Читать книгу Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System - John Rieder - Страница 10

2

The Mass Cultural Genre System

Most genre theory has focused on the choices writers make when composing texts or that readers make, or ought to make, in interpreting them. But the practice of attributing genre to narrative fiction also clusters heavily in two institutional locations, commercial publishing and the academy. On these two sites, practices of reading dovetail with acts of selection, publication, and dissemination coordinated with complex and multiform motives. The relation between these two institutional locations is a feature of contemporary genre systems that most twentieth-century theory turned its back upon, failing to even notice it, much less ask about its significance or implications. Recent contributions to media studies like Altman’s Film/Genre and Mittel’s Genre and Television have begun to repair this neglect by elaborating theories of genre attentive to the practices of the Hollywood studios and corporate broadcast television. What I am attempting here is a more general description of the mass cultural genre system that proceeds on the premise that the commercial and academic genre systems will be better understood in relation to one another than either one in isolation. My account takes its point of departure from the emergence of mass culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and will pay attention throughout to the relations between the mass cultural and the academic genre systems. I begin by asking not what kind of definitional or conceptual work these systems accomplish, but what sort of organizational tasks they perform. How do they intervene in organizing the distribution and reception of narrative fiction?

While literary genre theory has for the most part related genres to one another by means of formal and thematic, or as Altman puts it, syntactic and semantic, criteria, an opening to the institutional functions of genre differentiation can be afforded by recent rhetorical approaches to genre theory, which have been exploring the ways that complex organizational tasks often involve an array of interlocking and codependent genres. For instance, the organization of an academic conference might involve calls for papers, proposals, abstracts, the exchanging of drafts and feedback, and many other formal and informal genres in the course of its affairs. Summarizing and elaborating on this work, Clay Spinuzzi sorts out several different sorts of assemblages that such rhetorically interlocking genres can form. By a “system” of genres Spinuzzi designates a group of genres that are related to one another through a community’s use of them in a sequential and stable fashion to accomplish organizational or communicative tasks, like the organization of a professional meeting or the writing of a grant. More interesting to Spinuzzi, and more relevant to the sense of system I mean to explore here, are genre “repertoires,” a concept which recognizes that genres overlap, change over time, and demand improvisation, and that they are not simply means of communication but also ways of mediating social interaction and managing “distributed cognition” (Spinuzzi 4). Most robust of all Spinuzzi’s assemblages is the genre “ecology” (cf. the “information ecologies” of Bowker and Starr), which includes the properties of the genre repertoire but adds that within the framework of the genre ecology, “genres are not simply performed or communicated, they represent the ‘thinking out’ of a community as it cyclically performs an activity” (Spinuzzi 5). According to Spinuzzi, “genre ecologies are constantly importing, hybridizing, and evolving genres,” and in the framework of the genre ecology he sees “genres as collective achievements that act just as much as they are acted upon” (6).

Although I choose to keep the term “system” rather than “ecology,” the notion of a literary genre system proposed in this study resembles Spinuzzi’s notion of a genre ecology in a number of striking ways. Both the mass cultural and the academic-classical systems are means of mediating distributed cognition. Not only do the genres in these systems overlap, change over time, and demand improvisation of their users, but both systems also import and hybridize genres, albeit with quite different temporal rhythms. One can certainly argue that the genres involved are collective actions that act as much as they are acted upon. Most intriguing of all is Spinuzzi’s suggestion that the performance and communication of the genres within a genre ecology represent the thinking out of a collective activity. The mass cultural genre system plays a key role in organizing the production, distribution, and reception of storytelling within the milieu of mass culture, and although the activity of constructing narratives certainly does not exhaust the forms of verbal artistry, eloquence, and persuasion that are mediated by the mass cultural or the academic-classical genre systems, it would be difficult indeed to overestimate or overstate the importance of the collective activities and desires that are mediated and put at stake by storytelling alone.

