1 From a European perspective, Frits van Holthoon even goes so far as to claim: “The study and teaching of American popular culture is the core of any program of American Studies” (61). Critical Theories, Populist Utopias, and Unforeseen Diversities: From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media Winfried Fluck I. Few would deny that popular culture (including the mass media) is an important part of American culture, in fact, many argue that popular culture dominates and defines American culture to such an extent that it can be seen as the exemplary American culture. This is by no means a claim of the past. See, for example, Daniel Levin Becker who writes in his recent book, What’s Good, “Hip-Hop is ‘the thing that makes me most consistently proud to be American: our best export, the purest contribution we’ve made to the world in my lifetime’” (31). Thus, one would expect that the analysis of popular culture and the media would have played a central role in American studies, 1 a field that was established in the post-World War II period to analyze American culture and society and to provide a better and “deeper” understanding of it. In order to do this, the field had to find a consensus on what objects and texts could serve this purpose best. For the leading scholars of the first generation of American studies, the so-called myth and symbol school, popular culture did not qualify, however, because the America they wanted to highlight was an American culture that said “No! In Thunder” to the materialism and bland conformism often associated with American life at the time. For most intellectuals and for many scholars, popular culture was a supreme example of such unfortunate developments. Popular culture’s low status as an academic object of study was changed by two developments that emerged outside of American studies. One was post‐ modern theory; the other was the political turn in the wake of the Sixties and the influx of continental theory that gradually reached all fields in the humanities. 2 In view of the wide range of approaches covered in this essay, bibliographical references cannot be exhaustive and will be restricted to influential and representative texts. 3 For the Bowling Green group, American popular culture is the cultural manifestation of the anti-elitist egalitarian spirit of American society: “Popular culture is the voice of the people, and the voice is becoming louder and louder” (Browne, Challenges xv). Focusing on popular culture would be a democratic break-through, a transformation of the humanities: “To paraphrase Lincoln, the Elitists can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but they cannot fool all the people all the time” (Browne, “New Humanities” 9). A more ambitious argument is offered by the cultural historian Lawrence Levine in his study Highbrow/ Lowbrow in which he traces, among other examples, the gradual transformation of Shakespeare from a popular author to a high-brow icon that came to stand at the center of a newly established cultural hierarchy of high and low in the second half of the nineteenth-century. Levine regards this as a dispossession of the people’s culture by an elite, a development that should be reversed in the interest of democracy. 4 The difference in focus by Browne and Levine is reflected in two different views of popular culture. One is a liberal understanding of popular culture as the culture of the majority that should be acknowledged in a democracy (and in a field like American studies that claims to deal with American culture as a whole). Although one may not always be happy with it, this is the price one has to pay for democracy. In another, populist understanding, popular culture is an anti-elitist weapon of the common people that undermines the snobbery of elites and therefore deserves special recognition, if the idea of democracy is taken seriously. In the first definition, the word democracy stands for a plurality, in the second, democracy is a word for a populist anti-elitism. For postmodernism, popular culture was ideally suited to strengthen its case for aesthetic dehierarchization, for a newly emerging political criticism it seemed ideally suited to draw attention to the central role of ideology and power in cultural representations. The analysis of popular culture began to move from the margin to the center, and race, class, and gender studies, frequently using forms like Hip Hop or the postfeminist performances of an artist like Madonna as exemplary cases to make their point, gave added support to this trend. Popular culture could thus start to become a frequent interpretive object of High Theory, eventually even a key component of it, because political practices like medial forms of subject positioning, analyzed, for example by filmic apparatus theory, can be demonstrated more convincingly by drawing on classical Hollywood movies than on Ralph Waldo Emerson (where we do not find any continuity cutting). A brief survey can give a first idea of the variety and wealth of approaches one encounters when tracing the changing narratives that have been developed in the interpretation of American popular culture: 2 After the categorical critique and rejection of mass culture by the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt school (Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno) and an uncritical populist celebration in Popular Culture Studies 3 (Ray B. Browne, Lawrence Levine), 4 the subsequently 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 376 Winfried Fluck 5 Underlying poststructuralist theories is a radicalized, “Nietzschean” view of power which is seen as a fundamental driving force of the human world, a “will to power.” This is basically the poststructuralist view of power, most prominently represented by Michel Foucault where power becomes every form of disciplinary constraint. In the Left trajectory of popular culture and media studies, which is a story of continuous radicalization, Marxism replaced Critical Theory and was then itself replaced by poststructuralism. 6 For Hebdige, “the tensions between dominant and subordinate groups can be found reflected in the surfaces of subculture - in the styles made up of mundane objects which have a double meaning” (2). What has to be kept in mind, however, is that “the challenge to hegemony which subcultures represent is not issued directly by them. Rather, it is expressed obliquely, in style” (17). In one of the Working Papers of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, entitled “The Politics of Popular Culture: Cultures, and Subcultures,” John Clarke and Tony Jefferson describe “youth cultures as being involved in a struggle fundamental to the social order - that of the control of meaning. (…) It is significant that in this struggle for the control of meaning, one of the most frequent developed formula analysis (Will Wright, John Cawelti, Umberto Eco, Janice Radway), and social conflict models (Robert Warshow, Chuck Kleinhans, Kathy Peiss) provide influential early examples of increasingly more sophisticated approaches that argued against the then dominant view that narrative formulas signaled aesthetic inferiority and any lack of social significance. Auteur theory (Robin Wood) and the propagation of a “camp”-attitude (Susan Sontag, Richard Dyer, Pamela Robertson) introduced ingenious new ways to make a case for popular culture in aesthetic terms. More influential, however, was a shift to the politics of popular culture (Fredric Jameson, David Tetzlaff), and, more specifically, to the question whether and to what extent popular culture must be seen as a form of ideological manipulation. In some of these approaches - taking up, but also transforming - suggestions by Walter Benjamin, it is no longer the media content on which critics focus on their ideological analysis. The medium of representation that organizes our perception does the ideological work in a much more fundamental way, as, for example, in the so-called apparatus theory in film theory ( Jean-Louis Baudry, Laura Mulvey) in which the camera positions viewers as subjects and positions them in transcendental position that provides a sense of mastery along gender lines. However, poststructuralist theories of power like apparatus theory created the problem whether and to what extent cultural subject formation still leaves any room for agency and resistance. 