BREAD AND CIRCUSES BY THE SAME AUTHOR The Spirit of Reform: British Litera tu re and Polities, 1832-1867 BREAD& CIRCUSES Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay by Patrick Brantlinger CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London Cornell University Press gratefully acknowledges a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that aided in bringing this book to publication. Copyright © 1983 by Cornell University Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850 , or visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 1983 by Cornell University Press. First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 1985 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brantlinger, Patrick, 1941 – Bread and circuses. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1 . Mass media—Social aspects—History. 2 . Mass society—History. 3 . Culture. 4 . Popular culture. 5 . Classicism. I. Title. HM 258 .B 735 1984 302.2 ′ 34 83-45134 ISBN 978-0-8014-1598-2 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-8014-9338-6 (paper) The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ For Andy, Susan, and Jeremy Contents Preface 9 1. lntroduction: The Two Classicisms 17 z. The Classical Roots of the Mass Culture Debate 53 3. "The Opium of the People" 8z 4. Some Nineteenth-Century Themes: Decadence, Masses, Empire, Gothic Revivals 113 5. Crowd Psychology and Freud's Model of Perpetual Decadence 154 6. Three Versions of Modern Classicism: Ortega, Eliot, Camus 184 7. The Dialectic of Enlightenment Z2Z 8. Television: Spectacularity vs. McLuhanism Z49 8 CONTENTS 9. Conclusion: Toward Post-Industrial Society 278 Index 299 Preface F OR better or worse, the most powerful, influential instruments for the dissemination of values, knowledge, and art are today the mass media. Among artists and intellectuals, the cultural domination of radio, film, and television is normally viewed with apprehension. Teachers of literature, for example, often express the fear that books are an endangered species, that literacy is dying out, that it is giving way to what Jerzy Kosinski calls "videocy. "1 Political theorists on both the right and the left argue that the mass media are "totalitarian" rather than "democratic," that they are a major-perhaps the major- destroyer either of "individualism" or of "community." Often these apprehensions are expressed in terms of a mythology that 1 call "nega- tive classicism," according to which the more a society comes to de- pend on "mass culture," the more it falls into a pattern of "decline and fall" once traced by Rome and perhaps by other extinct civilizations. These apprehensions are not necessarily mistaken, but the mythology of negative classicism tends to obscure what is new and potentially liberating in our present situation. 1. See the interview with Jerzy Kosinski by David Sohn, "A Nation of Videots," Media and Methods, 11 (April 1975), 24-31, 52-57. A recent study of responses to literacy and the forces that threaten it is Robert Pattison, On Literacy: The Polifics of the Word fmm Homer to the Age of Rack (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). Pattison's book unfortunately appeared too late for me to consider it here. See al so my essays "The Multiversity as a Mass Medium," Radical Teacher, 13 (March 1979), 28-32, and "Mass Communications and Teachers of English," College English, 37 (January 1976), 490-509. 10 PREFACE The purpose of this hook is to criticize negative classicism as it has heen applied to mass culture not just in our electronic present hut over the last two centuries. The most recent "bread and circuses" responses to television and the welfare state are hardly new; they echo the reactions of artists and intellectuals from as long ago as Juvenal' s age to the entry of "the common people" into the cultural arena, or to the imposition on society of a centralized or mass-produced culture. Negative classicism is the product of several traditions of culture theo- ry, fi'om offshoots of Burkean conservatism to the esthetic postulates of ~larxism. My hope is that a critique of the mythology of negative classicism will help to open the way for new ideas ahout culture and societv. I do not wish to revive or defend older forms of culture, either "high" or "mass," an)' more than I wish to champion the electronic mass media as the)' are now employed in both capitalist and socialist countries to distract, to narcotize, to sell toothpaste and beer, fascism and Soviet Marxism. The two major arguments in defense of the mass media which have developed over the last twenty years I find largel)' unacceptable. The first line of defense is that of Marshall McLuhan and his disciples; the second is the case for "cultural pluralism" as fully compatible with-indeed, as partly a product of-the mass media, an argument that Herbert Gans, for example, makes in Popular Culture and High Culture. 2 If ~lcLuhan counters the mythology of negative classicism, it is only to substitute another mythology, equally suspect, based Oll the belief that the mass media are making the world over into an electronic utopia. Gans, on the other hand, represents a prag- matic liheralism whose main tenets have he en directly challenged by the monopolistic, perhaps even totalitarian, tendencies of the mass media. vVhere others find the erosion of democracy, Gans finds an enduring vitality. His vision reconciles democracy and massification in a way that, I helieve, cannot he squared with reality. A third defense of mass culture and the mass media might he expected to develop from Marxism, hut the most influential versions of ~larxist culture theory in vVestern E urope and America have treated the media in terms of reification, negation, monopoly capitalism, and therefore in 2. Raymond Rosenthal, ed., McLllhal1: Pro ami CO/l (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969): Herhert J. Cans, Popular Culture a/ld High ClIltllre: AIl Arwh¡sís tll1d Ecaluatioll of Taste (l\ew York: Basic, 1974). PREFACE 11 terms of "empire and decadence," "bread and circuses"-as in Her- bert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man. In my own reading and thinking about the mass media, 1 have wished to find sorne theory that would convince me that, somehow or other, in sorne not too remote future, mass culture and democratic community will coincide. They promise to do so, as Raymond Williams, among other theorists, has suggested; but that promise seems to rece de just as fast as the mass media achieve new levels of power, influence, and sophistication. 