3 •

A

Theory of

Culture

Mass

D w i g h t M a c d o n a l d

F o r a b o u t a century, W e s t e r n culture has really been t w o cultures: the traditional

kind - let us call it 'High C u l t u r e ' - that is chronicled in the t e x t b o o k s , and a ' M a s s

C u l t u r e ' manufactured wholesale for the m a r k e t . In the old art f o r m s , the artisans

of M a s s Culture have long been at w o r k : in the novel, the line stretches from E u g e n e

Sue to Lloyd C. D o u g l a s ; in m u s i c , from Offenbach to T i n - P a n Alley; in art from

the c h r o m o to Maxfield Parrish and N o r m a n R o c k w e l l ; in a r c h i t e c t u r e , from

V i c t o r i a n G o t h i c to suburban T u d o r . M a s s Culture has also developed new media

of its o w n , into which the serious artist rarely ventures: r a d i o , the m o v i e s , c o m i c

b o o k s , detective stories, science fiction, television.

It is sometimes called 'Popular C u l t u r e ' , ' but I think ' M a s s Culture' a m o r e

accurate term, since its distinctive m a r k is that it is solely and directly an article for

mass c o n s u m p t i o n , like chewing gum. A w o r k of High C u l t u r e is o c c a s i o n a l l y

p o p u l a r , after all, though this is increasingly rare. T h u s D i c k e n s was even m o r e

popular than his c o n t e m p o r a r y , G. A. H e n t y , the difference being that he was an

artist, c o m m u n i c a t i n g his individual vision to o t h e r individuals, while Henty was an

impersonal manufacturer of an impersonal c o m m o d i t y for the masses.

T h e historical reasons for the growth of M a s s Culture since the early 1 8 0 0 s are well

k n o w n . Political d e m o c r a c y and popular education b r o k e down the old upper-class

m o n o p o l y of culture. Business enterprise found a profitable m a r k e t in the cultural

d e m a n d s of the newly a w a k e n e d m a s s e s , and the advance of technology made

possible the cheap production of b o o k s , periodicals, pictures, m u s i c , and furniture,

in sufficient quantities to satisfy this m a r k e t . M o d e r n t e c h n o l o g y also created new

F r o m Rosenberg, B. and W h i t e , D. W. ( e d s ) , Mass Culture: The popular arts in America,

M a c m i l l a n , New Y o r k , 1 9 5 7 , pp. 5 9 - 7 3 .

T h e N a t u r e o f Mass C u l t u r e

2 2

A Theory of Mass Culture

23

media such as the movies and television which are specially well adapted to mass

manufacture and distribution.

T h e phenomenon is thus peculiar to modern times and differs radically from what

was hitherto known as art or culture. It is true that M a s s Culture began a s , and to

some extent still is, a parasitic, a c a n c e r o u s growth on High Culture. As Clement

Greenberg pointed out in 'Avant-garde and kitsch' {Partisan Review, Fall, 1 9 3 9 ) :

' T h e precondition of kitsch (a G e r m a n term for " M a s s C u l t u r e " ) is the availability

close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions,

and perfected self-conscious kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends.' T h e

c o n n e c t i o n , however, is not that of the leaf and the branch but rather that of the

caterpillar and the leaf. Kitsch 'mines' High Culture the way improvident fron-

tiersmen mine the soil, extracting its riches and putting nothing b a c k . A l s o , as kitsch

develops, it begins to draw on its own past, and some of it evolves so far away from

High Culture as to appear quite disconnected from it.

It is also true that M a s s Culture is to some extent a c o n t i n u a t i o n of the old Folk

Art which until the Industrial Revolution was the culture of the c o m m o n people, but

here, t o o , the differences are m o r e striking than the similarities. F o l k Art grew from

below. It was a s p o n t a n e o u s , a u t o c h t h o n o u s expression of the people, shaped by

themselves, pretty much without the benefit of High C u l t u r e , to suit their own

needs. M a s s Culture is imposed from a b o v e . It is fabricated by technicians hired by

businessmen; its audiences are passive c o n s u m e r s , their participation limited to the

choice between buying and not buying. T h e Lords of kitsch, in short, exploit the

cultural needs of the masses in order to m a k e a profit and/or to maintain their class

rule - in C o m m u n i s t c o u n t r i e s , only the second purpose o b t a i n s . (It is very different

to satisfy popular tastes, as R o b e r t Burns' poetry did, and to exploit t h e m , as

Hollywood does.) Folk Art was the people's own institution, their private little

garden walled off from the great formal park of their masters' High Culture. But

Mass Culture breaks down the w a l l , integrating the masses into a debased form of

High Culture and thus becoming an instrument of political d o m i n a t i o n . If one had

no other data to go o n , the nature of M a s s Culture would reveal capitalism to be

an exploitative class society and not the h a r m o n i o u s c o m m o n w e a l t h it is sometimes

alleged to be. T h e same goes even more strongly for Soviet C o m m u n i s m and its

special kind of M a s s Culture.

