What is the peculiarity of mass culture? Mass culture: main characteristics
Based on the reflections and assessments of researchers, a number of characteristics can be identified popular culture(Fig. 8.1).
The main difference between mass culture as a phenomenon is that it complicates reality. This conclusion only seems paradoxical. Marginalized social consciousness, which is more or less characteristic of the statistical majority of people (as long as they live in cities), is characterized by broken traditions and confusion of values. What is the marginal? It is clear that marginal consciousness constantly reproduces itself, as a rule, without receiving nourishment for the development of any solid, reliable fundamental value, living in their constant change in a world reminiscent of a children's kaleidoscope with its images on glass, albeit standard, but still time as if new. In this world, almost nothing is stable, everything resembles a house of cards, constantly falling and being erected again. The myth of Sisyphus, modernized by Albert Camus, is a paradigm of marginal consciousness, destroyed, destroying and all the time trying to be reborn from the ashes and roll a stone up the mountain, but doing it mechanically.
This is the difficulty. Group your efforts and unite not so much creatively as mechanically everyone and everything, turning off or extinguishing the creative components of consciousness against the background of the constant destruction of universal human values, their dissection with the loss of hierarchy, in other words, an attempt to reach the top of the mountain without a compass in hand and the meaning of life, without establishing guidelines in the soul verified by the history of mankind is a difficult task. It is analogous to trying to solve an equation with so many unknowns that the solution is fundamentally impossible. Many producers of mass culture, if they do not understand this, then feel it, and therefore in this area it is not the solution to life’s problems that dominates, but rather complex mechanical games of simplicity. The solution to a life problem, as if posed by a work of mass culture, is either impossible, or unnecessary, or, finally, denies the very existence of the problem.
Rice. 8.1.
It's also difficult because as soon as the consumer looks up from the stage, screen, headphones, etc., they can't help but feel that there is a problem. He was simply distracted and entertained. But what was received and what the bottom line is is a minimum of adequate tips that are really useful for real life, a maximum of “fairy tales”, it seems simple, understandable and therapeutic. If I don’t like it, the consumer consoles himself, I can press another button on the TV remote control, go to another site, or turn off the source of information altogether. This is the complex field in which mass culture plays – Brownian motion forms and meanings are obviously more complex than any hierarchy of meanings.
As technological rationality progresses, oppositional and transcendental elements of high culture are eliminated, which actually become victims of the process desublimation, dominant in developed regions of the modern world.
The achievements and failures of modern society have deprived culture of its former meaning. The glorification of the autonomous individual, humanism, tragic and romantic love, apparently, was an ideal only for the past stage of development...
Reality transcends its culture, and today man can do more, than culture heroes and demigods; he has already solved many problems that seemed insoluble. But at the same time, he betrayed hope and destroyed the truth, which were preserved in the sublimations of high culture...
The novelty of today's situation lies in the smoothing out of the antagonism between culture and social reality by rejecting the oppositional, alien and transcendental elements in high culture, thanks to which it created another dimension reality. Liquidation two-dimensional culture does not occur through negation and discarding" cultural values", but through their complete integration into the established order and their mass reproduction and demonstration.
And the fact that the media harmoniously, often imperceptibly mix art, politics, religion and philosophy with commercial advertising means that these spheres of culture are reduced to a common denominator - the commodity form. Soul music is becoming popular music. It is not the truth value that is quoted, but the exchange value...
High culture becomes part material culture and in this transformation loses most your truth...
Western high culture—the moral, aesthetic, and intellectual values still espoused by industrial society—was, both functionally and chronologically, a pre-technological culture. Its significance goes back to the experience of a world that no longer exists and that cannot be returned, because technological society has taken its place.
This feudal culture- and because the creations belonging to her sub-spirit expressed a conscious, methodical rejection of the entire sphere of business, industry and order based on calculation and profit...
In the pre-technological world, man and nature were not yet organized as things and tools...
The decisive difference between affirming and negating art is not in the psychological opposition, not in what feeds art - delight or sadness, health or neurosis - but in the relationship between artistic and social reality. The break with the latter, its miraculous or rational overcoming, is an essential feature of even the most affirmative art; it is alienated from the very public to which it is addressed. Regardless of how familiar or familiar a temple or cathedral was to the people living around it, it plunged them into a state of sublime fear unknown to them in everyday life, whether we are talking about slaves or peasants, artisans or even their masters...
In ritual or other form, art contained the rationality of negation, which in its developed form becomes the Great Refusal - a protest against the existing.
It is for the creation and awakening of another dimension of reality that the salon, concert, opera, and theater are intended. Their visit requires a celebratory preparation, thereby detaching and transcending everyday experience.
Currently, this gap between the arts and everyday routine is increasingly closing under the onslaught of a developing technological society.
This means consigning the Great Refusal to oblivion and absorbing the “other dimension” into the prevailing state of affairs. The works created by alienation are themselves integrated into this society and begin to circulate in it as an integral part of equipment that serves either to decorate or to psychoanalyze the dominant state of affairs. They thus perform a commercial task - they sell, console or excite.
This is true, but, entering life as classics, they cease to be themselves, they are deprived of their antagonistic power, of the defamiliarization that created the dimension of their truth. Thus, the purpose and function of these works fundamentally changed.
Marcuse G. One dimensional person. M., 1994. pp. 72–82.
Concept defamiliarization, which means “to defamiliarize”, to make strange, i.e. forcing the viewer (reader) to perceive a familiar thing in a new way, to experience it, and not to recognize it, was introduced into the Russian language by V. B. Shklovsky. Cultural privilege expressed an inequity in the distribution of freedom, a separation of intellectual from material productivity, but it also created a protected space in which taboo truths could survive away from the society that oppressed them. This distance has disappeared.
The cultural center now becomes a well-integrated part of a commercial or municipal or government center, architecturally sophisticated. Artistic alienation began to have a completely functional character. It, along with other forms of denial, becomes a victim of the process of onset of technological rationality. The consequence is that loneliness, the most important condition for an individual’s ability to resist society, slips away from its power and becomes technically impossible.