But mass culture does not organize storytelling for storytelling’s sake. It turns some stories into entertainment, others into news. The collective activities of buying and selling coalesce in mass culture with the rhetorical projects of publicizing and promoting, and this rhetorical-commercial matrix inevitably tangles itself in political relations as well. In what follows, I will argue that the commercial advertisement is the keystone of the mass cultural genre system, and that its calculated instrumentalization of the aesthetic pervades not only narrative production, both high and low, but also political discourse in the form of advertising’s first cousin, propaganda. I will also be arguing, however, that this instrumentalization of the aesthetic is far from determining the quality or the critical power of all the products of the culture industry. I will borrow from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks the distinction between organic and traditional intellectuals in order to compare the work done by the mass cultural genre system, a form of intellectual activity that emerges spontaneously within advanced capitalist relations and is therefore organic to it, to the work done by the traditional genre system located and maintained in the schools. Finally, I will attempt to map out the topography of the mass cultural genre system in terms of the effects of seriality, stratification, and the formation of subcultures that characterize its terrain. I begin by returning to the problem of conceptualizing the organizational function of a system of genres.

Genre Systems and Institutional Practices

Attempts to describe a system of literary genres have not often approached this project as a question about organizing the social functions of narrative. The most influential twentieth-century formulation of a system of literary genres, Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, took no interest in questions about social organization. Frye’s formal, thematic, and stylistic anatomy postulates an overarching, transcendent organization of literary types the principle of which is immanent in the logic and significance of literature itself. Thus his genre system has no clear historical boundaries and is not tied to any specific social milieu, an impulse echoed in Darko Suvin’s contention that the “literature of cognitive estrangement” thrives in times of social disruption per se, rather than in any specific moment of political or historical change. In sharp contrast to Frye’s grand sweep and universalizing impulses, which impose on the history of literature the synchrony of a kind of grand museum exhibition, Hans Robert Jauss’s carefully historicized, meticulous study of the medieval genre system in “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature” insists that historical contingencies have caused literary genres to be organized in different ways for different purposes according to different values at different times and places.¹ Jauss’s approach does not explicitly tackle the organizing social function of the medieval genre system, but it opens the possibility of doing so.

As Jauss articulates the many differences between the system of medieval genres and both classical and modern ones, he argues that the development of literary forms is neither continuous nor teleological: “No perceptible historical continuity exists between the forms and genres of the Middle Ages and the literature of our present. Here the reception of the ancient poetics and canon of genres in the Renaissance unmistakably cut through the threads of the formation of tradition. The rediscovery of medieval literature by romantic philology produced only the ideology of new continuities in the form of the essential unity of each national literature” (108). Literary forms do not simply grow and develop out of one another, and the logic of form, content, and style is not adequate to account for the discontinuous terrain of their history. The notion of a system of genres is for Jauss inherent in the broader concept of the horizon of expectations that frames literary reception, so that “the relationship between the individual text and the series of texts formative of a genre presents itself as a process of the continual founding and altering of horizons” (88). These horizons of expectation are not exclusively literary: “the work of art is [to be] understood as a sign and carrier of meaning for a social reality, and the aesthetic is defined as a principle of mediation and a mode of organization for extra-aesthetic meanings” (108). Although Jauss assigns the impetus for the early modern reordering of the genre system to scholarly reanimation of the literature of classical antiquity, his attention to the ever-shifting horizons of expectation and the organization of extra-aesthetic meanings might just as consistently include the impact of the printing press or the changing relations of church and state in the transition from feudalism to centralized absolutist monarchies. Both contributed to the secularization of literacy, shifting it from a predominantly clerical to an increasingly aristocratic and capitalistic, financial and bureaucratic set of functions. The question might well be raised, then, of how changes in the system of genres responded to these shifting technological and social horizons of expectation.