Mass C u l t u r e : U S S R

Everybody' k n o w s that America is a land of M a s s C u l t u r e , but it is not so generally

recognized that so is the Soviet U n i o n . Certainly not by the C o m m u n i s t leaders, one

or wr.om has contemptuously observed that the American people need not fear the

Peace-loving Soviet state which has absolutely no desire to deprive them of their

C o c a - C o l a and c o m i c b o o k s . Y e t the fact is that the U S S R is even more a land of

Mass Culture than is the U S A . T h i s is less easily recognizable because their M a s s

Culture is in form just the opposite of o u r s , being one of p r o p a g a n d a and pedagogy

24

Dwight Macdonald

rather than of entertainment. N o n e the less, it has the essential quality of M a s s , as

against High or F o l k , Culture: it is manufactured for mass consumption by

technicians employed by the ruling class and is not an expression of either the

individual artist or the c o m m o n people themselves. Like our o w n , it exploits rather

than satisfies the cultural needs of the masses, though for political rather than

c o m m e r c i a l reasons. Its quality is even lower: our Supreme C o u r t building is

tasteless and p o m p o u s , but not to the lunatic degree of the proposed new Palace of

the Soviets - a huge wedding cake of c o l u m n s mounting up to an eighty-foot statue

of Lenin; Soviet movies are so much duller and cruder than our own that even the

American c o m r a d e s shun t h e m ; the childish level of serious Soviet magazines

devoted to matters of art or philosophy has to be read to be believed, and as for

the popular press, it is as if Colonel M c C o r m i c k ran every periodical in A m e r i c a .

G r e s h a m ' s Law i n C u l t u r e

T h e separation of Folk Art and High Culture in fairly watertight c o m p a r t m e n t s

corresponded to the sharp line once drawn between the c o m m o n people and the

aristocracy. T h e eruption of the masses on to the political stage has broken down

this c o m p a r t m e n t a t i o n , with disastrous cultural results. W h e r e a s Folk Art had its

own special quality, M a s s Culture is at best a vulgarized reflection of High Culture.

And whereas High Culture could formerly ignore the m o b and seek to please only

the cognoscenti, it must n o w compete with M a s s Culture or be merged into it.

T h e problem is acute in the United States and not just because a prolific M a s s

Culture exists here. If there were a clearly defined cultural elite, then the masses

could have their kitsch and the elite could have its High Culture, with everybody

happy. But the boundary line is blurred. A statistically significant part of the

population, I venture to guess, is chronically confronted with a choice between

going to the movies or to a c o n c e r t , between reading T o l s t o y or a detective story,

between looking at old masters or at a TV s h o w ; i.e. the pattern of their cultural

lives is 'open' to the point of being p o r o u s . G o o d art competes with kitsch, serious

ideas compete with commercialized formulae - and the advantage lies all on one

side. T h e r e seems to be a G r e s h a m ' s L a w in cultural as well as monetary circulation:

bad stuff drives out the g o o d , since it is more easily understood and enjoyed. It is

this facility of access which at o n c e sells kitsch on a wide market and also prevents

it from achieving q u a l i t y .

2

Clement Greenberg writes that the special aesthetic

quality of kitsch is that it 'predigests art for the spectator and spares him effort,

provides him with a shortcut to the pleasures of art that detours what is necessarily

difficult in genuine art' because it includes the spectator's reactions in the w o r k of

art itself instead of forcing him to m a k e his own responses. T h u s 'Eddie Guest and

the Indian Love Lyrics are m o r e " p o e t i c " than T. S. E l i o t and S h a k e s p e a r e . ' And s o ,

t o o , our 'collegiate G o t h i c ' such as the Harkness Quadrangle at Y a l e is m o r e

picturesquely G o t h i c than C h a r t r e s , and a pinup girl smoothly airbrushed by Petty

is more sexy than a real naked w o m a n .

A Theory of Mass Culture

25

W h e n to this ease of consumption is added kitsch's ease of production because of

its standardized nature, its prolific growth is easy to understand. It threatens High

Culture by its sheer pervasiveness, its brutal, overwhelming quantity. T h e upper

classes, w h o begin by using it to make money from the crude tastes of the masses

and to dominate them politically, end by finding their own culture attacked and even

threatened with destruction by the instrument they have thoughtlessly employed.

( T h e same irony may be observed in modern politics, where most swords seem to

have two edges; thus Nazism began as a tool of the big bourgeoisie and the army

junkers but ended by using them as its t o o l s . )

H o m o g e n i z e d C u l t u r e

Like nineteenth-century capitalism, M a s s Culture is a d y n a m i c , revolutionary force,

breaking down the old barriers of class, tradition, taste, and dissolving all cultural

distinctions. It mixes and scrambles everything together, producing what might be

called homogenized culture, after another American a c h i e v e m e n t , the homogeniz-

ation process that distributes the globules of cream evenly throughout the milk

instead of allowing them to float separately on t o p . It thus destroys all values, since

value judgments imply discrimination. M a s s Culture is very, very d e m o c r a t i c : it

absolutely refuses to discriminate against, or between, anything or anybody. All is

grist to its mill, and all c o m e s out finely ground indeed.

Consider Life, a typical homogenized mass-circulation magazine. It appears on

the m a h o g a n y library tables of the rich, the glass end-tables of the middle-class and

the oilcloth-covered kitchen tables of the p o o r . Its c o n t e n t s are as thoroughly

homogenized as its circulation. T h e same issue will contain a serious exposition of

atomic theory alongside a disquisition on R i t a H a y w o r t h ' s love life; photos of

starving K o r e a n children picking garbage from the ruins of Pusan and of sleek

models wearing adhesive brassieres; an editorial hailing Bertrand Russell on his

eightieth birthday ('A G R E A T M I N D I S S T I L L A N N O Y I N G A N D A D O R N I N G

O U R A G E ' ) across from a full-page p h o t o of a housewife arguing with an umpire

at a baseball game ( ' M O M G E T S T H U M B ' ) ; a cover a n n o u n c i n g in the same size

type ' A N E W F O R E I G N P O L I C Y , B Y J O H N F O S T E R D U L L E S ' and ' K E R I M A :

H E R M A R A T H O N KISS I S A M O V I E S E N S A T I O N ' ; nine c o l o r pages o f Renoirs

plus a m e m o i r by his son, followed by a full-page picture of a roller-skating horse.

