Budapest W1: Feminist Research of Popular Culture and the Media - Mass Culture as Woman

Huyssen, Andreas: “Mass Culture as Woman” in Modernism’s Other. Indiana University Press, 1986.

"Sartre has indeed succeeded in showing how Flaubert fetishized his own imaginary femininity while simultaneously sharing his period's hostility toward real women, participating in a pattern of the imagination and of behavior all too common in the history of modernism." p.1

"One aspect of the difference that is important to my argument about the gender inscriptions in the mass culture debate is that woman (Madame Bovary) is positioned as reader of inferior literature-subjective, emotional and passive-while man (Flaubert) emerges as writer of genuine, authentic literature-objective, ironic, and in control of his aesthetic means." p.2

This text was written in 1986 - I wonder how this argument could be applied to other forms of mass culture today? Social media? Fan fiction? 

"It is indeed striking to observe how the political, psychological, and aesthetic discourse around the turn of the century consistently and obsessively genders mass culture and the masses as feminine, while high culture, whether traditional or modern, clearly remains the privileged realm of male activities." p.3

"modern mass culture is administered and imposed from above and that the threat it represents resides not in the masses but in those who run the industry." p.3

"What is interesting in the second half of the 19th century, however, is a certain chain effect of signification: from the obsessively argued inferiority of woman as artist (classically argued by Karl Scheflfer in Die Frau und die Kunst, 1908) to the association of woman with mass culture (witness Hawthorne's "the damned mob of scribbling women") to the identification of woman with the masses as political threat." p.5

"Nietzsche's ascription of feminine characteristics to the masses is always tied to his aesthetic vision of the artist-philosopher-hero, the suffering loner who stands in irreconcilable opposition to modern democracy and its inauthentic culture." p.5

Nietzche believed that the 'dilution' of culture, i.e. making cultural expressions more accessible to the masses, was because of the artist's desire to appeal to the woman, i.e. the feminisation of culture. 

"it is no coincidence that the philosopher blames theatricality for the decline of culture. After all, the theater in bourgeois society was one of the few spaces which allowed women a prime place in the arts, precisely because acting was seen as imitative and reproductive, rather than original and productive." p.6

"The fear of the masses in this age of declining liberalism is always also a fear of woman, a fear of nature out of control, a fear of the unconscious, of sexuality, of the loss of identity and stable ego boundaries in the mass." p.6

"Male fears of an engulfing femininity are here projected onto the metropolitan masses, who did indeed represent a threat to the rational bourgeois order." p.6

"Thus the nightmare of being devoured by mass culture through co-option, commodification, and the "wrong" kind of success is the constant fear of the modernist artist, who tries to stakeout his territory by fortifying the boundaries between genuine art and inauthentic mass culture." p.7

Modernism/Modernist Art Work:

"

• The work is autonomous and totally separate from the realms of mass culture and everyday life.
  
• It is self-referential, self-conscious, frequently ironic, ambiguous, and rigorously experimental.
  
• It is the expression of a purely individual consciousness rather than of a Zeitgeist or a collective state of mind.
  
• Its experimental nature makes it analogous to science, and like science it produces and carries knowledge.
  
• Modernist literature since Flaubert is a persistent exploration of and encounter with language. Modernist painting since Manet is an equally persistent elaboration of the medium itself: the flatness of the canvas, the structuring of notation, paint and brushwork, the problem of the frame.
  
• The major premise of the modernist art work is the rejection of all classical systems of representation, the effacement of "content," the erasure of subjectivity and authorial voice, the repudiation of likeness and verisimilitude, the exorcism of any demand for realism of whatever kind.
  
• Only by fortifying its boundaries, by maintaining its purity and autonomy, and by avoiding any contamination with mass culture and with the signifying systems of everyday life can the art work maintain its adversary stance: adversary to the bourgeois culture of everyday life as well as adversary to mass culture and entertainment whic h are seen as the primary forms of bourgeois cultural articulation.

" p.7

"The autonomy of the modernist art work, after all, is always the result of a resistance, an abstention, and a suppression-resistance to the seductive lure of mass culture, abstention from the pleasure of trying to please a larger audience, suppression of everything that might be threatening to the rigorous demands of being modern and at the edge of time." p.8

"The postmodern crisis of high modernism and its classical accounts has to be seen as a crisis both of capitalist modernization itself and of the deeply patriarchal structures that support it." p.10

"One of the few widely agreed upon features of postmodernism is its attempt to negotiate forms of high art with certain forms and genres of mass culture and the culture of everyday life." p.11

"the original impetus to merge high art and popular culture—for example, say in Pop Art in the early 1960— did not yet have anything to do with the later feminist critique of modernism. It was, rather, indebted to the historical avant-garde—art movements such as Dada, constructivism, and surrealism—which had aimed, unsuccessfully, at freeing art from its aestheticist ghetto and reintegrating art and life." p.11 - Was Dadaism unsuccessful at freeing art? Did it fail in reintegrating art and life? Did 'Kind Ubu' by Alfred Jarry not free art from its aestheticist ghetto?
 

 "it seems clear that feminism's radical questioning of patriarchal structures in society and in the various discourses of art, literature, science, and philosophy must be one of the measures by which we gauge the specificity of contemporary culture as well as its distance from modernism and its mystique of mass culture as feminine." p.13