skills.

At first I found it appealing when Steven Johnson says in the introduction that he is not going to take a symbolic approach at the cultural objects, like what most cultural studies do--to establish a symbolic relationship between the work and some spirit of the age. He suggests that the cultural object is not a metaphor for the system, but more like an output or a result, and he would try to systemically diagram the competing forces rather than to decode them. (10) I thought he might be able to come up with a method of cultural studies that can go beyond that sort of ‘symptomatic interpretation’, which oftentimes neglects the specificity of cultural objects and reaches a reading that they are all expressions of the social configuration.

But I was disappointed when I saw the string Johnson uses to thread all the different media is just "the cognitive benefit". And this benefit of popular culture is being analyzed as an isolated process. While "cognition" refers to "a faculty for the processing of information", the question of what kind of information is being processed is more crucial. Ideologized information or ture information to the real world? Johnson uses "man-made weather system" as an analogy to demonstrate what he thinks of culture--it serves as a metaphor for his approach in return--the cognitive complexity only reflects higher level of self-recreation: there is no man-made weather system in real.

In justifying the popular culture, this approach focuses too much on the neurological appetites of the brain, but not the economical aspect of the culture industry, as he promised. He might want to remind people who are there creating these order and meaning that our increasingly stronger cognitive muscles are responding to?