The advertisements, of course, provide even m o r e scope for the editor's

homogenizing talents, as when a full-page photo of a ragged Bolivian peon

grinningly drunk on c o c a leaves (which Mr Luce's c o n s c i e n t i o u s reporters tell us he

chews to narcotize his chronic hunger pains) appears o p p o s i t e an ad of a pretty,

smiling, well-dressed American mother with her t w o pretty, smiling, well-dressed

children (a boy and a girl, of course - children are always homogenized in American

ads) looking raptly a t a clown o n a T V set ( ' R C A V I C T O R B R I N G S Y O U A N E W

K I N D O F T E L E V I S I O N - S U P E R S E T S W I T H " P I C T U R E P O W E R ' " ) . T h e peon

26

Du/ight Macdonald

would doubtless find the juxtaposition piquant if he could afford a copy of Life

w h i c h , fortunately for the G o o d N e i g h b o r Policy, he c a n n o t .

A c a d e m i c i s m a n d A v a n t - g a r d i s m

Until about 1 9 3 0 , High Culture tried to defend itself against the e n c r o a c h m e n t s of

M a s s Culture in two opposite ways: A c a d e m i c i s m , or an attempt to c o m p e t e by

imitation; and Avant-gardism, or a withdrawal from c o m p e t i t i o n .

Academicism is kitsch for the elite: spurious High Culture that is outwardly the

real thing but actually as much a manufactured article as the cheaper cultural goods

produced for the masses. It is recognized at the time for what it is only by the Avant-

gardists. A generation or t w o later, its real nature is understood by everyone and

it quietly drops into the same oblivion as its franker sister-under-the-skin. E x a m p l e s

are painters such as Bougereau and R o s a B o n h e u r , critics such as E d m u n d C l a r e n c e

Stedman and E d m u n d G o s s e , the B e a u x - A r t s school of architecture, c o m p o s e r s such

as the late Sir E d w a r d E l g a r , poets such as Stephen Phillips, and novelists such as

Alphonse Daudet, Arnold B e n n e t t , J a m e s Branch Cabell and Somerset M a u g h a m .

T h e significance of the Avant-garde m o v e m e n t (by which I mean poets such as

R i m b a u d , novelists such as J o y c e , c o m p o s e r s such as Stravinsky, and painters such

as Picasso) is that it simply refused to c o m p e t e . Rejecting Academicism - and thus,

at a second r e m o v e , also M a s s Culture - it made a desperate attempt to fence off

some area where the serious artist could still function. It created a new

c o m p a r t m e n t a t i o n of culture, on the basis of an intellectual rather than a social elite.

T h e attempt was r e m a r k a b l y successful: to it we owe almost everything that is living

in the art of the last fifty or so years. In fact, the High Culture of our times is pretty

much identical with Avant-gardism. T h e m o v e m e n t c a m e at a time ( 1 8 9 0 - 1 9 3 0 )

when bourgeois values were being challenged both culturally and politically. (In this

c o u n t r y , the cultural challenge did not c o m e until W o r l d W a r I, so that our Avant-

garde flourished only in the twenties.) In the thirties the t w o streams mingled briefly,

after each had spent its real force, under the aegis of the C o m m u n i s t s , only to sink

together at the end of the decade into the sands of the wasteland we still live in. T h e

rise of Nazism and the revelation in the M o s c o w T r i a l s of the real nature of the new

society in Russia inaugurated the present period, when men cling to the evils they

k n o w rather than risk possibly greater ones by pressing forward. N o r has the

c h r o n i c state of w a r , hot or c o l d , that the world has been in since 1 9 3 9 encouraged

rebellion or experiment in either art or politics.

A M e r g e r Has B e e n A r r a n g e d

In this new period, the c o m p e t i t o r s , as often happens in the business w o r l d , are

merging. M a s s Culture takes on the c o l o r of both varieties of the old High C u l t u r e ,

A Theory of Mass Culture

27

Academic and Avant-garde, while these latter are increasingly watered down with

M a s s elements. T h e r e is slowly emerging a tepid, flaccid M i d d l e b r o w Culture that

threatens to engulf everything in its spreading o o z e . B a u h a u s modernism has at last

trickled d o w n , in a debased form of c o u r s e , into our furniture, cafeterias, movie

theatres, electric toasters, office buildings, drug stores, and railroad trains. Psycho-

analysis is expounded sympathetically and superficially in popular magazines, and

the psychoanalyst replaces the eccentric millionaire as the deus ex machina in many

a movie. T. S. Eliot writes The Cocktail Party and it b e c o m e s a Broadway hit.

( T h o u g h in some ways e x c e l l e n t , it is surely inferior to his Murder in the Cathedral,

which in the unmerged thirties had to depend on W P A to get produced at all.)

T h e typical creator of kitsch t o d a y , at least in the old m e d i a , is an indeterminate

specimen. T h e r e are no widely influential critics so completely terrible as, say, the

last William Lyon Phelps w a s . Instead we have such gray creatures as Clifton

Fadiman and Henry Seidel C a n b y . T h e artless numbers of an Eddie Guest are

drowned out by the m o r e sophisticated though equally c o m m o n p l a c e strains of

Benet's John Brown's Body. Maxfield Parrish yields to R o c k w e l l K e n t , Arthur

Brisbane to W a l t e r L i p p m a n , T h e d a Bara to Ingrid B e r g m a n . We even have what

might be called I'avant-garde pompier ( o r , in A m e r i c a n , 'phoney Avant-gardism'),

as in the buildings of R a y m o n d H o o d and the later poetry of Archibald M a c L e i s h ,

as there is also an academic Avant-gardism in belles lettres so that now the 'little'

as well as the big magazines have their hack writers.