Another property of mass culture is contextuality. A phenomenon can be classified as mass culture only in a certain context in which it is popular among certain segments of the population at the time of research. This context is characterized by a separation from basic spiritual values, their destruction to the state of atoms and the restructuring of the structure of the final product from the elements of the decay of primary samples. In this sense, “Jesus Christ Superstar” does not continue the tradition of Christianity and the musical “Notr-Dame de Paris” does not develop the direction of thoughts and feelings of Victor Hugo’s novel, but destroys them and makes them out of firebrands. To the extent that the fire in the firebrands has not yet gone out, elements of genuine art arise in the cauldron of mass culture. To the extent that their fusion with the atoms of mass culture is organic, we can observe the amazing phenomena of popular high art, both mass and elite. They were, are and will be. These are some of the songs of the Beatles and Okudzhava, films " White sun Deserts" and "Moscow Doesn't Believe in Tears" are products of overcoming the boundaries between mass and elite cultures and their rare organic synthesis.
Thus, mass culture mechanically mixes elements of various rootless cultures. Here we find one of the most important differences between mass and high culture. High culture, like a scion, gets used to tradition and grows along with the root and trunk of tradition, giving a new taste to the fruit, just as a pear grafted onto an apple tree feels new on the lips. “We all stand on the shoulders of giants,” Michelangelo said about this. Applying this comparison to popular culture, we can say that it “lies on the shoulders of dwarfs.” Popular culture eclectically manipulates elements of other cultures, placing them in contexts that lower the ethical and aesthetic values the primary sample taken for processing and the final product.
Despite all the differences in the ways of creating works of mass culture, the main method is to separate the values of the primary sample from their aesthetic, moral, ethical and spiritual roots and mechanically place them in a different context. Methods of playing to lower the context can be different: primitive rhythmization of Bach, creating conditions for listening to Mozart not in concert hall, and in one’s own kitchen, the distribution of images of the Mona Lisa (Gioconda) on souvenirs sold everywhere - these and many other methods of making basic values marginal.
Finally, popular culture is always ideological. However, it is capable of wrapping ideology in a package that makes this ideology less transparent. This is facilitated by the mastery of production technologies by producers of mass ideological products. mythologem.
Modern man, like anyone else, has a mythological component in his consciousness. However, in its original form, myth has already been lost, modern mythology is closely intertwined with ideology, and it is no coincidence that another concept has appeared - “mythologem”. This ideology can have a variety of directions. Thus, the latest domestic political mythology is associated with the processes of modernization of the country, the hopes and illusions of a person who finds himself in the complex collisions of the modern world. A world that would otherwise seem extremely aggressive and cruel. On the one hand, myth gives rise to surrogates of truth, a dream, hope for a miracle (get rich quick, financial pyramid, winning, etc.). The downside is mass psychosis, a weakening of people’s creative powers, and in general a slowdown in the dynamics of change.
When myths collapse, burying the values and orientations that were the support of a person, this becomes his tragedy, since the mythological consciousness is not capable of critical reflection, but to replace some myths with others ( remythologization ) takes time. These features of mythology are the basis for mass ideological influence. In turn, ideology, representing a distorted or inadequate reflection of social reality (since it expresses someone’s specific interests), acts as a social mythology (exploiting the slogans of a “society of equals” in America or “conciliarity”, “the chosenness of Russia”, etc.). etc.), which deforms consciousness. And this is the ideology aimed at Homo consommatus - the consuming person:
His Majesty Marketing.
Previously, we sold up to sixty varieties of apples, but now there are only three left - golden, green and red. Previously, chickens were raised for three months, now an egg and a chicken on the supermarket shelf are separated by only 42 days - and what a terrible 42 days! 25 birds per square meter, fed with antibiotics and anxiolytics. Until the seventies, Norman Camemberts were divided into 10 flavor categories, now there are a maximum of three due to the introduction of standards for sterilized milk. This, of course, is not your doing, but this is your world. Coca-Cola (10 billion francs in advertising in 1997) no longer contains cocaine, but phosphoric and citric acids are added to create the illusion of quenching thirst and addiction to this drink. Dairy cows are fed special fermented silage, from which they develop cirrhosis, and are also stuffed with antibiotics, which give rise to new types of resistant bacteria, which are also preserved in beef: not to mention bone meal, which causes mad cow disease - a lot has been written about this in newspapers. The milk of such cows is also full of dioxins, which they eat along with grass. Fish bred in artificial reservoirs are fed fish meal (as harmful to them as bone meal is to livestock) and, again, antibiotics... In winter, transgenic strawberries do not even freeze thanks to a gene borrowed from fish from the northern seas. Geneticists are great craftsmen! - they cross chickens with potatoes, scorpions with cotton, guinea pigs with tobacco, tobacco with lettuce, and humans with tomatoes.
Along with this, more and more thirty-year-olds are getting cancer of the kidneys, uterus, breast, rectum, thyroid, stomach, testicles, and doctors do not know the cause of this scourge. Even small children get sick: big cities the number of leukemias, brain tumors and epidemics of bronchial diseases has sharply increased... According to Professor Luc Montagnier, the manifestation of AIDS is explained not only by the transmission of the virus (which he himself discovered), but also by additional factors “associated with modern civilization”, namely with environmental pollution and diet, which, according to him, weaken the body's immunity and resistance. The amount of sperm decreases every year; The very existence of the human race is under threat.
And this civilization is based on false desires that you excite and fuel. She is doomed to die.
There is a lot of different information circulating where you work; so, for example, you accidentally find out that there are heavy-duty washing machines, which, however, no manufacturer wants to produce; that some guy invented an unbreakable thread for stockings, but a large pantyhose company bought the patent from him and stole it; that the patent for “eternal” tires is also hidden in a long box, and this despite the fact that thousands of people die on the roads every year; that the oil lobby is doing everything in its power to slow down the spread of electric vehicles (at the cost of atmospheric carbon dioxide pollution, which leads to a warming of the planet - the so-called greenhouse effect, which will most likely cause numerous natural disasters and other disasters in the next fifty years - hurricanes, melting Arctic ice, rising sea levels, skin cancer, not including oil spills); that even toothpaste is a completely useless product, it just freshens breath; that all dishwashing liquids are exactly the same; that CDs are as fragile as regular vinyl; that foil is much more harmful than asbestos; that the composition of sun creams has not changed since World War II (despite the increased incidence of melanoma), since these creams protect against harmless type B ultraviolet radiation, but not against harmful type A; What advertising campaigns Nestle's efforts to market powdered milk to infants in third world countries resulted in millions of deaths due to parents diluting it with raw water.