Certainly the emergence of science fiction has often been explained as a response to the shifting horizon of technological possibility. One of the most frequently reiterated commonplaces about science fiction is that it concerns itself with the social effects of technological change and emerges in the context of industrial technological innovation, and no doubt the reason this is so frequently repeated is that it is so obviously correct. For instance, in Roger Luckhurst’s recent history of science fiction he lists as one of the conditions of the genre’s emergence “the context of a culture being visibly transformed by technological and scientific innovations” in the later nineteenth century (Science Fiction, 16). But Luckhurst lists three other conditions for the emergence of science fiction that are very much to the point in the present context: “1) The extension of literacy and primary education to the majority of the population of England and America, including the working classes; 2) the displacement of the older forms of mass literature, the ‘penny dreadful’ and the ‘dime novel’, with new cheap magazine formats that force formal innovation, and drive the invention of modern genre categories like detective or spy fiction as well as SF; 3) the arrival of scientific and technical institutions that provide a training for a lower-middle-class generation as scientific workers, teachers, and engineers, and that comes to confront traditional loci of cultural authority” (Science Fiction, 16). Luckhurst’s second condition corresponds directly to the subject of this book. One of the major questions being raised here is how the new magazine formats “force formal innovation, and drive the invention of modern genre categories.” But there is a prior question implied in this one, the problem of what encouraged the development of these new magazine formats in the first place. The changes in the distribution of print, the speed of communication, and the technology of broadcast media that made possible mass culture were a no less momentous redistribution of literacy and its effects than those caused by the invention of the printing press itself. The question is what role the new, mass cultural genre system might have played in organizing, or managing, this redistribution of literacy.

I propose to approach this question by examining the emergence of the mass cultural genre system in relation to the one that prevailed in the set of institutions traditionally and directly charged with the social function of organizing and managing the distribution of literacy: the schools. The first and the third of Luckhurst’s conditions point to the expansion of the reading audience taking place on two levels of the educational system. Alongside the expansion of literacy at the most basic level of the ability to read, there is a more selective development in “scientific and technical institutions” of the specialized literacies required for technical and managerial tasks. Both the increasing number of people receiving primary education and the increased emphasis on technical training at the advanced level are part and parcel of “a culture being visibly transformed by technological and scientific innovations” insofar as these social phenomena respond to the needs of a growing industrial economy. While the growth of the reading public would seem to be one of the preconditions for the formation of mass culture in general, Luckhurst’s emphasis on the training of technicians (“scientific workers”) and engineers points more directly to the emerging audience for science fiction. That the younger readers aspiring toward this technical-managerial literacy composed a significant part of the reading audience for early science fiction seems a reasonable guess, given the didactic ambitions and extraordinary success of Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires, and likewise fits well with the “Edisonades” and boy geniuses of the transition from the dime novel into the pulp magazines.² This relation to a specialized body of generic content seems typical of mass cultural genres. Just as science fiction specializes in the subject matter of science and technology, detective fiction focuses on law and police work, the western on the settlement of the American western frontier, and romance on the social and emotional dynamics of courtship and sexuality (Attebery and Hollinger xi). The way this specificity of content fits into the larger mass cultural genre system is an issue we will need to return to later. First, however, let me return to the relation of technical training to developments in the larger educational apparatus and the academic genre system.

The development of advanced scientific and technical training takes place within an expansion of higher education through the growth of the redbrick universities in the United Kingdom and the emergence of the first great state universities in the United States. More than just opening up new venues and less exclusive opportunities to attain higher education, this growth signals a modernization of the university curriculum that includes not just scientific subjects but also a shift in literary studies away from classical antiquity toward vernacular languages and national literatures. In this context the category of “literature,” which had already developed from the designation of printed matter in general to a term that conferred upon selected texts the distinction of high quality and demanded the exercise of tasteful discernment in its use, became a kind of master genre, a boundary object that helped to rationalize curricular regularities in relation to the bureaucratic structure of the educational apparatus. What in the eighteenth century was a course of lectures in rhetoric and belles lettres would mutate into a panoply of courses on literary forms (the triad of poetry, drama, and prose supplying the overarching generic logic) and national traditions that, when entered upon a student’s transcript, promised his or her exposure to a standardized regime of study that could be measured in credit hours, billed for tuition, and used by administrators to determine the allocation of institutional resources.³