All this is not a raising of the level of M a s s Culture, as might appear at first, but

rather a corruption of High Culture. T h e r e is n o t h i n g m o r e vulgar than

sophisticated kitsch. C o m p a r e C o n a n Doyle's w o r k m a n l i k e and unpretentious

Sherlock H o l m e s stories with the bogus 'intellectuality' o f D o r o t h y M . Sayers, w h o ,

like many c o n t e m p o r a r y detective-story writers, is a novelist manquee w h o ruins her

stuff with literary attitudinizing. Or consider the relationship of H o l l y w o o d and

Broadway. In the twenties, the two were sharply differentiated, movies being

produced for the masses of the hinterland, theatre for an upper-class N e w Y o r k

audience. T h e theatre was High Culture, mostly of the A c a d e m i c variety ( T h e a t r e

Guild) but with some spark of Avant-garde fire (the 'little' or 'experimental' theatre

movement). T h e movies were definitely M a s s C u l t u r e , mostly very bad but with

some leaven of Avant-gardism (Griffith, S t r o h e i m ) and F o l k Art (Chaplin and other

comedians). With the sound him, B r o a d w a y and H o l l y w o o d drew closer together.

Plays are now produced mainly to sell the movie rights, with many being directly

financed by the him c o m p a n i e s . T h e merger has standardized the theatre to such an

extent that even the early T h e a t r e Guild seems vital in retrospect, while hardly a

trace of the 'experimental' theatre is left. And what have the movies gained? T h e y

are more sophisticated, the acting is subtler, the sets in better taste. But they t o o

have b e c o m e standardized: they are never as awful as they often were in the old

days, but they are never as good either. T h e y are better entertainment and worse

a r t

- T h e cinema of the twenties occasionally gave us the fresh charm of Folk Art or

the imaginative intensity of Avant-gardism. T h e c o m i n g of sound, and with it

B r o a d w a y , degraded the c a m e r a to a recording instrument for an alien art form, the

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Dwight Macdonald

spoken play. T h e silent him had at least the theoretical possibility, even within the

limits of M a s s Culture, of being artistically significant. T h e sound film, within those

limits, does not.

D i v i s i o n o f L a b o r

T h e whole field could be approached from the standpoint of the division of l a b o r .

T h e more advanced t e c h n o l o g i c a l l y , the greater the division. C f . the great B l a c k e t t -

Semple-Hummert factory - the word is accurate - for the mass production of radio

'soap operas'. Or the fact that in H o l l y w o o d a c o m p o s e r for the movies is not

permitted to make his own orchestrations any m o r e than a director can do his own

cutting. Or the 'editorial formula' which every big-circulation magazine tailors its

fiction and articles to fit, much as a u t o m o b i l e parts are machined in D e t r o i t . Time

and Newsweek have carried specialization to its e x t r e m e : their writers don't even

sign their w o r k , which in fact is not properly theirs, since the gathering of data is

done by a specialized corps of researchers and correspondents and the final article

is often as much the result of the editor's blue-pencilling and rewriting as of the

original author's efforts. T h e 'New Yorker short story' is a definite genre - s m o o t h ,

minor-key, casual, suggesting d r a m a and sentiment without ever being crude

enough to actually create it - which the editors have established by years of patient,

skilful selection the same way as a gardener develops a new kind of rose. T h e y have,

indeed, done their w o r k all t o o well: would-be contributors n o w deluge them with

lifeless imitations, and they have begun to beg writers not to follow the formula

quite so closely.

Such art workers are as alienated from their b r a i n w o r k as the industrial w o r k e r

is from his h a n d w o r k . T h e results are as bad qualitatively as they are impres-

sive quantitatively. T h e only great films to c o m e out of H o l l y w o o d , for e x a m p l e ,

were made before industrial elephantiasis had reduced the director to one of a

number of technicians all operating at about the same level of authority. O u r t w o

greatest directors, Griffith and S t r o h e i m , were artists, not specialists; they did

everything themselves, dominated everything personally: the s c e n a r i o , the a c t o r s ,

the c a m e r a w o r k , and above all the cutting (or montage). Unity is essential in art;

it c a n n o t be achieved by a production line of specialists, however c o m p e t e n t . T h e r e

have been successful collective creations (Greek temples, G o t h i c churches, per-

haps the Iliad) but their creators were part of a tradition which was strong enough

to impose unity on their w o r k . We have no such tradition t o d a y , and so art - as

against kitsch - will result only when a single brain and sensibility is in full

c o m m a n d . In the movies, only the director can even theoretically be in such a

position; he was so in the p r e - 1 9 3 0 cinema of this country, G e r m a n y , and the Soviet

U n i o n .

Griffith and Stroheim were both terrific egoists - crude, naive, and not without

charlatanry - who survived until the industry b e c a m e highly enough organized to

resist their vigorous personalities. By about 1 9 2 5 , both were outside looking in; the

A Theory of Mass Culture

29

manufacture of commodities so costly to m a k e and so profitable to sell was t o o *

serious a matter to be entrusted to artists.

' O n e word of advice, V o n , ' Griffith said to S t r o h e i m , w h o had been his assistant

on Intolerance, when Stroheim c a m e to him with the news that he had a c h a n c e to

make a picture himself. ' M a k e your pictures in your own w a y . Put your mark on

them. T a k e a stand and stick to your guns. You'll m a k e s o m e enemies, but you'll

make good pictures.' Could that have been only thirty years ago?