5 In British Cultural Studies (Stuart Hall), youth subcultures like Mods, Skinheads and Punks are still seen as models of resistance. They can have that function, because of their position outside of mainstream society that forced them to develop cultural practices and symbol systems of their own (Dick Hebdige, Paul Willis, Angela McRobbie). 6 In a way, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media 377 adjectives used to describe disapproved behavior by the young is ‘meaningless’” (9). In response, Todd Gitlin, in an essay on “The Antipolitical Populism of Cultural Studies,” calls the “New Left symbiosis with popular culture (…) a surrogate politics” (93). In his essay “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’” Stuart Hall, the spiritus rector of the Cultural Studies movement, also began to express his skepticism about a naively populist use of the term “popular.” Already in 1975, Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber had complained: “Very little seems to have been written about the role of girls in youth cultural groupings in general” (209). 7 In his book, Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins describes the circulation of media content across multiple media platforms. But the phenomenon I am describing goes beyond a mere flood of information produced by transmedial circulation. this sets a pattern. Social formations that define themselves by difference, such as the women’s movement ( Janice Radway, Angela McRobbie) and African American perspectives (Herman Gray, bell hooks, Racquel Gates) begin to shape popular culture studies at this point, soon gays are included (Richard Dyer). But the search for a site outside of discursive subject formation can also turn inward and focus on the body (Vivian Sobchak), on emotions (Carl Platinga), and on emotional excess (Linda Williams, Frank Kelleter and Ruth Mayer), and, finally, in yet another more radical attempt to escape the grip of discursive subject formation, on affect (Ann Koivunen), while, at the same time, gender studies began to branch out into queer and trans identities. II. In the meantime, unforeseen developments have emerged. The most obvious and consequential of these are technological. Digitalization and other techno‐ logical break-through features make more and more material available in easily accessible forms. One of the consequences is that the amount of content is exploding. “This year, 113 cable networks are programming 32 828 hours of content in prime time, up from 44 networks and 12 537 hours of content in the 1999-2000 season” (New York Times Jan. 20, 2015). The internet, computers, smart phones, and internet television have opened up a range of new viewing options. YouTube and other web-sites are making a staggering, unlimited number of clips and programs available. Within a week more material is added on YouTube than all world-wide TV produces within a year. 7 All of this has happened within a time span of about two decades. And it has reached a new dimension with the arrival of streaming services. In 2019, there were already 271 online video services available in the United States, serving all kinds of predilection, from telenovelas, aviation documentaries, horror movies (this particular channel is called “Shudder”) and the channel “Horse Lifestyle” 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 378 Winfried Fluck for, as the New York Times put it, “equine-themed content.” (“Offerings include,” the Times continues, “a series called ‘Marvin the Tap Dancing Horse.’”) Then major companies like Disney, Warner Media (HBO Max), NBC (Peacock) got into a market that was originally dominated by Netflix and Amazon Prime. The Times article from which I have already quoted was written when Disney started its streaming service: “Disney Plus arrived in Nov. 12 and costs less ($ 6.99 a month) than a single tub of popcorn at big-city movie theaters. It allows anyone with a high-speed internet connection to instantly watch Disney, Pixar, ‘Star Wars’ and Marvel movies, along with original series and films, 30 seasons of ‘The Simpsons’ and 7500 episodes of old Disney-branded TV shows (NY Times, Nov. 23/ 24, 2019). Another new streaming service that started at about the same time was Peacock, a NBCUniversal service. It “will offer 15 000 hours of content: complete seasons of ‘The Office’ and ‘Frazier,’ Universal films like ‘The Fast and the Furious’ and ‘Despicable Me,’ Telemundo shows, every episode of ‘Saturday Night Live,’ and a new reboot of ‘Battle Star Galactica’” (ibid). We have not yet mentioned Apple TV Plus, Paramount, the streaming service of Viacom CBS, and Hulu, an early service of Disney and NBC International. In the meantime, HBO Max and Discovery Plus have announced plans that they will merge. At present there are eight major media companies with streaming services that are in a fierce competition. Not all of them will survive, but so far none has a monopoly on interesting programs. The business model is that of monthly subscriptions. To keep viewers subscribed, companies like Netflix invest enor‐ mous sums in production. They need films that draw attention and stand out, but also series that cover different interests, from romance to crime and so on. Obviously, the last year in streaming saw 559 new series, after 493 in the year before. Altogether, this adds to an enormous volume of material and the obvious follow-up question must be: Who is watching all of this and who is providing some orientation about what to watch? Journalism can no longer cover the full range and offers only bits and pieces. In the Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel, we occasionally find articles like “the most interesting new programs in May” that mentions nine different series from seven different streaming services. An article in the Washington Post is entitled “10 hidden TV gems you might have missed. Now’s the time to finally catch up on ‘P-Valley,’ ‘We Own this City’ and eight other shows well worth your weekends.” This article is interesting because, apart from services like Peacock, Hulu and HBO Max, it also mentions two additional services which we could add to the eight already mentioned. And in a recent article “15 Under-the-Radar TV Shows that Deserve your Attention,” to give a last example, 15 “overlooked” series are mentioned and briefly characterized that are shown on 8 different streaming services. 