In the shift from classical to vernacular languages, the category of “literature” thus helps adapt the academic genre system to the way, in Luckhurst’s words, a “generation [of] scientific workers, teachers, and engineers … confront the traditional loci of cultural authority.” John Guillory, surveying the changing historical forms of the literary canon, writes of this nineteenth-century development that “it is only vernacular writing that has the power to bring into existence the category of ‘literature’ in the specific sense of poetry, novels, plays, and so on. The brackets that close around a particular set of genres at this time increasingly distinguish it on the one side from philosophical and scientific writing, and on the other from scripture” (76). These generic enclosures within the academy would come to complement and reinforce the separation of “literature” from the mass cultural genre system as a whole throughout most of the twentieth century.

Guillory argues that the displacement of the classics by vernacular “literature” changed the canon of texts used in advanced literary pedagogy but retained a crucial element of that pedagogy’s fundamental form, the phenomenon sociolinguists call “diglossia.” In the strict sense of the term originally formulated by the linguist Charles Ferguson, diglossia refers to a hierarchical differentiation of functions between a common, spoken language and one “which is learned largely by formal education and is used for most written and formal purposes but is not used by any sector of the community for ordinary conversation” (quoted in Guillory 69). Guillory stretches the concept of diglossia to include the practice of preserving and disseminating a canonical body of writing in the schools in order to inculcate an advanced linguistic competency. Thus what was formerly a linguistic distinction becomes a generic one, and the displacement of the classics by national traditions as “loci of authority” in the university curriculum institutionalizes “different practices of the same language” that help to coordinate different levels of educational attainment with different class destinations (Macherey and Balibar 47, quoted by Guillory 78).⁴ The ability to operate this genre distinction, then, is one of the specific disciplinary mechanisms by which the schools perform the function of “ideological state apparatuses”—as Louis Althusser called them in his most famous and influential essay. The ideological self-recognition associated with “literature” has to do with becoming a full-fledged human being regardless of class position (though of course one’s facility with and discernment of literature are strong signals of class), while the discourses of the various technical competencies excluded from that category are “practical” and job oriented—hence direct determinants of one’s economic status. It is easy to see how this dichotomy would come to dovetail with the rift between modernist experimentation and the more formally conservative methods of mass cultural artistry.

These developments are of course not isolated within the schools. Richard Ohmann usefully contrasts the “sacralization” of higher culture signaled in the second half of the nineteenth century in the United States by the founding of municipal art museums, symphonies, and opera companies with the burgeoning sphere of popular consumer culture in the same period:

Elites carried forth the “sacralization” of art and culture: purging it of amateurism, widening the separation between creators and audiences, framing art as difficult and pure, divesting it of more accessible, popular elements. Barnum-like exhibits were distinguished from art museums; ragtime from the symphony. Vaudeville, dime novels, comics, the saloon and the dance hall, Coney Island and the nickelodeon, the ethnic club and the sports park drew more uniformly working class participants. Culture became a system that clearly signaled and manifested social class; refined and sacralized at the top of the hierarchy, pleasure-seeking and openly commercial at the bottom. (221)

