Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System. John Rieder
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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