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media 379 III. Who can possibly watch all of this and, even more importantly, who is paying for all of these services? At the moment, the American average seems to be 4 streaming services, but since services are beginning to raise their monthly subscription rates, this may change. My students have told me that it is a common practice among them to exchange passwords, and it might be a future development to choose your circle of friends on the basis of how many passwords they can bring into the relationship. But apart from the fact that streaming services seem to have become aware of the exchange practices and will try to prevent them, what about those poor souls who do not have a password-savvy circle of friends? In response, articles begin to emerge like the following: “From Netflix to Disney Plus, This Clever Trick Can Save You Money on Streaming.” As the author points out, subscribing even to only five streaming services could cost $50 Dollars per month. Hence, he proposes, among other tips, that one should rotate one’s streaming services, that one should cancel one’s subscription before getting charged, and that one should pause for a temporary break only instead of cancelling one’s subscription. This may develop into a full-time job! But what about the scholar who still attempts to interpret popular culture as a meaningful and significant expression of American society? In her article “Overloaded: is there simply too much culture? ” Ann Helen Peterson, a media studies professor, registers her frustration: “Soon, the definition and number of television shows that felt essential - all ‘quality’ are part of the larger conversation - began to grow. It wasn’t enough to have watched The Wire and The Sopranos and be caught up with Madmen and Breaking Bad. There was The Americans and The Good Wife, Outlander and The Nick, Game of Thrones and Homeland, Broadchurch and Happy Valley, plus all the ongoing seasons of shows that previously felt very important (see: House of Cards) but increasingly felt like a slog. - Maintaining my fluency was getting harder and harder: I was a media studies professor who was able to devote hours of my ostensible working day to the task of consuming media. I was still falling behind, and more so every day” (The Guardian, Nov. 24, 2021). As Peterson mentions, as a result of this overload there is no longer any shared conversation possible, neither with colleagues, friends, nor students, because they “all seemed to be embarking down different pathways” (ibid.). This observation is confirmed by official numbers. All the technological developments I have mentioned split up audiences into ever smaller segments. An increasing number of programs also means fewer people to watch any one of them. As the writer Kurt Andersen puts it in a recent essay in the New York Times Book Review: “But ironies of ironies, after literature was evicted from mass 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 380 Winfried Fluck 8 However, pluralization should not automatically be equated with fragmentation, as Claude Fischer and Gregor Mattson point out in their essay “Is America Fragmenting? ” As they argue, the concept of clustering is more fitting in this case: “It is reasonable to conclude, based on the research by cultural sociologists, scholars of consumption, media analysts, and journalistic accounts, that the number of new, discrete, and separated social worlds increased between 1970 and 2005” (446). See also Michael J. Weiss, The Clustering of America. culture, pop culture itself began to fragment and lose its heretofore defining quality as the ubiquitous stuff that everybody consumed. In a typical week nowadays, fewer than 6 percent of Americans see the most popular scripted series on television” (23). Popular culture and mass media are thus no longer very popular or ‘mass’ either. Television, once a unifying cultural form especially after the demise of the classical Hollywood system, is exemplary in this respect. As has been pointed out, it has moved from its former function as raw material for cultural conversations towards fragmented niche-marketed programming that focuses on particular market segments in the audience. IV. Two consequences of this incessant, technology-driven process seem especially noteworthy. One is that as a result of the proliferation of media consumption devices, ever more differentiated audience segments are created that co-exist and do not have to take note of each other. There are only bits of shared experience left. Altogether, recent technological developments have thus led to an ever increasing cultural differentiation and, in consequence, to a separation of social worlds that make it more and more difficult to arrive at something like a common ground and a shared culture. 8 One may be tempted to argue that more voices also mean more opportunities for minorities whose voices have been drowned out by the majority in the past. But the same law of differentiation will also affect minorities who, in the end, will not simply be empowered but also segmented as voices. To quote Andersen again: “By and large, both entertainment and art now appeal to niches, cultural tribes that range in size from tiny to smallish” (23). Eventually, this will also happen - and is already happening - to minority cultures. I will get back to this at the end of the essay. One simple reason is that cultural differentiation increases the possibilities and range of self-expression. “On social media sites like Twitter, video distribu‐ tion sites like YouTube and fan fiction sites like fanfiction.net, we create our own kind of characters and new possibilities for who we want to be and share them with like-minded people” (Kaplan). (Now we have to add TikTok). Still taking her point of departure from television, Mary McNamara speaks of the “the biggest 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media 381 shift in our relationship to television since television was invented - the shift from mass media, which brought the world into the living room, to self-serve media, through which viewers never see anything they don’t want to see.” She continues, “Mass media doesn’t exist anymore. (…) Instead, we have personal media. Increasingly, people fill their information space with only what they want to see - things that reinforce their worldview. Take away channel surfing, and you never have to see anything that you don’t choose to see” (McNamara). V. What does this mean for American studies and the study of popular culture? After all, it has been the starting assumption of the field that the cultural material we analyze and teach tells us something significant about American culture and society. But if there are eight major streaming services with more than a hundred new programs each year, on what basis can one still draw any meaningful conclusions on society and culture, since it is almost impossible to have access to all of the services and programs, and, even if one had access, to watch them all or, at least, a sufficiently large number. Objective ratings services do not yet monitor streaming services. Viewership numbers are largely unknown for most programs. And if we move on to YouTube or the social media, we get innumerable statements of self-expression. On what basis can one still make any meaningful generalizations, then? - The traditional answer to the question why we should study popular culture has been: Popular Culture is an important part of American culture, thus when you want to understand American culture, you also have to make an effort to understand its popular culture. This argument is based on the criterion of representativeness. Since American studies was never in a position to deal with everything, it had to develop criteria of selection. In early phases, dominated first by the history of ideas and then the myth and symbol school, representativeness resided in art works that supposedly transcend ideology or the intellectual mainstream, and, in doing so, can provide deeper insights into a society and culture. Even in ideological criticism, as it was propagated by leading American studies scholars of the next generation, like Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen, the main focus still lies on art, because the point now is to argue that art does by no means transcend ideology and can, on