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“We have come to the end of ‘mass culture’; the debates and positions which named ‘mass culture’ as an other have been superseded.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 to give mass culture and the mass cultural genre system the best scholarly and critical attention possible.
Advertising 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