A d u l t i z e d C h i l d r e n and I n f a n t i l e A d u l t s

T h e homogenizing effects of kitsch also blurs age lines. It would be interesting to

know how many adults read the c o m i c s . We do k n o w that c o m i c b o o k s are by far

the favorite reading matter of our soldiers and sailors, that s o m e forty million c o m i c

b o o k s are sold a m o n t h , and that some seventy million people (most of w h o m must

be adults, there just aren't that many kids) are estimated to read the newspaper

c o m i c strips every day. We also k n o w that movie W e s t e r n s and radio and TV

programs such as ' T h e L o n e R a n g e r ' and 'Captain V i d e o ' are by no means enjoyed

only by children. On the other h a n d , children have access to such grown-up media

as the movies, radio and T V . ( N o t e that these newer arts are the ones which blur

age lines because of the extremely modest demands they m a k e on the audience's

cultural equipment; thus there are many children's b o o k s but few children's movies.)

T h i s merging of the child and grown-up audience means: ( 1 ) infantile regression

of the latter, w h o , unable to cope with the strains and c o m p l e x i t i e s of modern life,

escapes via kitsch (which, in turn, confirms and enhances their infantilism); ( 2 )

'overstimulation' of the former, w h o grow up t o o fast. O r , as M a x H o r k h e i m e r well

puts it: 'Development has ceased to exist. T h e child is grown up as soon as he can

walk, and the grown-up in principle always remains the s a m e . ' Also note (a) our cult

of youth, which makes 1 8 - 2 2 the most admired and desired period of life, and (b)

the sentimental worship of M o t h e r ( ' M o m i s m ' ) as if we couldn't bear to grow up

and be on our o w n . Peter Pan might be a better symbol of A m e r i c a than Uncle S a m .

Idols o f C o n s u m p t i o n

T o o little attention has been paid to the c o n n e c t i o n of our M a s s Culture with the

historical evolution of American Society. In Radio Research, 1942-43 (Paul F.

Lazarsfeld, e d . ) , L e o L o w e n t h a l c o m p a r e d the biographical articles in Collier's and

The Saturday Evening Post for 1 9 0 1 and 1 9 4 0 - 4 1 and found that in the forty-year

interval the proportion of articles about business and professional men and political

leaders had declined while those about entertainers had g o n e up 50 per cent.

Furthermore, the 1 9 0 1 entertainers are mostly serious artists - opera singers,

sculptors, pianists, etc. - while those of 1 9 4 1 are all movie stars, baseball players,

and such-

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e

n t

h e 'serious' heroes i n 1 9 4 1 aren't s o very serious after all: the

30

Dwight Macdonald

businessmen and politicians are freaks, oddities, not the really powerful leaders as

in 1 9 0 1 . T h e 1 9 0 1 Satevepost heroes he calls "idols of production', those of today

'idols of consumption'.

L o w e n t h a l notes that the modern Satevepost biographee is successful not because

of his own personal abilities so much as because he 'got the b r e a k s ' . T h e whole

competitive struggle is presented as a lottery in which a few winners, no m o r e

talented or energetic than anyone else, drew the lucky tickets. T h e effect on the mass

reader is at once consoling (it might have been me) and deadening to effort, ambition

(there are no rules, so why struggle?). It is striking how closely this evolution

parallels the country's e c o n o m i c development. L o w e n t h a l observes that the 'idols of

production' maintained their dominance right through the twenties. T h e turning

point was the 1 9 2 9 depression when the problem b e c a m e how to consume goods

rather than how to produce them, and also when the arbitrariness and c h a o s of

capitalism was forcefully brought home to the mass man. So he turned to 'idols of

c o n s u m p t i o n ' , or rather these were n o w offered him by the manufacturers of M a s s

Culture, and he accepted them. ' T h e y seem to lead to a dream world of the masses,'

observes L o w e n t h a l ,

w h o a r e no longer c a p a b l e or willing to conceive of biographies primarily as a means

of orientation and e d u c a t i o n . . . . H e , the A m e r i c a n mass m a n , as reflected in his 'idols

of c o n s u m p t i o n ' a p p e a r s no longer as a center of outwardly directed energies and

actions on whose w o r k and efficiency might depend mankind's progress. Instead of the

'givers' we are faced with the 'takers'. . . . T h e y seem to stand for a p h a n t a s m a g o r i a of

world-wide social security - an attitude which asks for no m o r e than to be served with

the things needed for r e p r o d u c t i o n and r e c r e a t i o n , an attitude which has lost every

p r i m a r y interest in h o w to invent, shape, or apply the tools leading to such purposes

of m a s s satisfaction.

S h e r l o c k H o l m e s t o M i k e H a m m e r

T h e role of science in M a s s Culture has similarly changed from the rational and the

purposive to the passive, accidental, even the catastrophic. Consider the evolution

of the detective story, a genre which can be traced back to the memoirs of V i d o c q ,

the master-detective of the N a p o l e o n i c era. P o e , w h o was peculiarly fascinated by

scientific m e t h o d , wrote the first and still best detective stories: The Purloined

Letter, The Gold Bug, The Mystery of Mane Roget, The Murders in the Rue

Morgue. C o n a n D o y l e created the great folk h e r o , Sherlock H o l m e s , like Poe's

Dupin a sage whose wizard's wand was scientific deduction (Poe's ' r a t i o c i n a t i o n ' ) .