the contrary, be seen as an especially powerful agent of it. It was one of the reasons of the initial harsh rejection of popular culture that it did away with the “art criterion” of representativeness and replaced it simply with the criterion of popularity. If a genre or text is popular, 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 382 Winfried Fluck then this must mean that it stands for views, attitudes, and/ or emotions of the majority and can be seen as an expression of “the people.” In contrast to art, where the determination of artistic achievement is a matter of interpretation (which has been the rationale of literary studies or art history since the nineteenth-century), popularity is no longer a qualitative, but quantitative criterion for determining representativeness. This is the basis of the highbrow (= elite) vs. lowbrow (= common man) dichotomy and the populist claims to see popular culture as a form of democratic, anti-elitist culture. One irony of the current situation is that in the age of ever smaller audience segments, ranging, as Andersen puts it, from “tiny to smallish,” the logic of dehierarchization has reached a point where popularity also can no longer be a valid criterion for selections. Thus, selections appear arbitrary, but in reality they are based on the logic of the algorithm that knows a viewer’s profile. The choices, in other words, are representative of the taste of the individual consumer and eventually the only possible way to profile it would be - and will be - by artificial intelligence. However, at this point we should concede that, inevitably, scholarship in American studies and Popular Culture studies has always been selective - inevitably, for the simple reason that it has always been impossible to cover everything. These selections have not been arbitrary; as a rule, scholars have selected those objects that can be used in support of the story they want to tell. In the final analysis, then, the question is not really how representative the selected objects have been in general terms, the question is what stories have been told by scholars in popular culture and media studies. And indeed, when looking at the main narratives since World War II, it is striking to see that there are two major storylines that have dominated. One is the story of an ever increasing awareness of power constraints, the other one of an ever advancing differentiation in technology, media, programs, audiences and critical approaches. Both go in opposite directions (as they have also done in ‘High Theory’ in the humanities more generally) and it will be an interesting question at the end to see where we stand in this struggle of narratives. VI. The story of an increasing awareness of disciplinary and constraining power effects is a story about the role popular culture has played and continues to play in the systemic reproduction of capitalism. Before World War II, popular culture was a side show for intellectuals, now it moves to the center in debates about modern society. One starting point was Frankfurt School Critical Theory and its rejection of 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media 383 9 In contrast to other critics as, for example, the at the time often quoted Dwight McDonald, Horkheimer/ Adorno are not simply defenders of a classic hierarchy of taste. For them, the original sin is the industrialization of culture in assembly-line fashion that starts with the arrival of film and radio and ushers in a shift from active participation to passive exposure: “The step from the telephone to the radio has clearly distinguished the role. The former still allowed the subscriber to play the role of subject, and was liberal. The latter (…) turns all participants into listeners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs which are all exactly the same” (121-22). With this shift from active engagement to passive consumption, capitalism had found a way to subject culture to industrial production and its regimes of standardization. If one considers culture the one sphere that still escapes the grip of instrumental rationality, then the emergence of the mass media is a devastating blow: it means that instrumental rationality is now also beginning to invade the sphere of culture, Adorno’s last hope. Hence, the term popular culture is considered entirely inappropriate, the fitting term is that of a culture industry. 10 For a superb discussion of the issue of fantasy in political criticism see Ian Ang’s essay “Feminist Desire and Female Pleasure. On Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance.” 11 The essay appeared in the first issue of the new journal Social Text where Jameson writes about the blockbuster Jaws: “I will now indeed argue that we cannot fully do justice mass culture as an entry gate of industrialized rationality into the realm of culture (Horkheimer/ Adorno). 9 But the dominant form it took on in American criticism was that of an ideological criticism that had as its founding question one that has remained central in all of the following versions of the power narrative: How does a system like capitalism reproduce itself in the realm of culture? How does the system contain opposition or resistance? What forms of agency does it still allow? Before such questions could be addressed, however, another question had to be answered first, namely why popular culture was so popular in the first place, although it was constantly condemned for misrepresenting reality and working against the people’s real interests. It was therefore the major goal of ideological criticism to raise people’s consciousness about popular culture’s misrepresentation of reality. In a first stage this led to analyses of stereotypes in popular culture and the media in the so-called “images of” approaches (Haskell, Bogle, Lemons). But should popular culture merely be evaluated by how correct its representation of reality was? Was popular culture nothing but a monolithic reproduction of dominant ideology? What about the strong elements of fantasy in popular culture and the pleasures they seemed to provide to audiences? How to deal with fantasy and pleasure became a major challenge to political criticism. 10 A first answer was offered by Fredric Jameson in his influential essay “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” that went beyond a then dominant Marxist orthodoxy and its simplistic view of fantasy as merely an escape from reality. Instead, the essay acknowledges that the fantasy elements of fictional texts are not merely escapist but can be seen as reflections of real and legitimate needs, even though these may be presented in commodified forms. 11 But when 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 384 Winfried Fluck to the ideological function of works like these unless we are willing to concede the presence within them of a more positive function as well: of what I will call, following the Frankfurt School, their utopian or transcendental potential - that dimension of even the most degraded type of mass culture which remains implicitly, and no matter how faintly negative and critical of the social order from which, as a product and a commodity, it springs” (144). 12 As Allen puts it: “(…) experiential reality is structured through representation, as an illusion” (Allen, Projecting Illusion 141). Structures of representation are thus inherently ideological. As Suzanna Walters has pointed out, in feminist film theory this has led to a move from “Images of Women to Woman as Image.” Since the filmic illusion of a reality effect could only be produced by concealing the artifice of filmic representation through devices like continuity cutting, one consequence was that ideological analysis had to become formal analysis. 