The kingdom of the market is based on the sale of goods, and your job is to persuade the consumer to choose the most short-lived of these goods. Industrialists call this "obsolescence programming."
And you were told to shut up and keep your feelings to yourself... In all ten years, you have never rebelled against this abomination. Maybe if you had given up your job, things would have turned out completely differently. Maybe then the ubiquitous advertising, which is already making you sick, would not disfigure the world, inviting outdoor signs would not flash on the roads, cities would do without fast food on every corner, and people would simply walk along the streets and talk to each other. Life wasn't supposed to turn out exactly the way it does now. And you didn’t want this artificial nightmare at all. And you didn't produce all these non-mobile cars (2.5 billion cars on the planet by 2050). However, you didn't lift a finger to change the world in better side. One of the Ten Commandments reads: “You shall not make for yourself any graven image or image... You shall not worship them or serve them...” But you, like everyone else, have fallen into this mortal sin and are now caught in the act. Well, God’s punishment has long been known - this is the hell in which you live.
Beigbeder F. 99 francs. M.: Inostranka, 2005. pp. 105–110.
Mass culture is a state, or more precisely, a cultural situation corresponding to a certain form of social structure, in other words, culture “in the presence of the masses,” and it is also a complex phenomenon generated by modernity and not amenable to unambiguous assessment. Since its appearance, it has become a subject of study and heated debate for philosophers and sociologists. Disputes about the meaning of this culture and its role in the development of society continue today.
To talk about the presence of mass culture, we must first mention historical community, called mass, as well as about mass consciousness. They are connected and do not exist in isolation from each other; they act simultaneously as both an “object” and a “subject” of mass culture.
The emergence of mass culture is associated with the formation at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. mass society. The material basis of what happened in the 19th century. Significant changes were the transition to machine production. But industrial machine production presupposes standardization, not only of equipment, raw materials, technical documentation, but also of workers’ skills, working hours, etc. Standardization processes and spiritual culture were also affected.
Two spheres of a working person’s life have become quite clearly defined: work and leisure. As a result, effective demand arose for those goods and services that helped to spend leisure time. The market responded to this demand by offering a “standard” cultural product: books, films, gramophone records, etc. They were intended primarily to help people have an interesting time. free time, take a break from monotonous work.
The use of new technologies in production and the expansion of mass participation in politics required certain educational preparation. In industrialized countries, important steps are being taken to develop education, especially primary education. As a result, a large readership appeared in a number of countries, and after this, one of the first genres of mass culture arose - mass literature.
Weakened with the transition from traditional to industrial society, direct connections between people were partly replaced by the emerging means of mass communication, capable of quickly broadcasting various kinds messages to a large audience.
Mass society, as many researchers have noted, gave birth to its typical representative - the “man of the masses” - the main consumer of mass culture. Philosophers of the early 20th century. endowed him with predominantly negative characteristics - “a man without a face”, “a man like everyone else”. In the first half of the last century, the Spanish philosopher X. Ortega y Gaset was one of the first to give a critical analysis of this new social phenomenon - the “mass man”. It is with the “mass man” that the philosopher associates the crisis of high European culture and the established system of public power. The masses displace the elite minority (“people with special qualities”) from leading positions in society, replace them, and begin to dictate their terms, their views, their tastes. The elite minority are those who demand a lot from themselves and shoulder burdens and obligations on themselves. The majority does not demand anything; for them, living means going with the flow, remaining as they are, without trying to surpass themselves. X. Ortega y Gaset considered the main features of the “mass man” to be the unbridled growth of life’s demands and innate ingratitude towards everything that satisfies these demands. Mediocrity with an unbridled thirst for consumption, “barbarians who poured out of the hatch onto the stage of the complex civilization that gave birth to them” - this is how the philosopher unflatteringly characterizes most of his contemporaries.
In the middle of the 20th century. The “mass man” increasingly began to be correlated not with “rebellious” violators of the foundations, but, on the contrary, with a completely well-intentioned part of society - with the middle class. Realizing that they are not the elite of society, middle class people are nevertheless satisfied with their material and social status. Their standards, norms, rules, language, preferences, tastes are accepted by society as normal and generally accepted. For them, consumption and leisure are no less important than work and career. The expression “mass middle class society” appeared in the works of sociologists.
There is another point of view in science today. According to her, mass society disappears from the historical scene altogether, so-called demassification occurs. Uniformity and unification are being replaced by emphasizing the characteristics of an individual person, personalization of personality, replacing “ to the mass person» the industrial age comes the "individualist" fast industrial society. So, from the “barbarian who burst onto the scene” to the “respectable ordinary citizen” - such is the range of views on the “mass person”.
The term "mass culture" covers various cultural products, as well as the system of their distribution and creation. First of all, these are works of literature, music, visual arts, films and videos. It also includes patterns of everyday behavior, appearance. These products and samples come to every home thanks to the means mass media, through advertising, fashion institute.
Let's consider the main features of mass culture.
Public availability. Accessibility and recognition have become one of the main reasons for the success of mass culture. Monotonous, exhausting work industrial enterprise increased the need for intensive rest, rapid restoration of psychological balance and energy after a hard day. To do this, a person searched on bookstores, in cinema halls, and in the media, first of all, for easy-to-read, entertaining performances, films, and publications.
Worked within the framework of popular culture prominent figures arts: actors Charlie Chaplin, Lyubov Orlova, Nikolai Cherkasov, Igor Ilyinsky, Jean Gabin, dancer Fred Astaire, world famous singers Mario Lanza, Edith Piaf, composers F. Low (author of the musical “My Fair Lady”), I. Dunaevsky, film directors G. Alexandrov, I. Pyryev and others.
Entertaining. It is ensured by addressing those aspects of life and emotions that arouse constant interest and are understandable to most people: love, sex, family problems, adventure, violence, horror. In detective stories and “spy stories,” events replace each other with kaleidoscopic speed. The heroes of the works are also simple and understandable; they do not indulge in long discussions, but act.
