Cultural Capital, Mass Culture & Opportunity

Questions about meaning and value when it comes to culture can be especially difficult to answer these days. What one may view as mass or low culture another may see as avant-garde high culture. Because we live in a world where technology has made communication so fast and knowledge so accessible, we are bombarded with new images and ideas about culture everyday.

In the past, high culture was a more universal concept. Everyone “knew” it included Shakespeare, Mozart, and Rembrandt. People that were familiar with these pieces of high culture held the cultural capital of the time. The flow of ideas about what constituted high culture was a much slower process and the “canon” of culture was constructed over time. At a certain point around the time when television was becoming increasingly popular a sort of new emerging mass-culture began. In all reality there’s probably always been a mass-culture, but sociologists started to take notice and coin some of the phrases we’re still using today to talk about culture. At the time (1950’s) for authors like Dwight Macdonald it seemed almost a moral issue. In his book, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, Macdonald considers mass culture to be vulgar and insipid. In his mind, there are only two cultures and the high one is the one to aspire to. “Mass culture began as, and to some extent still is, a parasitic, a cancerous growth on High Culture” (Macdonald, p. 23). Macdonald tells us what makes up mass culture – comic books, television, and any cheaply-made product, to let us know what is bad. The theory seems to be that because of its “mass-ness” it is evil. He calls the people who make products in order to profit form the masses- “The Lords of kitsch.” His arguments can feel stuffy and overly dramatic at times, “There is slowly emerging a tepid, Middlebrow Culture that threatens to engulf everything in its spreading ooze”(Macdonald, p. 27), however I would argue his real fear is our loss of integrity around expectations. He is concerned with “…the passivity of the public itself, which doesn’t insist on better Mass Cultural products”(Macdonald, p. 34). He goes on to say:

The Lords of kitsch sell culture to the masses. It is a debased trivial culture that voids both the deep realities (sex, death, failure, tragedy) and also the simple, spontaneous pleasures, since realities would be too real and the pleasures to lively to induce what Mr. Seldes calls ‘the mood of consent’ i.e. a narcotized acceptance of Mass Culture and of the commodities it sells as a substitute for the unsettling and unpredictable (hence unsaleable) joy, tragedy, wit, change, originality, and beauty of real life. The masses, debauched by several generations of this sort of thing, in turn come to demand trivial and comfortable cultural products. Which came first, the chicken or the egg, the mass demand or its satisfaction (and further stimulation) is a question as academic as it is unanswerable. The engine is reciprocating and shows no signs of running down.

It would be hard to argue that his prediction has not come true, but what do we do with it?
Today we have an opportunity to look at mass-culture differently. We have the opportunity to critique each piece of popular culture as is. We can create a framework that considers “high” and “low” all in the same space without sweeping generalizations. We don’t have to box ourselves into thinking like “Shakespeare is good” and “Myspace is bad.” We can challenge ourselves to think about what might be helpful to learning and education in both.

I recognize that many people would be uncomfortable with the idea of judging Shakespeare and Myspace in the same space, but if we can create a framework with integrity why not? I would argue that we as educators have an exciting open road ahead of us because we’re in a place and time where all culture and learning is fair game.