13 One argument in support of apparatus theory was that it seemed to be able to explain “the hypnotic power of mass culture” which, in turn, seemed to be able “to explain the seemingly irrational allegiance of the masses to a system that perpetuated their own subordination” (Allen, “Film Theory” 123). Thus, Mulvey can write in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”: “It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article” (16). workers - or, more broadly speaking, the oppressed - did not honor this acknowledgment, a more radical explanation had to be found. In apparatus theory the problem is no longer that of ideologically distorted misrepresenta‐ tions but, in following Lacanian psychoanalysis, of the misrecognition through which the subject gains an identity. Ideology is no longer simply a case of false consciousness; it is now a closed system of representation that produces a complete illusion of reality whose ideological nature only manifests itself in unintended cracks and ruptures in the realistic surface. 12 For the cultural Left the description of subject positioning in apparatus theory became a welcome explanation of how the political system creates subjects that are not aware of what is happening to them, because the cinematic apparatus, which places the spectator in the illusory position of an all-seeing, transcendental subject, reenacts a crucial aspect of subject formation, the misrecognition of the mirror phase described by Lacan. Instead of opening up a space for resistance, negotiation, or, possibly, even transformation, film spectatorship becomes the site where the ideological effect takes hold almost imperceptively and, therefore, most effectively. Systemic reproduction is complete and popular culture does it more effectively than any other cultural form. Ideology is no longer transmitted by propaganda but by the pleasure the film can provide for the spectator. 13 But not for all spectators, because Mulvey’s transcendental subject is engen‐ dered. That created a problem, because it seemed not to leave any active viewer 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media 385 14 Vivian Sobchak’s impatient intervention is exemplary: “In this regard, although what follows is not an overtly feminist work, it is written by a woman who has felt con‐ strained by contemporary theoretical analysis, who wants to speak of more possibility than either psychoanalytic or Marxist theory currently allows. Even - or, perhaps, especially - because it has grounded and circumscribed feminist film theory, neo- Freudian psychoanalysis has not exhausted my experience, although it has often exhausted my patience. I refuse to be completely contained within its structures and described by its terms. Psychoanalysis is fine, perhaps, for disclosing the ‘unconscious’ of patriarchal texts and the power and constitutive nature of an experienced ‘lack,’ but it is not so fine for describing the pleasure and plenitude of an experience that includes - but is also in excess of - sexual ‘difference’” (xv). 15 Cf. Christine Gledhill: “(…) feminists found a genre distinguished by the large space it opened to female protagonists, the domestic sphere and socially mandated ‘feminine’ concerns” (10). One of the strongest and influential critical voices within this radical reorientation, Linda Williams, began to build a whole new theory on this re-evaluation of melodrama, first by linking it to a group of other “body genres,” such as pornography and horror in her essay on “Gender, Genre and Excess,” and then, in her essay “Melodrama Revised,” by making melodrama the basis for a reconsideration of the classical Hollywood system as a whole. For Williams, it is a basic mode of storytelling that also informs so-called masculine genres like the Western or the Gangster movie, which long seemed to be its opposites. Frank Kelleter and Ruth Mayer have provided an overview of the changing attitudes toward melodrama in the introduction to their essay collection, Melodrama: The Mode of Excess from Early America to Hollywood. In her essay, “Melodrama, Serial Form and Television Today,” Jane Feuer also includes the serial form as an antidote to narrative closure. 16 A helpful summary is provided in Kristin Thompson’s “The Concept of Cinematic Excess.” position for female viewers. 14 Thus, cultural radicalism had to find ways to grant a certain degree of deviation from the subject-positioning model, or, to put it differently, to grant a certain degree of deviation without putting the central theoretical claims of poststructuralism into question. One possible way had been pointed out by Roland Barthes, whose concept of a reality effect had been crucial in the redefinition of representational realistic illusion as a closed ideological system. But Barthes also acknowledged, almost in camp fashion, that the so-called reality effect can suffer from exaggeration and excess, so that an unintended distancing effect is created. For film criticism, this was an ideal argument to save genres like the women’s melodrama from contempt; what initially looked like an especially clear case of ideological gender construction could be reconceptualized as an almost progressive genre. 15 The theoretical significance of the excess narrative should be stressed. 16 If everything is (invisible) power, then it becomes a major challenge to identify those rare instances that still exist, if only temporarily, outside of power. Since power manifests itself in subject formation, the question of the subject is of 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 386 Winfried Fluck 17 See Vivian Sobchak, various essays on the role of body in responding to popular culture, and, more recently, a shift to the level of affects, as, for example in Ann Koivunen’s essay, “The Promise of Touch: Turns to Affect in Feminist Film Theory”: “Bodies, not language or discourse, are conceptualized as a radical political force, since ‘along-side’ the inevitability of conforming to these pressures, there always lies the possibility that affective intensity may provide a line of escape - in Deleuze’s words, a line of flight. Affect, here, in this desubjectified model, is not a subjective quality or a psychological or social emotion to be named but a capacity or intelligence of the body beyond or prior to language, discourse, narrative, and cultural matrix” (107). Emotion and affect are separated in these arguments, for while emotion is still a subjective quality, affect is a dimension of the body that is not yet subject to cultural or social impositions. It is, in other words, the one remaining part of the body that cannot be ideologically interpellated. 18 This retreat has its price. Since bodily and affective responses cannot speak, they may be there, but we cannot hear what they say. Thus, we also cannot know what their meaning is. Their only function seems to be to assure the individual viewer (and the reader) that there is still a part of the subject that is not yet entirely subjected by disciplinary regimes. Ironically enough, although someone like Sobchak insists on the uniqueness of filmic experience, she can only tell the same story over and over again - namely that her body and all of its parts are very much alive in watching movies. 