Seriality, replicability. This feature is manifested in the fact that mass culture products are produced in very large quantities, designed for consumption by a truly mass of people.
Passivity of perception. This feature of mass culture was noted already at the dawn of its formation. Fiction, comics, and light music did not require intellectual or emotional effort from the reader, listener, or viewer for their perception. The development of visual genres (cinema, television) only strengthened this feature. Reading even light literary work, we inevitably imagine something, create our own image of heroes. Screen perception does not require this from us.
Commercial nature. A product created within the framework of mass culture is a product intended for mass sale. To do this, the product must be democratic, that is, suitable and appealing to a large number of people of different genders, ages, religions, and education. Therefore, manufacturers of such products began to focus on the most fundamental human emotions.
Works of mass culture are created mainly within the framework of professional creativity: music is written professional composers, film scripts are made by professional writers, advertisements are created by professional designers. For inquiries wide range The consumer is guided by professional creators of mass culture products.
So, mass culture is a modern phenomenon, generated by certain social and cultural shifts and performing a number of quite important functions. Mass culture has both negative and positive aspects. The not too high level of its products and the mainly commercial criterion for assessing the quality of works do not negate the obvious fact that mass culture provides a person with an unprecedented abundance of symbolic forms, images and information, makes the perception of the world diverse, leaving the consumer the right to choose what to consume. product". Unfortunately, the consumer does not always choose the best.
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Classmates
The concepts of mass and elite culture define two types of culture in modern society, which are associated with the peculiarities of the way culture exists in society: the methods of its production, reproduction and distribution in society, the position that culture occupies in the social structure of society, the attitude of culture and its creators to everyday life. people's lives and socio-political problems of society. Elite culture appears before mass culture, but in modern society they coexist and are in complex interaction.
Mass culture
Definition of the concept
In modern scientific literature There are various definitions of popular culture. Some associate mass culture with the development in the twentieth century of new communication and reproductive systems (mass press and book publishing, audio and video recording, radio and television, xerography, telex and telefax, satellite communications, computer technology) and the global information exchange that arose thanks to the achievements scientific and technological revolution. Other definitions of mass culture emphasize its connection with the development of a new type of social structure of industrial and post-industrial society, which led to the creation of a new way of organizing the production and transmission of culture. The second understanding of mass culture is more complete and comprehensive, because it not only includes the changed technical and technological basis of cultural creativity, but also considers the socio-historical context and trends in cultural transformations of modern society.
Popular culture This is a type of product that is produced in large quantities every day. This is a set of cultural phenomena of the 20th century and the peculiarities of the production of cultural values in modern industrial society, designed for mass consumption. In other words, this is a conveyor belt production through various channels, including the media and communications.
It is assumed that mass culture is consumed by all people, regardless of place and country of residence. This is the culture of everyday life, presented on the widest possible channels, including TV.
The emergence of mass culture
Relatively prerequisites for the emergence of mass culture There are several points of view:
- Mass culture arose at the dawn of Christian civilization. As an example, simplified versions of the Bible are cited (for children, for the poor), designed for a mass audience.
- In the XVII-XVIII centuries Western Europe The genre of adventure, adventurous novel appears, which significantly expanded the readership due to huge circulations. (Example: Daniel Defoe - the novel “Robinson Crusoe” and 481 other biographies of people in risky professions: investigators, military men, thieves, prostitutes, etc.).
- In 1870, a law on universal literacy was passed in Great Britain, which allowed many to master the main form of art. creativity XIX century - novel. But this is only the prehistory of mass culture. In the proper sense, mass culture first manifested itself in the United States at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The emergence of mass culture is associated with the massification of life at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At this time, the role of the human masses in various areas life: economics, politics, management and communication of people. Ortega y Gaset defines the concept of the masses this way:
Mass is a crowd. A crowd in quantitative and visual terms is a multitude, and a multitude from a sociological point of view is a mass. Weight - average person. Society has always been a moving unity of the minority and the masses. A minority is a set of persons who are specially singled out; the mass is a group of people who are not singled out in any way. Ortega sees the reason for the promotion of the masses to the forefront of history in the low quality of culture, when a person of a given culture “does not differ from the rest and repeats the general type.”
The prerequisites for mass culture also include the emergence of a system of mass communications during the formation of bourgeois society(press, mass book publishing, then radio, television, cinema) and the development of transport, which made it possible to reduce the space and time necessary for the transmission and dissemination of cultural values in society. Culture emerges from local existence and begins to function on the scale of a national state (a national culture emerges, overcoming ethnic restrictions), and then enters the system of interethnic communication.
The prerequisites for mass culture also include the creation within bourgeois society of a special structure of institutions for the production and dissemination of cultural values:
- The emergence of public educational institutions ( secondary schools, professional school, higher education institutions);
- Creation of institutions producing scientific knowledge;
- The emergence of professional art (academies of fine arts, theater, opera, ballet, conservatory, literary magazines, publishing houses and associations, exhibitions, public museums, exhibition galleries, libraries), which also included the emergence of the institute art criticism as a means of popularizing and developing his works.
Features and significance of mass culture
Mass culture in its most concentrated form is manifested in artistic culture, as well as in the spheres of leisure, communication, management and economics. The term "mass culture" was first introduced by the German professor M. Horkheimer in 1941 and the American scientist D. MacDonald in 1944. The content of this term is quite contradictory. On the one hand, mass culture - "culture for all", on the other hand, this is "not quite culture". The definition of mass culture emphasizes spreadthe vulnerability and general accessibility of spiritual values, as well as the ease of their assimilation, which does not require special developed taste and perception.
The existence of mass culture is based on the activities of the media, so-called technical types arts (cinema, television, video). Mass culture exists not only in democratic social systems, but also in totalitarian regimes, where everyone is a “cog” and everyone is equal.
Currently, some researchers abandon the view of “mass culture” as an area of “bad taste” and do not consider it anti-cultural. Many people realize that mass culture has not only negative traits. It influences:
- the ability of people to adapt to the conditions of a market economy;
- respond adequately to sudden situational social changes.
Besides, mass culture is capable:
- compensate for the lack of personal communication and dissatisfaction with life;
- increase the population's involvement in political events;
- increase the psychological stability of the population in difficult social situations;
- make the achievements of science and technology accessible to many.