3 Given this disillusioning pat- tern, we may indeed be justified in using sorne version of negative classicism to understand where the mass media are leading uso But whatever liberating potential there may be in the technology of the media counts for little in an apocalyptic mythology that reads the doom of empires in what seem to be among the most constructive, original developments of the age. How can this contradiction be un- derstood? The history of theories about mass culture-which is more often than not the history of negative classicism, Roman analogizing, "bread and circuses"-may provide at least sorne clues to the future toward which the mass media are propelling us, or to the future we may create for ourselves through learning to use the mass media in democratic ways. Many people and several institutions have helped me complete this project. 1 am grateful to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; their fellowship allowed me to spend 1978-79 at the Uni- versity of California, Berkeley, beginning research that must have sounded strange and unlikely at the proposal stage. 1 am also grateful to Kenneth Gros Louis, John Reed, Jerome Buckley, and Patrick McCarthy for their support in the early going, and to Indiana Univer- sity for the "leave without pay" and Summer Faculty Fellowships that added both free time and financial support to the Guggenheim. 1 went to Berkeley in part because the University of California is blessed with two scholars, Leo L6wenthal and Martin Jay, who know 3. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (New York: Harper and Row, 1966 [first published in 1958]); The Long Revolutíon (London: Chatto and Wind- us, 1961); Television: Technology and Cultural Fonn (New York: Schocken, 1975 [1974]). The influence ofWilliams's thinking on my own will be apparent throughout this book. 12 PREFACE more about the history of the Frankfnrt Institute than anyone else. They offered me their time, ideas, criticisms, and even their libraries with great generosity. Both read parts of this book in early and embar- rassingly rough drafts, and both offered suggestions that were astute, usable, and yet also enconraging. Others-Ellen Anderson Brantlinger, :\lartha Vicinus, Eugene Kintgen, and Matei Calinescu-also read and criticized parts of this book at various stages. I am grateful to aB of them, but especially to Ellen and Matei. Ellen not only helped and enconraged me in numer- ous ways, but patiently endnred a good deal of absent-mindedness, sloppy housekeeping, and plain blue funk from me while I was writ- ing. With his criticisms and suggestions about new books and articles to read, Matei helped me to sharpen most of the chapters, focusing my attention on the paradox of progress as decadence. Some of the ideas in this study 1 first tried out in a graduate course at Indiana: L68o, Literary Theory. I team-taught that course with Christoph K. Lohmann, whose knowledge of American writers helped me at the start of this project. During the semester we taught to- gether, Chris brought many of my thoughts about mass culture into better focus. 1 also imagine that many of the comments and questions of our L680 students are registered in this book. Other students and colleagues have helped with suggestions, information, eonversation, research, translating, and typing, including Marilyn Breiter, Joan Corwin, Linda David, Joseph Donovan, John Eakin, Catherine Gal- lagher, Camille Garnier, Daniel Granger, Donald Gray, Raymond Hedin, Joonok Huh, Lewis :\1iller, James Naremore, Robert Nowell, Marsha Richmond, Sheldon Rothblatt, Seott Sanders, Michael Sheldon, Anthony Shipps, Robert Smith, Elisa Sparks, Lee Sterren- burg, Paul Strohm, Timothy Wiles, and John Woodeoek. I also thank Jerzy Kosinski for eoming to my aid when a journal mangled an essay of mine, the better parts of which 1 have revived in this book. And both David Riesman and :\Iiehael Grant generously answered my requests for information. Whom have I left out? Perhaps our television set, but it is occupied most of the time when 1 want to watch it by Andy, Susan, and Jeremy (no, they have not been transmogrified into "videots," and they are not usually "barbarians" either). 1 suppose I have them to thank for keeping me at work those evenings when what I wanted to watch was PREFACE 13 not what they were watching. And 1 can be even more thankful to them for another reason: someday they may read this book and understand why 1 wrote it for them. PATRICK BRANTLINGER Bloomington, Indiana BREAD AND CIRCUSES CIIAPTER 1 Introduction: The Two Classicisms '"Ve change cures, finding norte effecti¡;e, neme calid, beca use lce hace faith neither in the ¡¡ea ce u;e seek rlOr in the pleasurcs ¡ce ¡JlIrsue. Versatile sages, ¡ce are the stoics ami epicurealls of lnodern Romes. -E. ~1. CIOHA'i, A. Sl!ort Historl¡ of Decm¡ T HIS is an examination of reactions to mass culture that interpret it as either a symptom or a cause of social decay. Television, for example, is sometimes treated as an instrument with great educational potential which ought to help-if it is not already helping-in the creation of a genuinely democratic and universal culture. But it just as often evokes dismay, as in Jerzy Kosinski's novel amI movie Beillg There; its most severe critics treat it as an instrument of totalitarian manipulation amI social disintegration. All critical theories of mass culture suggest that there is a superior type of culture, usually defined in terms of some historical moclel: the Enlightenment, the Renais- sanee, the NI icldle Ages, Periclean Athens. 