19 The following quote from the culture industry chapter of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” is exemplary: Cartoons “hammer into every brain the old lesson that (…) the breaking down of all individual resistance is the condition of life in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their trashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment” (138). Ten years before, in the second version of his “Das Kunstwerk special interest in this context. To be sure, the subject’s understanding of the world is an effect of power, but is the subject completely determined by this interpellation or are there parts that may still be seen to exist outside its grasp? It is notable that in the aftermath of a growing critique of apparatus theory a retreat set in to dimensions of the subject that might still be out of reach of misrecognition because of sensory, somatic, or affective responses as they may be found in bodily experiences, emotions, and affects. 17 This, it seems, has currently become the last hope for critical analysis. The original promise of the invisible power narrative - to enlighten us about new manifestations of power - has become the story of an ongoing retreat. 18 VII. But there is also another story that can and has been told. It starts with the term mass culture. A key point of Critical Theory’s attempt to highlight the full extent of systemic reproduction is to argue that the subject is compulsively dependent on it. 19 There is no longer any subject capable of self-determination, and the so- 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media 387 im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” translated - correctly - in the Harvard Edition as “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin had still put his hopes on Disney when he wrote about the therapeutic function of collective laughter: “American slapstick comedies and Disney films trigger a therapeutic release of unconscious energies” (38). 20 Criticism thus had to be careful not to be seen as a discrimination of the common man. In this type of “democratic,” anti-elitist popular culture studies, American popular culture becomes an endless catalogue in which everything co-exists. David Madden has described this catalogue scholarship fittingly when he says: “Popular Culture is a garish galaxy of bubble gum, rock music festivals, hoola-hoops, trading stamps, bingo, superman heroes, marathon dances, drive-in movies and restaurants, saloons, success worship, miracle cure medicines (Hadacol) (…).” And so on. Madden’s list, based on contributions to Bowling Green publications, covers a half page of unrelated items, many of them banal and ephemeral trivia. 21 Formula analysis provided a breakthrough in Popular Culture studies. For the first generation of American studies scholars, valuable cultural insights were dependent on the aesthetic quality of a cultural object. Popular culture, on the other hand, was considered aesthetically inferior. Under these circumstances, there were only two possibilities to make a case for the usefulness of popular culture for cultural analysis: one was a defense of popular culture as by no means aesthetically inferior, the other consisted in the claim that special insights into American culture could be gained precisely from those features that had been considered aesthetically inferior until now, namely its recurring narrative patterns. The point here is that narrative formulas are not emptied out of meaning by standardization but open up entirely new possibilities for the expression of hidden wishes and inner conflicts, as in Warshow’s example. 22 Cf. Umberto Eco on the amazing popularity of the movie Casablanca: “What then is the fascination of Casablanca? The question is a legitimate one, for aesthetically speaking (or by any strict critical standards), Casablanca is a very mediocre film. It is a comic strip, called mass culture with its standardized, formulaic forms seemed to confirm this in dramatic, shocking forms. The first attempts to defend popular culture in Bowling Green Popular Culture Studies countered this narrative simply with the populist belief in “the people,” who have made America great and know what they are doing. 20 But in the following stage, that of formula criticism, we already find a subject that uses popular culture for the disguised expression of hidden, often socially tabooed impulses, as in Robert Warshow’s statement, “He is what we want to be and what we are afraid we might become.” 21 We cannot know this subject, because its psychology is hidden behind genre conventions, but it is there and has an active imaginary dimension of its own. This active dimension is further enhanced in camp in which attitudes toward popular culture change completely. Forms that were singled out as proof of popular culture’s aesthetic inferiority are now praised as sources of aesthetic pleasure. Among other things, this means that the subject can change the meaning and significance of a popular culture product by taking another attitude, “a good taste of bad taste” (Sontag 292). 22 By doing so, the subject 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 388 Winfried Fluck a hotch-potch, low on psychological credibility, and with little continuity in its dramatic effects. And we know the reasons for this: the film was made up as the shooting went along, and it was not until the last moment that the director and scriptwriters knew whether Ilse would leave with Victor or with Rick” (35). 23 As Jack Barbucio points out, it was one of the main attractions of camp for gays that it drew attention to the constructedness of gender roles. “Bad taste” exaggerations can highlight the unnaturalness and artificiality of the construction. John Wayne, for example, is not just a representation of real masculinity, his persona also reveals what it takes to construct the image of a real man. As Richard Dyer puts it: “Gay camp can emphasize what a production number the Wayne image is - the lumbering gait, drawling voice and ever more craggy face are a deliberately constructed and manufactured image of virility” (145). 24 In his essay “It’s being so camp as keeps us going,” reprinted in his Only Entertainment, Richard Dyer provides a thoughtful discussion of the ambiguity of camp’s liberation. A more systematic problematization of the usefulness of the concept of identification is offered by Jackie Stacey in her book Star Gazing. See also Miriam Thaggart, “Divided Images: Black Spectatorship and John Stahl’s Imitation of Life” on divided identifications by Black viewers. In this context, see also bell hooks and her criticism of Manthia Diawara in “The Oppositional Gaze.” gains ironic distance, highlights the artificiality of the representation, 23 and thus undermines the basis of ideologization: identification. 24 Postmodern theory has extended this playful approach that challenges readers and viewers to consciously reflect on the constructedness of aesthetic forms. The result has been a far-reaching dehierarchization that undermines hierarchies between high and low and, in consequence, a further pluralization and differentiation of cultural forms, in which popular culture could now even become associated with avant-garde forms. The changing relation to modernism is exemplary: Analyses of early mass culture criticism had pointed out that, at a closer look, the dichotomy between high culture and popular culture was really an opposition between the experimental ambitions of modernism and an assumedly formulaic popular culture. But now, in the spirit of postmodern theory, we read in Kirk Varnedoe’s book Modern Art and Popular Culture that “the exchanges between modern art and lowbrow culture were a formative aspect in the history of modern art” (13), leading eventually, one might add, to Pop Art in painting. These arguments have been pushed further toward a major turn in popular culture studies: theories of reception and aesthetic effect. As Liebes and Katz point out in their essay, “On the Critical Abilities of Television Viewers: ” “The status of the viewer has been upgraded regularly during the course of communication research” (204). A