It should be recognized that mass culture is an objective indicator of the state of society, its misconceptions, typical forms of behavior, cultural stereotypes and a real value system.
In the sphere of artistic culture, it calls on a person not to rebel against the social system, but to fit into it, to find and take his place in an industrial society of a market type.
TO negative consequences of mass culture refers to its ability to mythologize human consciousness, to mystify real processes occurring in nature and society. There is a rejection of the rational principle in consciousness.
There were once beautiful poetic images. They talked about the wealth of imagination of people who could not yet correctly understand and explain the action of the forces of nature. Nowadays myths serve the poverty of thinking.
On the one hand, one might think that the purpose of mass culture is to relieve tension and stress in a person in an industrial society - after all, it is entertaining. But in fact, this culture does not so much fill leisure time as stimulate the consumer consciousness of the viewer, listener, and reader. A type of passive, uncritical perception of this culture arises in a person. And if so, a personality is created, whose consciousness easy mamanipulate, whose emotions are easy to direct to the rightside.
In other words, mass culture exploits the instincts of the subconscious sphere of human feelings and, above all, feelings of loneliness, guilt, hostility, fear, self-preservation.
In the practice of mass culture, mass consciousness has specific means of expression. Mass culture is more focused not on realistic images, but on artificially created images - images and stereotypes.
Popular culture creates a hero formula, repetitive image, stereotype. This situation creates idolatry. An artificial “Olympus” is created, the gods are “stars” and a crowd of fanatical admirers and admirers arises. In this regard, mass artistic culture successfully embodies the most desirable human myth - myth of a happy world. At the same time, she does not call her listener, viewer, reader to build such a world - her task is to offer a person refuge from reality.
The origins of the widespread dissemination of mass culture in the modern world lie in the commercial nature of all public relations. The concept of “product” defines all the diversity social relations in society.
Spiritual activity: cinema, books, music, etc., in connection with the development of mass media, become a commodity in the conditions of assembly line production. The commercial attitude is transferred to the sphere of artistic culture. And this determines the entertaining nature works of art. It is necessary that the clip pays off, the money spent on the production of the film produces a profit.
Mass culture forms a social stratum in society called the “middle class”. This class became the core of life in industrial society. For modern representative"middle class" is characterized by:
- Striving for success. Achievement and success are the values that culture in such a society is oriented towards. It is no coincidence that stories about how someone escaped from poor to rich, from a poor emigrant family to a highly paid “star” of mass culture are so popular in it.
- Second distinguishing feature"middle class" person possession of private property . A prestigious car, a castle in England, a house on the Cote d'Azur, an apartment in Monaco... As a result, relations between people are replaced by relations of capital, income, i.e. they are impersonally formal. A person must be in constant tension, survive in conditions of fierce competition. And the strongest survive, that is, those who succeed in the pursuit of profit.
- The third value characteristic of a “middle class” person is individualism . This is recognition of individual rights, its freedom and independence from society and the state. Energy free person is directed to the sphere of economic and political activity. This contributes to the accelerated development of productive forces. Equality is possible stey, competition, personal success - on the one hand, this is good. But, on the other hand, this leads to a contradiction between the ideals of a free personality and reality. In other words, as the principle of the relationship between man and man individualism is inhumane, and as a norm of a person’s relationship to society - antisocial .
In art and artistic creativity, mass culture performs the following social functions:
- introduces a person to the world of illusory experience and unrealistic dreams;
- promotes the dominant way of life;
- distracts the broad masses of people from social activity and forces them to adapt.
Hence the use in art of such genres as detective, western, melodrama, musicals, comics, advertising, etc.
Elite culture
Definition of the concept
Elite culture (from the French elite - selected, best) can be defined as a subculture of privileged groups of society(while sometimes their only privilege may be the right to cultural creativity or to preserve cultural heritage), which is characterized by value-semantic isolation, closedness; elite culture asserts itself as the creativity of a narrow circle of “highest professionals”, the understanding of which is accessible to an equally narrow circle of highly educated connoisseurs. Elite culture claims to stand high above the “ordinariness” of everyday life and to occupy the position of the “highest court” in relation to the socio-political problems of society.
Elite culture is considered by many culturologists as the antithesis of mass culture. From this point of view, the producer and consumer of elite cultural goods is the highest, privileged layer of society - elite . In modern cultural studies, the understanding of the elite as a special layer of society endowed with specific spiritual abilities has been established.
The elite is not just the highest stratum of society, the ruling elite. There is an elite in every social class.
Elite- this is the part of society most capable ofspiritual activity, gifted with high moral and aesthetic inclinations. It is she who ensures social progress, so art should be focused on meeting her demands and needs. The main elements of the elite concept of culture are contained in philosophical works A. Schopenhauer (“The World as Will and Idea”) and F. Nietzsche (“Human, All Too Human,” “The Gay Science,” “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”).
A. Schopenhauer divides humanity into two parts: “people of geniuses” and “people of benefit.” The former are capable of aesthetic contemplation and artistic activity, the latter are focused only on purely practical, utilitarian activities.
The demarcation between elite and mass culture is associated with the development of cities, book printing, and the emergence of a customer and performer in the sphere. Elite - for sophisticated connoisseurs, mass - for the ordinary, ordinary reader, viewer, listener. Works that serve as standards of mass art, as a rule, reveal a connection with folklore, mythological, and popular popular constructions that existed before. In the 20th century, the elitist concept of culture was summarized by Ortega y Gaset. The work of this Spanish philosopher, “The Dehumanization of Art,” argues that the new art is addressed to the elite of society, and not to its masses. Therefore, art does not necessarily have to be popular, generally understandable, universal. New art should alienate people from real life. "Dehumanization" - and is the basis of the new art of the twentieth century. There are polar classes in society - majority (mass) and minority (elite) . New art, according to Ortega, divides the public into two classes - those who understand it and those who do not understand it, that is, artists and those who are not artists.
Elite , according to Ortega, this is not the tribal aristocracy and not the privileged layers of society, but that part of it that has a “special organ of perception” . It is this part that contributes to social progress. And it is precisely this that artists should address with their works. The new art should help ensure that “...the best get to know themselves, learn to understand their purpose: to be in the minority and fight with the majority.”
