Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System. John Rieder
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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)