whole field of study has emerged on what is now called “active audiences.” In camp, the spectator, by taking on another attitude than intended by the text, can turn its meaning on its head. According to British Cultural Studies, youth subcultures can give mundane everyday, such 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media 389 as needles and pins, resistant meanings. And in popular culture, readers come to terms with their own situation in their own idiosyncratic ways. In the reception of Dallas, different ethnic groups look at one and the same program differently. In the critical discussion of apparatus theory, feminist critics reject the notion that the female spectator is arrested in her subject position. Instead, they begin to emphasize the freedom to enter different perspectives, including those of males (Linda Williams, Jackie Stacey). Altogether, there has been an unmistakable tendency to give the recipient ever more freedom by looking at the actual conditions of media use. An important point of departure was to reconsider the reception model postulated by apparatus theory, that of a central, omniscient position, made possible by the darkness of the film theatre, where viewers are “alone” vis-à-vis the screen and can have the illusion of being addressed directly. But what about watching television, in most cases in a living room together with family members, with constant interruptions and distractions, and often not in a darkened room? In retrospect, one realizes to what extent apparatus theory was still fixated on the classical Hollywood film; however, by the time criticism set in, television had begun to replace film as the leading medium. Popular culture studies in the 1970s and 80s were film studies, in the following decades, popular culture studies were television studies. (And this development has been continued by devices like the VCR, the DVD, the internet and video games) that have further extended the range of available media. Frank Kelleter’s emphasis on the impact seriality can have on processes of meaning making could be drawn upon here and linked with a body of texts that emphasizes the unlimited process of intertextuality in which every text or object is embedded in ever new associations (“Five Ways”). But where do we stop? The question has been most prominently provoked by John Fiske, who ties television reception to a subjectivity that roams freely through the continuous flow of images characteristic of television. TV for Fiske is not a text but a form of textuality, that is, an endless process of signification, which, in poststructuralist fashion, is semiotically “open” and therefore also open to ever new and different readings. What can we still say about these readings? Viewers watch television because they enjoy the polysemic play of television, no matter what the program is, so that the pleasure of watching television is the pleasure of producing ever new meanings out of a constant flow 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 390 Winfried Fluck 25 One might argue at this point that in their eagerness to reject the model of passive readers and to emphasize their active engagement, scholars have lost sight of the fact that their activities will most likely have something to do with the programs they are watching. Television viewers may sit in front of the TV set for hours, but they still like certain programs more than others, and the degree of their cognitive, psychic, emotional and affective involvement must have something to do with the program itself. Men do not watch soap operas to the same extent as women, although the semiotic play the program offers may be equally rewarding. 26 Cf. Fiske, “Popularity.” For my own phenomenological explanation of reception as a transfer process, see “The Aesthetic Experience of the Image” and my essay on “second narratives” reprinted in this volume. 27 Cf. Bennett, “Texts, Readers, Reading Formations.” 28 One way to do so is to link the reception of popular culture material to certain subcul‐ tural communities, including such groups as fan groups who “appropriate, rethink, and rework media materials as the basis for their own social interactions and cultural exchanges” ( Jenkins 175). For example, as Jenkins points out, where the sexuality of a character is not clearly determined, there is space for queer appropriations. In an essay in which he repeatedly refers to the movie Thelma and Louise, Jenkins also includes slash readings and readings by lesbian communities which, not unexpectedly, have another reading of Thelma and Louise than other groups. Fittingly, Jenkins now speaks of the viewer as a poacher. of signs. 25 From being a medium of mass manipulation, television has become a semiotic democracy that encourages viewers to become their own producers. 26 For example, in an essay on the television series Dynasty, Jane Feuer refers to fan magazines, ads, product tie-ins, public letters, and interviews as part of the sense-making process, and Tony Bennett, in another essay, even draws the conclusion that because of that variety of sense-making sources that readers or viewers use, the text only exists in its activations. 27 His methodological conclusion is that “as a consequence, to study the connection between literary phenomena and social processes requires that everything that has been said or written about a text, every context in which it has been inscribed, should in principle, be regarded as relevant to and assigned methodological parity within such a study” (qtd. in Feuer 279). Bennett does not seem to be concerned that this may be asking too much of any interpreter or that, as David Morley puts it, the text is simply dissolved into an endless chain of readings (Morley, “Populism” 287). 28 VIII. This is quite a different story from that of an ever increasing awareness of power constraints. In fact, the two narratives - which, in my opinion, are representative of the theoretical work done in literary and cultural studies since the 1980s - 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media 391 29 In that respect, the title of a recent essay collection by Laura Mulvey and Anna Backman Rogers that wants to bring feminism up to date is telling: Feminisms. Diversity, Difference and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures. There is an unmistakable effort here not to miss out on any possible differentiation. 30 See, for instance, Julia Erhart, “Laura Mulvey Meets Catherine Tramell Meets the She- Man: Counter-History, Reclamation, and Incongruity in Lesbian, Gay, and Queer Film and Media Criticism,” in which she also quotes the following definition of queer provided by Harry Benshoff in his book Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film: “queer (…) includes people who might also self-identify as gay and/ or lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, transvestite, drag queen, leather daddy, lipstick lesbian, pansy, fairy, dyke, butch femme, feminist, asexual, and so on - any people not explicitly defining themselves in ‘traditional’ heterosexual terms“ (5). 31 The pattern is always the same, in the case of Black identities it goes from Black Power to identity politics, which was then criticized as essentialist in Black Feminist Criticism, until Black Feminists, in turn, were criticized for their essentialism. Thus, Lisa Taylor criticizes bell hooks for contradicting herself by “claiming that black women have both turned away from Hollywood cinema and developed an ‘oppositional gaze.’ This sweeping claim, which would seem to speak on behalf of all black American women, risks essentializing black femininity. hooks remains silent on why black women would want to view Hollywood films, what they specifically watch, and how they watch it” (Taylor 155). go in opposite directions and appear to be irreconcilable. In the power narrative the last hope finally came to rest on the recipient’s affects as the only place left that has not yet been subjected to power. On the other hand, popular culture studies cannot ignore the fact of an ongoing differentiation. Gender studies provide a case in point, for example when a feminist like Angela McRobbie, in her well-known essay “Post-Feminism and Popular Culture,” complains about recent developments in feminism that are now summarily comprised under the heading of post-feminism. In a development for which the multi-million copy bestseller Bridget Jones’s Diary can be seen as a symbol, a younger generation, McRobbie argues, has welcomed the idea of political self-empowerment but then has left politics by the wayside, so that what remains is self-empowerment as self-fashioning. And the more versions of self-empowerment, the more differentiation you will get. 29 Recent developments in gender studies, where the number of gender identities have exploded, amply confirm this. 30 In his essay, “Subject(ed) to Recognition,” the Black television scholar Herman Gray puts his finger on the source of this development - the change of the meaning and function of the politics of recognition - when he refers to the recognition “of racial, ethnic, and sexual difference as diversity rather than difference as group position or the basis of social inequality and economic subordination” (773). In the course of the changing narratives about popular culture traced here, difference has become differentiation. 31 For Gray, one of the 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 392 Winfried Fluck consequences is: “Rather than struggle to rearticulate and restructure the social, economic, and cultural basis of a collective disadvantage, the cultural politics of diversity seeks recognition and visibility as an end in itself ” (772). Differentia‐ tion undermines political struggles. However, in contrast to the “old-fashioned” Gray, the Black television scholar Racquel J. Gates, in her well-received recent book Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture, argues that Black scholars should move away from their calls for positive, empowering images, because negative images can function “as the repository for those identities, experiences, and feelings that have been discarded by respectable media” (16). For Gates, negative images are not necessarily distortions but representations that, although they may not be quite respectable, enlarge the range of Black identities. What worries Gray - the multiplication and differentiation of Black subject positions - is a welcome liberation for Gates, even if it means to include negative images of Blackness. However, this is not an essay about diversity but about two meta-narratives that have dominated not only popular culture studies over the last decades, but all fields of literary, cultural, and media studies in the humanities. And the stark contrast between them seems to suggest that we will have to take a stand in favor of one or the other: either the work we have been doing in our fields has been in the service of an ever more effective systemic reproduction by increasingly invisible power effects, or it has been one of the driving forces in a process of differentiation that has led to an increasing number of expressive forms of a self-serve culture. At this point, it may be useful to go back to the story with which we started, that of the consequences of recent technological developments. In a way, this process changes the role popular culture can have in systemic reproduction. In view of the overpowering abundance of programs, ideological analyses or the search for invisible power effects have become obsolete, because they are drowned in multitude. We can no longer know a significantly large part of the material and thus cannot make any meaningful selections of what is representative of a culture. Moreover, since much, if not most of the material is not known to us and we do not know anything about the forms of its reception, we have no clue about its effect on audiences, including ideological effects. To be sure, digitalization opens up an enormous range of selections for the viewer, so that her freedom of choice is dramatically enhanced, but since these choices are highly personal, it is almost impossible to attribute any larger social or cultural significance to them. Moreover, there are still all those other social media, YouTube, cable and other options that add up to Andersen’s “tiny to smallish” tribes. Even if we 10.24053/ REAL-2023-0021 From the Mass Culture Debate to Self-Serve Media 393 32 See David Tetzlaff, “Divide and Control: Popular Culture and Social Control in Late Capitalism,” in which he raises objections against the ideology-as-closed-system view that has dominated the power narrative since poststructuralist Marxism began to dominate. Tetzlaff ’s argument is an eye-opener, because only in retrospect does it become clear that the approaches that put their political hopes on categories like conflict, tension, contradiction, ruptures, and gaps are all based on the tacit assumption of ideology as a closed totality. Their function lies in the fact that they disturb the tight closedness of the system and keep it from being a completely closed entity. In effect, one may even go one step further and claim that the fact that the term resistance has remained rather unspecific, if not empty, in many of these publications, can be explained by the fact that the disturbance of a closed entity is already seen as its actual political achievement. But as Tetzlaff argues, social and ideological control can be much more effective where differentiation or fragmentation prevail, because this means that it is hard to identify what the specific source of domination is. In consequence, there is no longer any common ground for resistance. The new forms of power are far more flexible and resilient, they can easily accommodate resistance and co-exist with other centers of power. could identify a body of texts that might look significant to us, the small size of the users would hardly allow any larger generalization. In other words: The system reproduces itself on the basis of a proliferation of cultural material, but the meaning and significance of this material becomes increasingly irrelevant. For its reproduction, the system does not need any particular content, the sheer numbers suffice. The result is an ever increasing array of individual choices and options - a narrative of ongoing differentiation - that happily co-exists with the narrative of systemic reproduction. In fact, it may provide a new dimension of unexpected support to this other narrative, because it reveals that the system does not do its work most effectively by the illusionary construct of a totality, but by precisely the opposite: by a multiplication of ever new options. 32 One understands in retrospect what the lure of the power narrative is: it puts critical interpreters in a position of superiority. They can claim to see something others have failed to see, and since society is conceived as a systemic totality, this means that critics are in a position of having the key for understanding society as a whole. On the other hand, the differentiation narrative leads to a loss of authority. Interpreters become one voice among many others in a plurality of views and “active” audiences. The power narrative can provide distinction, the differentiation narrative may be closer to contemporary reality, but it also leads to a loss of status of the intellectual. 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