Free Preview: Participatory Culture and the Assault on Democracy by Lee Siegel
Untrammeled individuality in popular culture used to be the stuff of vicarious daydreams. Today it is a real expectation. It’s as if the conflict of rights vs. entitlements in the social realm had now been decided, in favor of the latter, in the realm of popular art and diversion.
As a result of that demand, we are now witnessing for the first time in history the advent of a true mass culture. Throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, there was culture for the masses. It was turned out by the giant record companies, and by the book publishing companies, and by mass-circulation magazines like Life, Look, Time, and Newsweek. There were the Big Three television networks, and the handful of Hollywood studios and, compared with now, a limited number of radio stations, all commercial. But culture for the masses is not the same thing as culture by the masses.
No television viewer in 1957 could respond to The Honeymooners with a mash-up of the series—a re-editing—in which the viewer himself appears in a scene with Ralph Kramden. No one in 1969 could push a button, click a mouse, and become a “viral personality” recognized around the world. No one until about ten years ago could wake up in the morning, drag himself over to his computer before even getting dressed, and reach more people in his bathrobe with his private thoughts than William Faulkner ever did, even at the height of his renown. For the first time in history, we are all producers as well as consumers. This is mass culture.
It is no longer sufficient to live vicariously through a character in a film or television drama, or through the journey of a melody to which we surrender ourselves, or by immersing ourselves in the third-person experience of a figure in a novel. Now we want access. We demand transparency, not just in the political realm, but in culture, too—transparency being a powerful mode of access. Why accept Tolstoy’s creation of Anna Karenina? The author holds the key to all her secrets and reveals them or not, as he chooses. Instead, the characters on a “reality” TV program helplessly reveal themselves seemingly by the pressure of our gaze—and often by our votes on their fate.
This is what I call participatory culture, which is composed of consumers and producers. From reality TV to blogs to the “most popular” lists that allow consumers to determine the producer’s aesthetic choices, we live in an interactive—that is, participatory—world.
It was always certain musical occasions that made that type of participation possible, from ancient Dionysian rituals to the masque plays of Elizabethan times to, in our own era—if you will pardon an even greater leap—swing to Woodstock to rap. Now it’s the more reflective arts, too. Consider the shift from third-person to first-person in contemporary fiction, and the rise of the memoir, which is of course written in the first person. It is much easier to inhabit an intimate, immediate “I” than a distant “he” or “she.” First-person storytelling is as close to “participatory” as narrative gets, although websites exist now where you can rewrite famous novels. (You can save Madame Bovary and marry her, too. Good luck.) Indeed, the participatory turn accounts for the way rhythm has overtaken melody in popular music: it’s easier to assimilate rhythm’s sameness to your fantasies than to step out of yourself and follow melody’s different changes. Rhythm is music’s first person, as the close-up is film’s. The same participatory dynamic rules video games, mash-ups, interactive websites, karaoke, and movieoke. Three-dimensional films such as James Cameron’s Avatar make the audience feel that they are actually moving through the film’s environment. The technology is said to be the next wave in filmmaking.
Participatory culture is an arena in which the hallowed American concept of “the people” determines, as never before, who shall create the artifacts of their diversion. The people also decide, as never before, what those artifacts shall be. I still wait for the New Yorker cartoon showing a group of headstones in a cemetery with the loving inscription “Most Emailed” on one of them. “Most popular” lists now guide the news judgment of newspaper and magazine editors. The cult of popularity has normalized the commodification of friends on social-networking sites like Facebook. It has made an indiscriminate hunger for popularity the only prerequisite for popularity—a willingness to use whatever is the most effective means of conformity to gravitate toward or attract the largest share of one type of market or another.
This is a sea change in the way we divert ourselves. To be sure, popular culture has always been almost synonymous with ratings: the top-ten hits, the best-seller list, the Nielsens, box-office reports. But the hallmark of great popular art used to be the way a performer put an original twist on a standard genre or formula. The last thing a budding young songwriter wished to do in 1964 was write an imitation of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Now, if you put a talking cat on YouTube, within days the Web will bloom with thousands of talking geese, chickens, and goats. And they will all be saying the same thing. It used to be that performers strove to create excellence and originality within a popular style, in order to become popular. They competed against each other’s work. In today’s culture, you strive only to be popular—in order to become popular. You compete against other, measurable degrees of popularity. You strive to come as close to reproducing a successful “original” style as possible. You must sound more like everyone else than anyone else is able to sound like everyone else.