Explaining the twentieth century’s peculiar rearticulation of the longstanding European division of high genres and high style from low ones as a reordering of the distribution of literacy and the cultural competencies and privileges attached to it supplements and complicates the thesis concerning commercial narrative production proposed by Fredric Jameson in his essay “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” There Jameson proposes that the specter of commodification looms over high modernism just as much as over mass culture. Where the products of the culture industry are explicitly designed as commodities, and their production intentionally organized around commercial activity, the artifacts of high modernism are, according to Jameson, just as strongly determined by their rejection of commodity status. One needs to add, however, that the antithetical practices of high modernism and mass culture reiterate the generic and disciplinary division of literary study from technical and scientific training in the schools, and that what Jameson quite reasonably sees as a set of heavily constrained responses to the pressures of commodification might also be seen as practical, goal-oriented management of the linguistic resources corresponding to that division. The mass cultural genre system would from this point of view be engaged in what Spinuzzi calls “thinking out” the technical and instrumental character of advanced capitalist social interaction. But this “thinking out” takes place within the constraints of class, and the management of narrative in mass culture includes—as Jameson goes on to argue in “Reification and Utopia”—the way it negotiates the tension between the commercial status quo and class-based fantasies of liberation from that social order.

The relation between the genre systems generated in commercial publishing and the academy is not one of simple exclusion or straightforward hierarchy, then, but rather involves a distribution of the social functions of narrative across the fields of education, employment, and consumption. The tensions of class dominance and resistance pervade the entire field. As Theodor Adorno famously observed in a letter to Walter Benjamin dated March 3, 1936, both high modernism and mass culture “bear the stigmata of capitalism,” representing the “torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up” (Culture Industry, 2). Merely to condemn the “culture industry” as a debased form of more authentic traditional cultural practices enforces a false separation upon cultural analysis that encourages nostalgia and elitism. Yet to celebrate the mass cultural system as the realm of the popular, embracing the wider reading audience that the elitist practices of high modernism and the upper levels of academic literary specialization exclude, would be to confuse consumerism with democracy.

Nonetheless it is entirely appropriate to draw upon Gramsci’s distinction between organic and traditional intellectuals to speak here of the confrontation of organic versus traditional genre systems. This opposition does not have to do with the political activities of the intellectuals involved but with the institutional locations where the genre systems are primarily enacted—in the cauldron, so to speak, of commodity production, on the one hand, and in the ivory tower of the academy, on the other. The academic genre system, organized around the category of literature, imports and hybridizes genre categories that emerged in previous social formations and mediates their ongoing impact upon the present. Its task is to help construct the meaning of tradition. The mass cultural genre system arises out of the distribution of cultural resources and the inextricably entwined commercial and cultural motives of practice organic to the contemporary social formation, and its task is to help coordinate these various resources and motives. Its emergence within the specific historical constraints of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American and British capitalism is the topic we turn to in the next section of this chapter. Among the issues that remain to be explored is whether and to what extent the mass cultural genre system participates in what Gramsci calls the ideal social and political function of the organic intellectual, to give a social group “homogeneity and an awareness of its own function” (5). It cannot be doubted, at the least, that mass culture relentlessly insists on telling us who we are, and who we ought to want to be.

Before turning to the emergence of the mass cultural genre system it is worthwhile to measure our distance from the situation I have been describing. The early twentieth century’s antagonism between modernism and mass culture has faded into the early twenty-first century’s postmodernist irreverence for the canonical and the ongoing disintegration of the prestige of “literature.” In higher education the technical and managerial linguistic competence aimed at in composition courses has arguably overtaken and subsumed that embodied in the study of literature. This was John Guillory’s judgment in 1993: “We know that fewer students are [nowadays being] routed through the curriculum of literature, although this is not a matter of numbers only—the center of the system of social reproduction has moved elsewhere, into the domain of mass culture” (80). In 1991 Michael Denning called the same situation the end of mass culture: “We have come to the end of ‘mass culture’; the debates and positions which named ‘mass culture’ as an other have been superseded. There is no mass culture out there; it is the very element we all breathe” (267). It is not any coincidence that the paradigm shift in genre theory described in the first chapter corresponds closely in time with such calls to end the othering of mass culture, as testifies the fact that some of the most notable advances in the new paradigm have come in media studies devoted to mass cultural genre practices.