Such stories could only appeal to - in fact, only be comprehensible to - an audience

accustomed to think in scientific terms: to survey the d a t a , set up a hypothesis, test

it by seeing whether it caught the murderer. T h e very idea of an art genre cast in

the form of a problem to be solved by purely intellectual means could only have

arisen in a scientific age. T h i s kind of detective fiction, which might be called the

A Theory of Mass Culture

31

'classic' style, is still widely practiced (well by Agatha Christie and J o h n Dicksbn

C a r r , badly by the m o r e popular Erie Stanley G a r d i n e r ) but of late it has been

overshadowed by the r a n k , n o x i o u s growth of w o r k s in the 'sensational' style. T h i s

was inaugurated by Dashiel H a m m e t t ( w h o m Andre Gide was foolish enough to

admire) and has recently been enormously stepped up in voltage by M i c k e y Spillane,

whose six b o o k s to date have sold thirteen million copies. T h e sensationalists use

what for the classicists was the point - the uncovering of the criminal - as a mere

excuse for the minute description of scenes of b l o o d s h e d , brutality, lust, and

a l c o h o l i s m . T h e c o o l , astute, subtle D u p i n - H o l m e s is replaced by the crude man

of action whose prowess is measured not by intellectual mastery but by his capacity

for liquor, w o m e n , and mayhem (he can 'take it' as well as 'dish it out' - H a m m e t t ' s

The Glass Key is largely a chronicle of the epic beatings a b s o r b e d by the hero before

he finally staggers to the solution). M i k e H a m m e r , Spillane's aptly named h e r o , is

such a m o n u m e n t a l blunderer that even Dr W a t s o n would have seen through him.

According t o R i c h a r d W . J o h n s t o n {Life, J u n e 2 3 , 1 9 5 2 ) , ' M i k e has one bizarre and

m e m o r a b l e characteristic that sets him apart from all o t h e r fictional detectives: sheer

i n c o m p e t e n c e . In the five H a m m e r cases, 48 people have been killed, and there is

reason to believe that if M i k e had kept out of the w a y , 34 of them - all innocent

of the original crime - would have survived.' A decade a g o , the late G e o r g e O r w e l l ,

apropos a 'sensationalist' detective story of the t i m e , No Orchids for Miss Blandish,

showed h o w the brutalization of this genre mirrors the general degeneration in ethics

from nineteenth-century standards. W h a t he would have written had M i c k e y

Spillane's w o r k been then in existence I find hard to imagine.

F r a n k e n s t e i n t o H i r o s h i m a

T h e real heirs of the 'classic' detective story t o d a y , so far as the exploitation of

science is c o n c e r n e d , are the writers of science fiction, where the marvels and horrors

of the future must always be 'scientifically possible' - just as Sherlock H o l m e s drew

on no supernatural powers. T h i s is the approach of the bourgeoisie, w h o think of

science as their familiar instrument. T h e masses are less confident, more awed in

their approach to science, and there are vast lower strata of science fiction where

the marvellous is untrammeled by the limits of k n o w l e d g e . To the masses, science

>s the modern arcanum arcanorum, at o n c e the supreme mystery and the philo-

sopher's stone that explains the mystery. T h e latter c o n c e p t appears in c o m i c

strips such as 'Superman' and in the charlatan-science exploited by 'health fakers'

and 'nature fakers'. T a k e n this w a y , science gives man mastery over his environment

and is beneficent. But science itself is not understood, therefore not mastered,

therefore terrifying because of its very p o w e r . T a k e n this w a y , as the supreme

mystery, science b e c o m e s the stock in trade of the ' h o r r o r ' pulp magazines and

comics and movies. It has got to the p o i n t , indeed, that if one sees a laboratory

l r

> a m o v i e , one shudders, and the white c o a t of the scientist is as blood-chilling

a

sight as C o u n t Dracula's black c l o a k . T h e s e ' h o r r o r ' films have apparently an

"kB\05A2°[Q0

32

Dwight Macdonald

T h e P r o b l e m o f the Masses

Conservatives such as O r t e g a y Gasset and T. S. Eliot argue that since 'the revolt

of the masses' has led to the horrors of totalitarianism (and of California roadside

architecture), the only hope is to rebuild the old class walls and bring the masses

once more under aristocratic c o n t r o l . T h e y think of the popular as s y n o n y m o u s with

cheap and vulgar. M a r x i a n radicals and liberals, on the other h a n d , see the masses

as intrinsically healthy but as the dupes and victims of cultural exploitation by the

Lords of kitsch - in the style of Rousseau's 'noble savage' idea. If only the masses

were offered good stuff instead of kitsch, how they would eat it up! H o w the level

of M a s s Culture would rise! Both these diagnoses seem to me fallacious: they assume

that M a s s Culture is (in the conservative view) or could be (in the liberal view) an

expression of people, like Folk Art, whereas actually it is an expression of masses,

a very different thing.

T h e r e are theoretical reasons why M a s s Culture is not and can never be any g o o d .

I take it as a x i o m a t i c that culture can only be produced by and for human beings.

But in so far as people are organized (more strictly, disorganized) as masses, they

lose their human identity and quality. F o r the masses are in historical time what a

crowd is in space: a large quantity of people unable to express themselves as human

beings because they are related to one another neither as individuals nor as m e m b e r s

of communities - indeed, they are not related ro each other at all, but only to

something distant, a b s t r a c t , n o n h u m a n : a football game or bargain sale in the case

of a c r o w d , a system of industrial production, a party or a State in the case of the

masses. T h e mass man is a solitary a t o m , uniform with and undifferentiated from

thousands and millions of other a t o m s w h o go to make up 'the lonely c r o w d ' , as

David Riesman well calls American society. A folk or a people, h o w e v e r , is a

c o m m u n i t y , i.e. a group of individuals linked to each other by c o m m o n interests,

w o r k , traditions, values, and sentiments; something like a family, each of whose

m e m b e r s has a special place and function as an individual while at the same time

sharing the group's interests (family budget) sentiments (family q u a r r e l s ) , and

culture (family j o k e s ) . T h e scale is small enough so that it ' m a k e s a difference' what

indestructible popularity: Frantenstein is still s h o w n , after twenty-one years, and

the current revival of King Kong is expected to gross over t w o million dollars.