To put it another way, popular culture used to draw people to what they like. Popularity culture draws people to what everyone else likes. From “I love that thing he does!” to “Look at all those page views!” in just a few years.
This is the dynamic that first drove, for example, Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that is a collaborative enterprise open to anyone who wishes to participate in it. During the early years of the project’s existence, anybody could contribute to Wikipedia’s entries. You didn’t have to be a historian to add to the entry on Winston Churchill; you simply had to be interested in adding to the entry on Winston Churchill. Behind the anti-elitist rationale for such a magnitude of openness was a more fundamental principle: the more people who were allowed to participate in Wikipedia, the more people who would read Wikipedia. The result was an almost total chaos of misinformation, bitter squabbles among contributors, and litigation threatened by subjects who claimed that they were libeled by inaccurate facts. The “people’s encyclopedia” is still a collaborative enterprise, but one that is monitored much more closely by an inner circle of editors.
The manipulation of participation in order to create popularity—with the result being a radical lowering of standards—is now rife throughout the culture. On CNN, you encounter I-reporters, nonjournalists who are given a few precious minutes of airtime to report the news with, predictably, a colloquial, subjective slant. The dominant model for our culture and our politics now seems to be American Idol, with its invitation to viewers either to try to get on the show itself, or to use their votes to make or unmake the next pop culture superstar. Our current president, said to be the most poll-conscious politician ever to lead the country, seems to construct his very speeches along the participatory/popularity axis, as he presents irreconcilable viewpoints in order, not just to appeal to as many people as possible, but to give the illusion of national participation in his decisions. No wonder two reality-TV aspirants recently crashed a state dinner at the White House claiming they had been invited. In fact, they had not been invited, but they could be forgiven for thinking they had.
The most baleful potential of the new participatory and popularity culture is, on the one hand, to create people who are cut off from their fellow citizens, floating in a disconnected space where their imperial conception of self bears no relation to who they really are.
They do not respond to anything that either does not reflect their own experience, or that does not allow them to “produce” it, as well as to consume it. Behind this “access” and “transparency” thrives a low tolerance for facts that obstruct the ego, and a fanatical thirst to nourish one’s amour-propre on public figures’ slightest infractions. As in the enjoyment of reality television, public humiliation is becoming a national pastime for this new, disconnected, imperial self.
It is disconcerting that the people who watch Survivor and its many offshoots, as well as cable television’s hourly deconstruction of public figures, do not realize that they are relishing a general contempt for individuality and for achievement that could easily boomerang back against themselves. The spectacle of such lack of self-awareness recalls Gershom Scholem’s horror as he sat in a middle-class German audience in 1932 watching a performance of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, a play that is filled with loathing for the middle class. “I was astonished,” Scholem wrote, “when I saw that a middle-class audience that had lost all sense of its own situation was here cheering a play in which it was gibed and spat at with a vengeance.”
Yet these products of our new participatory and popularity culture are also so uncertain of their relation to other people that they are extra vulnerable to approval, and susceptible to the most effective conformist strategy for gaining approval. Their egos are both larger than their environment and entirely submerged in it. You must sound more like everyone else than anyone else is able to sound like everyone else. Having created the illusion of a transparent, accessible, and manipulable world, the imperial self—like Chaplin confidently placing his foot where in fact there is no ground—disappears into it.
Scholem’s terror as he sat in that audience was experienced during the post-WWII period by a generation of mostly Jewish émigrés when they encountered American popular culture. It is strange to read them now. Their sometimes absurdly paranoiac and hysterical reactions to, for example, American jazz—Theodor Adorno dismissed it as “the garbage fragments of a bourgeois culture”—were irrelevant at the time. They mistook for the slouching beast of a tyranny coming from within culture what was really the twilight of an incredibly rich and vital period in the American popular arts. In the introduction to the influential 1957 anthology Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, a volume heavily influenced by Frankfurt School critical theorists like Adorno, the sociologist Bernard Rosenberg summed up the intellectual response to mass culture after the war: “at its worst, mass culture threatens not merely to cretinize our taste, but to brutalize our senses while paving the way to totalitarianism.” Rosenberg and others believed that this slow descent into tyranny was accomplished by robbing people of the right to think for themselves. Mass media imposed opinions and judgments on the individual, thus submerging the individual in the mob. As Herbert Marcuse wrote in his famous essay “Repressive Tolerance,” “Under the rule of monopolistic media—themselves the mere instruments of economic and political power—a mentality is created for which right and wrong, true and false are predefined wherever they affect the vital interests of the society.”