Two decades later, after the intervening explosion of digital media and the emergence of online social networking, the skills relevant to commanding “the center of social reproduction” seem even less likely to coincide with mastery of the traditional literary canon. Henry Jenkins, in Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, argues for shifting the educational institution’s conversation about the new media away from its obsession with technological access and toward the project of developing the cultural competencies and social skills necessary to play a full role in the emerging culture. The new literacies Jenkins adds to the list of traditional research, technical, and critical-analysis skills include such subjects as simulation, appropriation, multitasking, distributed cognition, collective intelligence, transmedia navigation, networking, and negotiation. None of these seems particularly focused on the traditional genre system, and most of them are likely to involve direct engagement with the mass cultural genre system. If, nonetheless, the hierarchical divide between the traditional and the mass cultural genres still has considerable force, there remains at this point no good reason to continue to defend the cultural divide between the two genre systems, or to take up partisan advocacy of one against the other, or to study one as if the other did not exist or were an embarrassment. On the contrary, there is every reason to give mass culture and the mass cultural genre system the best scholarly and critical attention possible.

Advertising and Serial Fiction

The opposition between the mass cultural genre system and the traditional genre system operating in the schools and the critical establishment plays a key role in organizing the social functions of narrative in twentieth-century U.S. and British society. The way that the modernist experimentation of writers like James Joyce or T. S. Eliot highlights the polyglot nature of Western tradition and renders the native tongue difficult takes its point of departure from the diglossia of literary education, which still depended heavily on the learning of foreign languages in the early twentieth century. Thus the prestige afforded to “literature” both originates in and depends upon its alignment with the cosmopolitanism and multilingual competency of the traditional intellectual. The organic genres of mass culture, in contrast, cultivate the lingua franca of homogeneous and contemporaneous national culture, the language of the news as well as of emerging technical disciplines. In what follows, I will argue that the key element of the mass cultural genre system’s coherent organizational function, the binding agent, as it were, of whatever collective practices and subjectivities it sets in motion, is the commercial advertisement.

The best account of the emergence of mass culture is Richard Ohmann’s in Selling Culture. According to Ohmann, mass culture consists of “voluntary experiences, produced by a relatively small number of specialists, for millions across the nation to share, in similar or identical form, either simultaneously or nearly so, with dependable frequency; mass culture shapes habitual audiences, around common needs or interests, and it is made for profit” (14). One index of its development in the nineteenth-century United States is the growing dominance of national over local news: the Associated Press wire service was founded in 1848; syndicated newspaper columns became common in the 1880s, syndicated comics in the 1890s. But more crucial to the “voluntary” and “habitual” nature of this emergent “homogeneous national experience” (21) is the fact that, starting in the 1890s, a few newspapers and magazines pioneered a business model in which these publications depended on advertising rather than sales for their main source of income. Their product, at this point, became not the news, journalistic features, or fiction they provided the public, but rather the attention of the public, which they sold to the advertisers.

Ohmann argues that this business strategy was a response to the recurrent economic crises of overproduction that beset the American economy from 1873 into the 1890s. It involved a shift of corporate “ingenuity, resources, and organizational energy” from production to sales, abandoning the free market “war of all against all, with its destructive bouts of price cutting and market cornering” for “more steady and reliable ways to maintain a market share and expand the whole economy” (74). These more steady and reliable ways centered on advertising.⁵ Late nineteenth-century monopoly capitalism, as it is usually called, was above all “marketing capitalism” (74). The key was a shift from maximizing the extraction of labor from workers to a new emphasis on turning them into reliable consumers: “not only would they [the corporations] colonize the leisure of most citizens, as they had previously dominated work time; they would also integrate the nation into one huge market and market culture” (59). The new national culture being promulgated in the newspapers and magazines thus marched hand in hand with the promotion of national brands and increasingly equated social identity with consumer habits. As Ohmann sums it up, the magazines “located advertising … in the center of American cultural production, and it has remained there since,” where it reinforces “the tight linkage of social identity with the purchase and use of commodities” (362).