A typical manifestation of elite culture is theory and practice of “pure art” or “art for art’s sake” , which found its embodiment in Western European and Russian culture at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. For example, in Russia, the ideas of elite culture were actively developed by the artistic association “World of Art” (artist A. Benois, magazine editor S. Diaghilev, etc.).
The emergence of an elite culture
Elite culture, as a rule, arises in eras of cultural crisis, the breakdown of old and the birth of new cultural traditions, methods of production and reproduction of spiritual values, and a change in cultural and historical paradigms. Therefore, representatives of elite culture perceive themselves as either “creators of the new”, towering above their time, and therefore not understood by their contemporaries (these are mostly romantics and modernists - figures of the artistic avant-garde, cultural revolution), or “custodians of fundamental principles” that must be protected from destruction and whose meaning is not understood by the “masses”.
In such a situation, the elite culture acquires features of esotericism- closed, hidden knowledge, which is not intended for wide, universal use. In history, the carriers of various forms of elite culture were priests, religious sects, monastic and spiritual knightly orders, Masonic lodges, craft guilds, literary, artistic and intellectual circles, and underground organizations. Such a narrowing of the potential recipients of cultural creativity gives rise to awareness of one's creativity as exceptional: “true religion”, “pure science”, “pure art” or “art for art’s sake”.
The concept of “elite” as opposed to “mass” was introduced at the end of the 18th century. The division of artistic creativity into elite and mass manifested itself in the concepts of the romantics. Initially, among the romantics, the elitist carries within itself the semantic meaning of being chosen and exemplary. The concept of exemplary, in turn, was understood as identical to the classical. The concept of the classical was especially actively developed in. Then the normative core was the art of antiquity. In this understanding, the classical was personified with the elitist and exemplary.
Romantics sought to focus on innovation in the field of artistic creativity. Thus, they separated their art from the usual adapted artistic forms. The triad: “elite - exemplary - classic” began to crumble - the elitist was no longer identical to the classical.
Features and significance of elite culture
A feature of elite culture is the interest of its representatives in creating new forms, demonstrative opposition to harmonious forms classical art, as well as an emphasis on the subjectivity of the worldview.
The characteristic features of an elite culture are:
- the desire for the cultural development of objects (phenomena of the natural and social world, spiritual realities), which stand out sharply from the totality of what is included in the field of subject development of the “ordinary”, “profane” culture of a given time;
- inclusion of one’s subject in unexpected value-semantic contexts, creation of its new interpretation, unique or exclusive meaning;
- the creation of a new cultural language (language of symbols, images), accessible to a narrow circle of connoisseurs, the decoding of which requires special efforts and a broad cultural outlook from the uninitiated.
Elite culture is dual and contradictory in nature. On the one hand, elite culture acts as an innovative enzyme sociocultural process. Works of elite culture contribute to the renewal of the culture of society, bringing into it new issues, language, methods of cultural creativity. Initially, within the boundaries of elite culture, new genres and types of art are born, the cultural and literary language of society is developed, and extraordinary scientific theories, philosophical concepts and religious teachings, which seem to “break out” beyond the established boundaries of culture, but then can become part of the cultural heritage of the entire society. That is why, for example, they say that truth is born as heresy and dies as banality.
On the other hand, the position of an elite culture, opposing itself to the culture of society, may mean a conservative departure from social reality and its pressing problems into the idealized world of “art for art’s sake,” religious, philosophical and socio-political utopias. Such a demonstrative form of rejection of the existing world can be either a form of passive protest against it or a form of reconciliation with it, recognition of the elite culture’s own powerlessness, its inability to influence cultural life society.
This duality of elite culture also determines the presence of opposing - critical and apologetic - theories of elite culture. Democratic thinkers (Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, Pisarev, Plekhanov, Morris, etc.) were critical of elitist culture, emphasizing its separation from the life of the people, its incomprehensibility to the people, its serving the needs of rich, jaded people. Moreover, such criticism sometimes went beyond the bounds of reason, turning, for example, from criticism of elite art into criticism of all art. Pisarev, for example, declared that “boots are higher than art.” L. Tolstoy, who created high examples of the novel of the New Age ("War and Peace", "Anna Karenina", "Sunday"), in the late period of his work, when he switched to the position of peasant democracy, considered all these works unnecessary to the people and became compose popular stories from peasant life.
Another direction of theories of elite culture (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Berdyaev, Ortega y Gasset, Heidegger and Ellul) defended it, emphasizing its meaningfulness, formal perfection, creative search and novelty, the desire to resist stereotypes and lack of spirituality everyday culture, viewed it as a haven for creative personal freedom.
A variety of elite art in our time is modernism and postmodernism.
References:
1. Afonin V. A., Afonin Yu. V. Theory and history of culture. Tutorial for independent work of students. – Lugansk: Elton-2, 2008. – 296 p.
2.Cultural studies in questions and answers. Toolkit to prepare for tests and exams in the course “Ukrainian and foreign culture» for students of all specialties and forms of study. / Rep. Editor Ragozin N.P. - Donetsk, 2008, - 170 p.
When analyzing mass culture as a special sociocultural phenomenon, it is necessary to indicate its main characteristics. These characteristics, in our opinion, are:
Focus on a homogeneous audience;
Reliance on the emotional, irrational, collective, unconscious;
Escapism;
Quick availability;
Easily forgotten;
Traditionalism and conservatism;
Operating with the average linguistic semiotic norm;
Entertaining.
Let us dwell in more detail on some of the above characteristics.
Focus on the irrational, unconscious, collective. Carl Jung noted in his works that symbol formation is the basis of mass culture. The role of the symbol, in his opinion, is to promote the sublimation of the energy of the unconscious spheres of the psyche, i.e. directing it into objective reality. According to Jung, the following components are basic in understanding mass culture. Firstly, its perception as a compensatory phenomenon that makes up for the lost integrity of human nature. Secondly, understanding the unconscious basis of mass culture. Thirdly, understanding the myth-making purpose of mass culture.