The “repressive tolerance” was the way commercial society absorbed the most autonomous and subversive social critique. Foucault meant much the same thing when, some twenty years later, he described modern society’s tendency to control human behavior by publicly defining it through ever-evolving “freedoms,” which were really methods of social construction and control. For many postwar thinkers, culture was the realm where the purveyance of thoughtless pleasure by corporate conglomerates was a crushing illusion.
The nightmare guiding this fear was J. L. Talmon’s notion of “totalitarian democracy,” in which citizens vote for elected representatives but do not participate in the state’s most crucial decisions. The sham of commercial culture and representative democracy comprised one large deceit. For Adorno, Marcuse, Foucault, Talmon, and others, the answer to brutish, dehumanizing culture and politics was the dismantling of “the rule of monopolistic media” and the establishment of participatory culture, in which, presumably, access and transparency would be the order of the day.
The cunning of history indeed. In the postwar period, you could turn off the television, the radio, or the record player; decide not to go to a movie; put down a potboiler and pick up a literary novel. It turned out that the “monopolistic media” left a great deal of room for the cultivation of individual taste and freedom. Not Johnny Mercer or Elvis or the Beatles led the way to Auschwitz or Kolyma. Their original and idiosyncratic styles grew in the vast spaces in and around culture for the masses, like wildflowers in the shade of a public garden.
But with today’s advent of participatory and popularity culture, culture never ends. The ever-present and almighty screen dominates your world. Information streams at you without end from every corner of society. Cable news whips people up into one politicized group or another. The “most popular” lists determine what you read—and a story about Britney Spears will be a lot more popular than a story about social injustice. One of the concerns that plagued Mass Culture’s editors and contributors was the worry over what modern people would do with their growing leisure time. A half century later, we are all caught up in the “prosuming”—Alvin Toffler’s term for the new hybrid person who is both a producer and a consumer—interactive universe: the blogger or website owner, the Facebook person advertising his qualities, the eBay seller, the Match.com romantic aspirant, and so on.
For over a hundred years, high culture has been merging with popular culture. But now all experience is available as culture, which means that there are no criteria for judging these disjointed echoes of each other except their popularity. And what drives popularity is a routine’s success in merging with the mass, in extending the most generic and derivative appeal. It also means that there is no escape from culture into a personal space.
For under the guise of increasingly democratic culture, commerce permeates every aspect of existence. There was always one chief difference between popular or high culture on the one hand, and commercial culture on the other. The former, even at their crassest and most profit-driven, were meant to be enjoyed disinterestedly. You were in the experience for the pleasure that comes either from high art’s absorption of your attention or from popular art’s gifts of diversion. In both cases, you were briefly sprung from the daily pressures of self-interest. You laid yourself and your ego aside, in one degree or another. In this more or less contemplative self-surrender, you found your true identity, your true self. For a moment, you were not driven by your ego, which is to a great degree driven by conventional social appetites.
Commercial culture, on the other hand, is all about the gratification of your self-interest, and it involves the total engagement of your ego. Assertiveness, initiative, full participation in every aspect of “the deal” that has a bearing on your self-interest—those qualities are what carry the day for a buyer or seller, not passive enjoyment of the situation unfolding before you. At the heart of a successful work of art, high or low, lies something wholly fresh and other, some type of original experience that draws out your own native originality as a person. At the heart of a transaction, however, is everday, socially constructed you. That is to say, at the heart of a successful transaction is the satisfaction of your self-interest. When culture becomes thoroughly commercialized in this way, we ourselves, not the media, are—to quote Marcuse again—“the mere instruments of economic and political power.” No spaces for the cultivation of our individuality exist between us and the media monopolies or the sham elected representatives.
The essential liberal position is based on an idea—the idea of ever-expanding individual rights. It just so happens that the fantasy of a majestically sovereign and autonomous self is the heart and soul of American popular culture, a culture that is quintessentially liberal. The result is that the most serious threat to freedom in America today is the threat posed to democracy by the excesses of that culture. As our ever-expanding selves participate more in every cultural activity, the disinterestedness of play and of aesthetic pleasure gives way to crude self-assertion. And as everyone asserts their entitlement to participation, popularity replaces originality as a standard of excellence—you end up with what you might call an egalitarian antidemocracy, in which interactive crowds scorn and marginalize the democratic equalizer of true talent. That old bugbear of postwar sociology—the mob-self—is now a reality. In a participatory/popularity culture, the freedom to think and act for ourselves becomes harder and harder to achieve. The tyrannical majority so feared by Adorno, Foucault, Talmon, and others is all around us, and within us.
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