Commercial culture has never had it so good, at least from the point of view of its producers. That popular film and TV, music, video games, some easily consumable literature and more can be big business is obvious; but at the same time, compared even to a few decades ago, such culture commands a considerable level of intellectual respectability, while much less commercially oriented “high” culture (not to mention much historically or geographically distant culture) is decreasingly valued and taught.
I wish here to trace some of the intellectual developments which have informed such a situation, and in the process pay tribute to the important work of two of the figures who did most to challenge it—Greg Philo, director of the Glasgow University Media Group, and cultural sociologist Jim McGuigan, latterly of Loughborough University. Both passed away in 2024.
To understand the significance of these two scholars’ work requires some wider historical context relating to changing views of the “masses” and “mass culture”, and especially of the extent to which lay citizens control the impact of such culture and media. From the nineteenth century onwards, following the major expansion of large cities, the new way of life they brought about—crowded, polluted, and with consequent feelings of loneliness—was captured by poets from Charles Baudelaire to T.S. Eliot. Gustave Le Bon, in his Psychologies des Foules (1895, ‘Psychology of Crowds’), attempted to explain crowd psychology, as leading individuals to surrender emotional control and intellectual and critical reasoning skills, mesmerized by that mass in which they find themselves.
But such social models were subsequently modified by two key individuals. Walter Lippmann, author of Public Opinion (1922), made a positive case for the use of mass culture and media to manipulate large numbers of people, in the process coining the term “manufacturing consent”. Edward Bernays, author of Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928) (drawing on Le Bon, Lippmann and Bernays’s uncle Sigmund Freud) took ideas of crowd psychology and the "herd instinct" further, and developed influential theories of manipulation, which informed the emerging practice of public relations.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in their seminal Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment), largely written by 1944, but published in 1947, set out most clearly their theories of the culture industry, anticipated in some of Adorno’s earlier writings. This model radically shifted the focus away from artists and performers towards the industry which shapes and conditions their work in industrial society. Adorno and Horkheimer argued that the culture industry produced essentially standardized and formulaic products, pretending to satisfy needs and wishes by appealing to a lowest common denominator. Mass culture left little place for genuine artistic individuality, nor for that which might produce more ambiguous and pluralist responses from those who receive it.
Adorno (more than Horkheimer) expanded upon this model in subsequent writings. He considered not only jazz and popular music, but also radio, television, astrology and charismatic preachers. All of these largely effected a form of “mass deception” and manipulation upon populations. By contrast, while high culture was not immune to Adorno’s critique, nonetheless in some avant-garde work, such as the music of Arnold Schoenberg or the texts and plays of Samuel Beckett, Adorno believed there remained a “utopian” element, able to point beyond the world already known.
While high culture was not immune to Adorno’s critique, nonetheless in some avant-garde work, such as the music of Arnold Schoenberg or the texts and plays of Samuel Beckett, Adorno believed there remained a “utopian” element, able to point beyond the world already known.
The Adorno/Horkheimer model has been highly influential but has also been heavily criticized. Some viewed it as excessively elitist in its unwavering hostility to forms of culture valued by many, and in particular to popular music with African-American roots. But other prominent intellectuals pursued related or parallel directions, continuing to focus on the manipulative role of culture and media industries “from above”. The poet and writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger presented in 1970 a modified model of a Bewusstseins-Industrie ('Consciousness Industry'), whereby the ruling classes had instilled a mode of consciousness which served their interests above those of other citizens, through media and education, transformed by increased leisure time and mass production of consumer goods.