Mass culture, as culturologists have noted, is very characterized by the repetition of plots, ideas and images. And repetition is a property of myth. Mythology, in turn, captures the collective unconscious in a concentrated form. Consequently, mass culture in one way or another focuses on the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Russian culturologist V.P. interestingly noted. Rudnev: “Actors in the minds of the audience are identified with the characters. A hero who dies in one film is resurrected in another, just as archaic gods died and were resurrected.” In general, culturologists are increasingly bringing mass culture closer to mythology. Even the titles of the monographs are characteristic. For example - "Mythology of the 20th century".
Another, no less significant characteristic of mass culture is escapism, i.e. escape from reality into the world of fantasy and dreams. This feature has been noted by many researchers. So, in particular, V.P. Shestakov believes that it is thanks to escapism that mass culture carries out a substitution, or, in the language of psychoanalysis, compensation for reality with a world of deceptive and comforting illusions. Author of the book "Philosophy" artistic history"Arnold Hauser also believes that the history of modern mass (popular) art begins with the emergence of the idea that art means distraction. In it, they look for dispersion, but not concentration, entertainment, but not education.
The rapid availability of products of mass culture is achieved with the help of modern means of mass communication, which are becoming more sophisticated and diverse from year to year. Behind last decade to such already traditional methods of distributing mass culture products as cinema, video, television and radio programs, printed publications have been added mobile systems communications (pagers, mobile phones), as well as the Internet.
Mass culture is an integral part of the life of society. However, the products of mass culture are short-lived. Being largely a consumer culture, it instantly responds to emerging demand for one or another of its products. As demand disappears, so do the products designed to satisfy it.
Speaking about the fragility of mass culture products, we should highlight a special category of its so-called “cult” works. Their main feature lies in the fact that they penetrate very deeply into the mass consciousness and acquire a sufficient degree of stability.
For example, the book “Twelve Chairs” (I. Ilf, E. Petrov) - cult work Soviet social satire, fused into the consciousness of the masses with countless quotes and aphorisms. The lyrics and music of the rock group "The Beatles" are no longer just lyrics and music, but a kind of sacred symbols of mass rock culture. Feature Film“Seventeen Moments of Spring” (T. Lioznova, USSR) has been a kind of video anthem of Soviet military intelligence for more than a quarter of a century. And the performer leading role(V. Tikhonov) in the consciousness of the people until the end of his life creative activity will remain "Stirlitz".
Mass culture, giving rise great amount of her ephemera works, at the same time deeply conservative. Her works can be unmistakably attributed to one genre or another; the plots have a clear, repeating structure over and over again. And although works of “mass culture” are often devoid of deep meaning, they have a rigid framework of internal structure. The best remedy to please the tastes of the public, some cultural experts believe, is not novelty, not innovation, but banality. A person is not able to understand and assimilate something completely new to him if this new thing has no correspondence with anything already known. The known serves as a guiding thread leading through the unknown space. It has even been calculated that if a work contains more than 10% completely new information, contact with the audience is lost.
As an independent phenomenon, mass culture is assessed controversially.
In general, existing points of view can be divided into two groups. Representatives of the first group (Adorno, Marcuse, etc.) give a negative assessment of this phenomenon. In their opinion, mass culture forms a passive perception of reality among its consumers. This position is argued by the fact that works of mass culture offer ready-made answers to what is happening in the sociocultural space around the individual. In addition, some theorists of mass culture believe that under its influence the system of values changes: the desire for entertainment and entertainment becomes dominant. The negative aspects associated with the influence of mass culture on public consciousness also include the fact that mass culture is based not on an image oriented to reality, but on a system of images that influence the unconscious sphere of the human psyche.
This group also includes the authors of the Teaching of Living Ethics (the Mahatmas, the Roerich family). According to the Living Ethics paradigm, mass culture is essentially a pseudo-culture, since, unlike true culture (i.e., high culture), in most of its forms it does not contribute to humanistically oriented social progress and spiritual evolution of man. The calling and purpose of true culture is the ennobling and perfection of man. Popular culture performs inverse functions- it reanimates the lower aspects of consciousness and instincts, which, in turn, stimulate the ethical, aesthetic and intellectual degradation of the individual.
Meanwhile, researchers who adhere to an optimistic point of view on the role of mass culture in the life of society point out that:
It attracts the masses who do not know how to use their free time productively;
Creates a kind of semiotic space that promotes closer interaction between members of a high-tech society;
Provides an opportunity for a wide audience to become acquainted with works of traditional (high) culture.
And yet, it is likely that the contrast between definitely positive and definitely negative assessments of mass culture will not be entirely correct. It is obvious that the influence of mass culture on society is far from clear and does not fit into the binary scheme “white - black”. This is one of the main problems of analyzing popular culture.
Let us now try to identify the reasons for the popularity of mass culture and comment on them. Here, in addition to the objective reason (the need for an average language of communication), others can be identified that are directly related to the characteristics of human consciousness. They look like this.
The reluctance of an individual to actively participate in social phenomena and processes spiritually or intellectually. In other words, the initial passivity of the consciousness of the majority of members of society.
The desire to get away from everyday problems, from everyday life and routine.
The desire for understanding and empathy for one’s problems on the part of another person and society.
In addition, the famous English writer O. Huxley, analyzing the specifics of mass culture as an aesthetic phenomenon, notes such reasons for its popularity as: recognition and accessibility. “Society needs constant confirmation of great truths,” he quite rightly notes, “although mass culture does this at a low level and tasteless.”
Mass culture, taking into account all these features of consciousness, provides products that are easily perceived, allows one to plunge into the world of dreams and illusions, and creates the impression of addressing a specific individual.
In connection with the widespread dissemination of mass culture, the question of its geographical status also arises. Most theorists and cultural historians are inclined to believe that mass culture is a universal phenomenon that has nothing to do with the social structure of society. Mass culture is cosmopolitan.