If the scientist's l a b o r a t o r y has acquired in M a s s Culture a ghastly a t m o s p h e r e ,

is this perhaps not o n e of those deep popular intuitions? F r o m Frankenstein's

laboratory to M a i d e n e k and H i r o s h i m a is not a long journey. W a s there a popular

suspicion, perhaps only h a l f c o n s c i o u s , that the nineteenth-century trust in science,

like the nineteenth-century trust in popular education, was m i s t a k e n , that science

can as easily be used for antihuman as for p r o h u m a n ends, perhaps even m o r e

easily? F o r M r s Shelley's Frankenstein, the experimenter w h o brought disaster by

pushing his science t o o far, is a scientific folk hero older than and still as famous

as Mr Doyle's successful and beneficent Sherlock H o l m e s .

A Theory of Mass Culture

33

the individual does, a first condition for human - as against mass - existence. He

is at o n c e more important as an individual than in mass society and at the same time

more closely integrated into the c o m m u n i t y , his creativity nourished by a rich

c o m b i n a t i o n of individualism and c o m m u n a l i s m . ( T h e great culture-bearing elites

of the past have been communities of this kind.) In c o n t r a s t , a mass society, like a

c r o w d , is so undifferentiated and loosely structured that its a t o m s , in so far as

human values g o , tend to cohere only along the line of the least c o m m o n

d e n o m i n a t o r ; its morality sinks to that of its most brutal and primitive m e m b e r s ,

its taste to that of the least sensitive and most ignorant. And in addition to

everything else, the scale is simply t o o big, there are just roo many people.

Yet this collective m o n s t r o s i t y , 'the masses', 'the public', is taken as a human norm

by the scientific and artistic technicians of our M a s s C u l t u r e . T h e y at once degraded

the public by treating it as an o b j e c t , to be handled with the lack of ceremony and

the objectivity of medical students dissecting a c o r p s e , and at the same time flatter

it, pander to its level of taste and ideas by taking these as the criterion of reality (in

the case of questionnaire-sociologists and other 'social scientists') or of art (in the

case of the Lords of kitsch). W h e n one hears a questionnaire-sociologist talk about

how he will 'set up' an investigation, one feels he regards people as a herd of dumb

animals, as mere congeries of conditioned reflexes, his calculation being which reflex

will be stimulated by which question. At the same time, of necessity, he sees the

statistical majority as the great R e a l i t y , the secret of life he is trying to find out; like

the kitsch L o r d s , he is wholly without values, willing to accept any idiocy if it is held

by many people. T h e aristocrat and the democrat both criticize and argue with

popular taste, the one with hostility, the other in friendship, for both attitudes

proceed from a set of values. T h i s is less degrading to the masses than the 'objective'

approach of H o l l y w o o d and the questionnaire-sociologists, just as it is less

degrading to a man to be shouted at in anger than to be quietly assumed to be part

of a m a c h i n e . But the plebs have their dialectical revenge: complete indifference to

their human quality means complete prostration before their statistical quantity, so

that a movie magnate w h o cynically 'gives the pubic what it wants' - i.e. assumes

it wants trash - sweats with terror if box-office returns drop 10 per cent.

T h e F u t u r e o f H i g h C u l t u r e : D a r k

T h e conservative proposal to save culture by restoring the old class lines has a more

solid historical base than the M a r x i a n hope for a new d e m o c r a t i c , classless culture,

for, with the possible (and important) exception of Periclean Athens, all the great

cultures of the past were elite cultures. Politically, h o w e v e r , it is without meaning

in a world dominated by the t w o great mass n a t i o n s , USA and U S S R , and becoming

more industrialized, m o r e massined all the time. T h e only practical thing along

those lines would be to revive the cultural elite which the Avant-garde created. As

I have already n o t e d , the Avant-garde is now dying, partly from internal causes,

Partly suffocated by the competing M a s s C u l t u r e , where it is not being absorbed into

34

Dwight Macdonald

it. Of course this process has not reached 1 0 0 per cent, and doubtless never will

unless the country goes either Fascist or C o m m u n i s t . T h e r e are still islands above

the flood for those determined enough to reach them, and to stay on them: as

Faulkner has shown, a writer can even use H o l l y w o o d instead of being used by it,

if his purpose is firm enough. But the homogenization of High and M a s s Culture

has gone far and is going farther all the t i m e , and there seems little reason to expect

a revival of Avant-gardism, that is, of a successful c o u n t e r m o v e m e n t to M a s s

Culture. Particularly not in this c o u n t r y , where the blurring of class lines, the

absence of a stable cultural tradition, and the greater facilities for manufacturing

and marketing kitsch all work in the other direction. T h e result is that our

intelligentsia is remarkably small, w e a k , and disintegrated. O n e of the odd things

about the American cultural scene is how many brainworkers there are and how few

intellectuals, defining the former as specialists whose thinking is pretty much

confined to their limited 'fields' and the latter as persons w h o take all culture for their

province. N o t only are there few intellectuals, but they don't hang together, they

have very little esprit de corps, very little sense of belonging to a c o m m u n i t y ; they

are so isolated from each other they don't even bother to quarrel - there hasn't been

a really good fight a m o n g them since the M o s c o w T r i a l s .