One could therefore say that the commercial advertisement is the organic genre of mass culture. It is the keystone of the mass cultural genre system: all other genres necessarily take their position within the system in relation to it. This does not mean, however, that mass cultural genres necessarily resemble ads. The relationships at stake have more to do with practical proximity or distance than with formal similarity. The glossy magazines and newspapers of the 1890s interspersed advertisement into the news or into an editorial selection of features and fiction. The form impressed upon other genres by their proximity to commercial advertisements—a form so familiar today as to be almost invisible—is what Adorno, in one of his jeremiads against the culture industry, decried as the “variety act” (Culture Industry, 69). Adorno stresses the suspension of the work of art’s finality, which gives way to the predominant quality of “expectation” where “waiting for the thing in question, which takes place as long as the juggler manages to keep the balls going, is precisely the thing in itself” (70). What I mean to emphasize is the transformation of every segment of the broadcast or magazine into an episode, discrete in itself, that may be preceded and followed by a variety of other episodes with no thematic or formal resemblance to it. For instance, there is no real logical or thematic unity to the news broadcast’s or general interest magazine’s sequence of political news, human-interest stories, the weather, sports, etc.; they are, as Adorno puts it, arranged as “episodes” rather than “acts” (69). But all of them are linked to one another through the connective tissue of the advertisements—which themselves have no internal sequential logic, their length and placement being determined instead by marketing strategies and costs. The news broadcast or televised narrative may represent the commercials as “interruptions” (if it mentions them at all), but from the point of view of the genre system as a whole, commercial advertisement is mass culture’s most persistent and binding element. It is the other genres that “interrupt” this constant presence, even—or especially—when, as in feature films, there are no commercial interruptions.

The centrality of commercial advertisements to the mass cultural genre system does not mean, then, that the form of the commercial imposes itself on other mass cultural products directly, but rather that the market pressures and commercial goals that shape the commercial from the inside impose themselves upon other mass cultural products from the outside. One result is a generalized instrumentalization of the aesthetic. Consciously manipulating beauty’s power to command attention in order to promote economic or political interests was hardly a new practice at the end of the nineteenth century, but the very urgency of proclamations of art for art’s sake and of the disinterestedness of fine art at that time points toward an intensification of the manipulative powers of image and eloquence that finds its most deliberate, scientific expression in the emergent advertising industry. Ohmann argues that the work of the ad agencies, a new form of business enterprise that came into existence in the 1890s, was “to alter consciousness and deliver customers” in pursuit of “interests [that] were structurally very close to those of still more powerful businesses, and not very close to those of other citizens” (100). It is a short step from professionalized market research and the construction of advertising campaigns to the techniques of political propaganda. As Raymond Williams observed in a 1960 essay arguing that advertising had become “the official art of modern capitalist society,” “The need to control nominally free men, like the need to control nominally free customers, lay very deep in the new kind of society” (Problems, 184, 180).⁶

The citizens of the mass cultural nation—and so the audiences of mass cultural genres—are first and foremost consumers, then, and the ideological force borne by the act of consumption is evident in the utopian aura it acquires. The world projected by advertising takes on a magical quality, as a 1909 New York Evening Post editorial wryly observes:

What a reconstructed world of heart’s desire begins with the first-page advertisement. Here no breakfast food fails to build up a man’s brain and muscle. No phono record fails to amuse. No roof pane cracks under cold or melts under the sun. No razor cuts the face or leaves it sore. Illness and death are banished by patent medicines and hygienic shoes. Worry flies before the model fountain pen. Employers shower wealth upon efficient employees. Insurance companies pay what they promise. Trains always get to Chicago on time. Babies never cry; whether it’s soap or cereal, or camera or talcum, babies always laugh in the advertising supplement. A happy world indeed, my masters! (quoted in Ohmann 210)