However, it should be borne in mind that mass culture cannot appear out of nowhere. To her, like anyone else social phenomenon, a certain ideological foundation is required. Such a foundation for mass culture is traditional culture, from which it draws plots and ideas for its works, the historical experience of this or that social education, or in other words, the memory of the people. For example, Japanese popular culture gives rise to its own completely original types of heroes. They are partly similar to Western models, but at the same time they retain the features of traditional Japanese culture. Japanese culturologist Y. Buruma notes their originality using the example of comics for girls: “Although in the West, comics for girls are full of unusually handsome young men with long eyelashes and starry eyes, they are still undoubtedly men.... In Japan they are more dual in appearance.... This androgynous young heroes are called "bishounen", handsome youths."
mass culture social cosmopolitan
45. Mass culture, its character traits
A specific feature of the twentieth century was the spread, mainly thanks to the developing means of mass communication, of mass culture. In this sense, there was no mass culture in the 19th century or earlier - newspapers, magazines, a circus, a farce, folklore, which was already dying out - that was all that the city and the village had.
For mass culture is a semiotic image of reality, and fundamental culture is a deeply secondary image, a “secondary modeling system” that needs a first-order language for its implementation. In this sense, the mass culture of the twentieth century was the complete opposite of elite culture in one way and its copy in the other.
Mass culture is characterized by anti-modernism and anti-avant-gardeism. If modernism and the avant-garde strive for a sophisticated writing technique, then mass culture operates with an extremely simple technique, worked out by the previous culture. If modernism and the avant-garde are dominated by an attitude toward the new as the main condition for their existence, then mass culture is traditional and conservative. It is focused on the average linguistic semiotic norm, on simple pragmatics, since it is addressed to a huge reading, viewing and listening audience (compare with the pragmatic, shock failure that occurs when the text of mass culture is inadequately perceived by sophisticated autistic thinking - extreme experience.
It can therefore be said that mass culture arose in the twentieth century not only due to the development of technology, which led to such a huge number of sources of information, but also due to the development and strengthening of political democracies. It is known that the most developed mass culture is in the most developed democratic society - in America with its Hollywood, this symbol of the omnipotence of mass culture. But the opposite is also important - that in totalitarian societies there is practically no mass culture, there is no division of culture into mass and elite. All culture is declared to be mass, and in fact all culture is elitist. It sounds paradoxical, but it is true.
A necessary property of a mass culture product must be entertaining in order for it to be a commercial success, so that it is bought and the money spent on it produces a profit. Entertaining is determined by the strict structural conditions of the text. The plot and stylistic texture of mass culture products may be primitive from the point of view of elitist fundamental culture, but it should not be poorly made, but, on the contrary, in its primitiveness it should be perfect - only in this case will it be guaranteed readership and, therefore, commercial success . Stream of consciousness, detachment, intertext, the principles of twentieth-century prose are not suitable for mass culture. For mass literature, you need a clear plot with intrigue and twists and turns and, most importantly, a clear division into genres. We see this clearly in the example of mass cinema. The genres are clearly demarcated and there are not many of them. The main ones are detective, thriller, comedy, melodrama, horror film. Each genre is a closed world with its own linguistic laws, which in no case should be crossed, especially in cinema, where production involves the greatest amount of financial investment.
Using the terms of semiotics, we can say that genres of mass culture must have a rigid syntax - an internal structure, but at the same time they may be semantically poor, they may lack deep meaning.
In the twentieth century, mass culture replaced folklore, which is also syntactically constructed extremely rigidly. This was shown most clearly in the 1920s by V.Ya. Propp, who analyzed a fairy tale and showed that it always contains the same syntactic structural diagram, which can be formalized and represented in logical symbols.
Texts of mass literature and cinema are constructed in the same way. Why is this necessary? This is necessary so that the genre can be recognized immediately; and the expectation must not be violated. The viewer should not be disappointed. Comedy should not spoil a detective story, and the plot of a thriller should be exciting and dangerous.
This is why stories within popular genres are so often repeated. Repeatability is a property of myth; this is the deep relationship between mass culture and elite culture, which in the twentieth century, willy-nilly, focuses on the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Actors are identified with characters in the minds of the viewer. A hero who dies in one film seems to be resurrected in another, just as archaic mythological gods died and were resurrected. After all, movie stars are the gods of modern mass consciousness.
The repetition mindset gave rise to the phenomenon of the television series: a temporarily “dying” television reality is revived the next evening.
A variety of mass culture texts are cult texts. Their main feature is that they penetrate so deeply into the mass consciousness that they produce intertexts, but not in themselves, but in the surrounding reality. Thus, the most famous cult texts of Soviet cinema - “Chapaev”, “His Excellency’s Adjutant”, “Seventeen Moments of Spring” - provoked endless quotes in the mass consciousness and formed anecdotes about Chapaev and Petka, about Stirlitz. That is, cult texts of mass culture form a special intertextual reality around themselves. After all, it cannot be said that jokes about Chapaev and Stirlitz are part of the internal structure of these texts themselves. They are part of the structure of life itself, language games, elements of the everyday life of language.
An elite culture, which in its internal structure is built in a complex and sophisticated way, cannot influence extra-textual reality in such a way. True, it happens that some modernist or avant-garde technique is mastered by fundamental culture to such an extent that it becomes a cliche, then it can be used by texts of mass culture. As an example, we can cite the famous Soviet cinema posters, where foreground the huge face of the main character of the film was depicted, and in the background little people were killing someone or simply flickering around (depending on the genre). This change, distortion of proportions is a stamp of surrealism. But the mass consciousness perceives it as realistic, although everyone knows that there is no head without a body, and that such space is essentially absurd.
Postmodernism - that careless and frivolous child of the end of the 20th century - finally let in mass culture and mixed it with elite culture. At first it was a compromise called kitsch. But then classic texts of postmodern culture, such as Umberto Eco’s novel “The Name of the Rose” or Quentin Tarantino’s film “Pulp Fiction,” began to actively use the strategy of the internal structure of mass art.
Mass culture− this is the culture of the masses, a culture intended for consumption by the people; this is the consciousness not of the people, but of the commercial cultural industry; it is hostile to truly popular culture. She knows no traditions, has no nationality, her tastes and ideals change with dizzying speed in accordance with the needs of fashion. Mass culture appeals to a wide audience, appeals to simplified tastes, and claims to be folk art. The phenomenon of mass culture exists, and television is the most effective means of replicating and disseminating this culture. Mass culture influences mass consciousness, is associated with the means of mass communication, is focused on consumer tastes and instincts, and is manipulative in nature. Mass culture standardizes human spiritual activity.