1 shall call looking to the past for an ideal culture "positive classicism." But critical theories of mass culture also often suggest that the present is a recreatiO!1 or repetition of the past in a disastrous way: the modern world is said to have entered a stage of its history like that of the decline ancI bll of the Roman Empire. Hence, "bread amI circuses." Comparisons of mo<1- ern society with Roman imperial decadence 1 shall caH "negative classicism. " Frequently what a social scientist or a literary critic or a popular 18 BREAD AND G/RGUSES journalist offers as analysis of mass culture or the mass media proves to be something else: a version of a persistent, pervasive mythology that frames its subject in the sublime context of the rise and fall of empires, the alpha and omega of human affairs. Very little has been written about mass culture, the masses, or the mass media that has not been colored by apocalyptic assumptions. It would be too easy to say that where genuine analysis ends mythologizing begins, but that is often the case. The terms ofthis mythology-"mass culture" itself, but also "the masses," "empire," "decadence," "barbarism," and the like- defy definition. Their meanings shift with each new analysis, or rather with each new mythologizing. U nless it is rooted in an analysis of specific artifacts or media, the phrase "mass culture" usually needs to be understood as an apocalyptic idea, behind which lies a concern for the preservation of civilization as a whole. 1 call negative classicism a "mythology" both because it is apocalyptic and because it pervades all levels of public consciousness today, from scholarly and intellectual writing to the mass media themselves. Of course it is a secular mythol- ogy, close to Roland Barthes' s concept of "myth as depoliticized speech"; a near synonym for it might be "ideology." But negative classicism transcends the specific ideologies-conservatism, liberal- ism, radicalism, fascism, socialism, Marxism-and is used in different ways by them all. Its most thoughtful expositors elaborate and qualify it with great sophistication and rationality, but it still functions more like an article of faith than like a reasoned argument: in many cases, a mere passing allusion to "bread and circuses" or to such related no- tions as "decadence" and "barbarism" is meant to trigger a chain of associations pointing toward a secularized Judgment Day in which democracy, or capitalism, or Western civilization, or "the technologi- cal society" will strangle upon its own contradictions, chief among which is likely to be an amorphous monstrosity called "mass culture." M y chief purpose has been to provide a critique of the mythology of negative classicism as it has developed over the last two centuries in relation to "mass culture": the mass media, journalism, mass educa- tion, the cultural effects of the processes of democratization and indus- trialization. Since a complete history of this mythology would have to survey most writing about culture and society over the same time span, 1 have chosen instead to focus on major patterns and major cultural theorists. The first chapter offers an overview of some of the The Two Classicisms 19 assumptions and theories that shape contemporary responses to mass culture, as well as a capsule history of the "bread and circuses" analo- gy. The second looks back to the Greek and Roman origins of modern culture theories, including the two classicisms themselves. The third returns to the modern world via an examination of some of the main con tribu tion s of the Christian tradition to contemporary theorizing about mass culture. It focuses on the idea of religion as the antithesis of classical culture, and as somehow proletarian or for the masses, and therefore as a version of mass culture-"the opium of the people." The fourth chapter then turns to the "decadent movement," primarily among nineteenth-century French and British writers, to show how it developed as a defensive response to the democratization and indus- trialization-that is, the "massification"-of culture. "Decadent" poets and artists were the first major group of intellectuals to develop a mythology based upon the analogy of modern society to the declin- ing Roman Empire. The fifth chapter turns to the origins of Freud's theories of civilization in his group psychology and its forebears, such as Gustave Le Bon's "crowd psychology." Freud adopts much ofthe negative thinking about "the masses" present in Le Bon, Nietzsche, and other late nineteenth-century writers; the emergence of "the masses" or of "mass culture" is a sign of the beginning of the end of civilization, a return to barbarismo Chapter 6 explores the culture theories of three contrasting figures from the first half of this century: José Ortega y Gasset, T. S. Eliot, and Albert Camus. The first two offer elaborate versions of negative classicism; Camus has enough faith in ordinary human nature to believe in the prospect of a mass culture that is not decadent, but that is instead synonymous with a free, humane civilization. The seventh chapter examines the mass culture theories of the chief representatives of the Frankfurt Institute- The- odor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Ben- jamin. The concept of the "dialectic of enlightenment" points to a regression of civilization that, according to these theorists, is largely caused by mass culture and the mass media, at least as these have developed under capitalismo The last chapter focuses on television, as reflected in the apocalyptic ideas of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and others, including the Frankfurt theorists. The mythology of nega- tive classicism seems inevitably to point to television as the chief culprit in the alleged decline and fall of contemporary culture. Yet