T h e F u t u r e o f Mass C u l t u r e : D a r k e r

If the conservative proposal to save our culture via the aristocratic Avant-garde

seems historically unlikely, what of the democratic-liberal proposal? Is there a

reasonable prospect of raising the level of M a s s Culture? In his recent b o o k The

Great Audience, Gilbert Seldes argues there is. He blames the present sad state of

our M a s s Culture on the stupidity of the Lords of kitsch, w h o underestimate the

mental age of the public; the arrogance of the intellectuals, w h o m a k e the same

mistake and so snobbishly refuse to work for such mass media as r a d i o , TV and

movies; and the passivity of the public itself, which doesn't insist on better M a s s

Cultural products. T h i s diagnosis seems to me superficial in that it blames

everything on subjective, moral factors: stupidity, perversity, failure of will. My

own feeling is that, as in the case of the alleged responsibility of the G e r m a n (or

Russian) people for the horrors of Nazism (or Soviet C o m m u n i s m ) , it is unjust to

blame social groups for this result. H u m a n beings have been caught up in the

inexorable workings of a mechanism that forces them, with a pressure only heroes

can resist (and one c a n n o t demand that anybody be a h e r o , though o n e can hope

for i t ) , into its own pattern. I see M a s s Culture as a reciprocating engine, and w h o

is to say, once it has been set in m o t i o n , whether the stroke or the c o u n t e r s t r o k e

is 'responsible' for its continued action?

T h e Lords of kitsch sell culture to the masses. It is a debased trivial culture that

voids both the deep realities ( s e x , death, failure, tragedy) and also the simple,

spontaneous pleasures, since the realities would be too real and the pleasures t o o

lively to induce what Mr Seldes calls 'the m o o d of c o n s e n t ' , i.e. a narcotized

A Theory of Mass Culture

35

acceptance of M a s s Culture and of the c o m m o d i t i e s it sells as a substitute for

the unsettling and unpredictable (hence unsaleable) j o y , tragedy, wit, c h a n g e ,

originality and beauty of real life. T h e masses, debauched by several generations of

this sort of thing, in turn c o m e to demand trivial and c o m f o r t a b l e cultural products.

W h i c h c a m e first, the chicken or the egg, the mass demand or its satisfaction (and

further stimulation) is a question as a c a d e m i c as it is u n a n s w e r a b l e . T h e engine is

reciprocating and shows no signs of running d o w n .

Indeed, far from M a s s Culture getting better, we will be lucky if it doesn't get

worse. W h e n shall we see another popular humorist like Sholem Aleichem, whose

b o o k s are still being translated from the Yiddish and for whose funeral in 1 9 1 6 a

hundred thousand inhabitants of the B r o n x turned out? Or Finlay Peter D u n n e ,

whose Mr D o o l e y c o m m e n t e d on the American scene with such wit that Henry

Adams was a faithful reader and Henry J a m e s , on his famous return to his native

land, wanted to meet only one American a u t h o r , Dunne? Since M a s s Culture is not

an art form but a manufactured c o m m o d i t y , it tends always d o w n w a r d , towards

cheapness - and so standardization - of production. T h u s , T. W. A d o r n o has

noted, in his brilliant essay ' O n popular music' (Studies in Philosophy and Social

Science, N e w Y o r k , N o . 1, 1 9 4 1 ) , that the chorus of every popular song without

exception has the same number of b a r s , while Mr Seldes remarks that H o l l y w o o d

movies are cut in a uniformly rapid t e m p o , a shot rarely being held more than forty-

five seconds, which gives them a standardized effect in c o n t r a s t to the varied t e m p o

of European film cutting. T h i s sort of standardization m e a n s that what may have

begun as something fresh and original is repeated until it b e c o m e s a nerveless routine

- vide what happened to Fred Allen as a radio c o m e d i a n . T h e only time M a s s

Culture is good is at the very beginning, before the 'formula' has hardened, before

the money boys and efficiency experts and audience-reaction analysts have moved

in. T h e n for a while it may have the quality of real Folk Art. But the Folk artist today

lacks the cultural roots and the intellectual toughness (both of which the Avant-

garde artist has relatively more o f ) to resist for long the pressures of M a s s Culture.

His taste can easily be corrupted, his sense of his own special talent and limitations

o b s c u r e d , as in what happened to Disney between the g a y , inventive early M i c k e y

M o u s e and Silly Symphony c a r t o o n s and the vulgar pretentiousness of Fantasia and

heavy-handed sentimentality of Snow White, or to W e s t b r o o k Pegler, w h o has

regressed from an excellent sports writer, with a sure sense of form and a mastery

of coloquial satire, into the rambling, course-grained, garrulous political pundit of

today. W h a t e v e r virtues the F o l k artist h a s , and they are m a n y , staying power is not

one of them. And staying power is the essential virtue of one w h o would hold his

own against the spreading ooze of M a s s Culture.

N o t e s

• As I did myself in 'A theory of popular culture' {Politics, F e b r u a r y 1 9 4 4 ) , parts of which

have been used or a d a p t e d in the present article.

36 Dwight Macdonald

2. T h e success of Reader's Digest illustrates the law. H e r e is a magazine that has achieved

a fantastic circulation - s o m e fifteen millions, m u c h of which is a c c o u n t e d for by its

foreign editions, thus showing that kitsch by no m e a n s appeals only to A m e r i c a n s - simply

by reducing to even lower terms the already superficial formulae of other periodicals. By

treating a theme in t w o pages which they treat in six, the Digest b e c o m e s three times as

'readable' and three times as superficial.