Late Modernism. Robert Genter

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      In this sense, Riesman’s formulation of identity bore little resemblance to high modernist notions of aesthetic self-formation. In a series of articles published in early volumes of American Quarterly, including “Listening to Popular Music,” which he had begun in 1947 but did not finish until after the publication of The Lonely Crowd, and “Movies and Audiences,” which he coauthored with his wife, Evelyn, Riesman challenged the disdain with which highbrow critics dissected America’s cultural landscape.⁸¹ Rejecting arguments that the culture industry completely manipulated passive audiences, Riesman criticized high modernists for their failure to address the reception side of cultural consumption and for their inability to appreciate how the divisions of class, race, gender, and religion affected the ways in which the interpretation of goods took place. Borrowing from the findings of Paul Lazarsfeld and his fellow researchers at the Bureau of Applied Social Research, which demonstrated that the meaning and content digested by consumers from mass media was often translated, distorted, or inverted by local opinion leaders and local settings, Riesman argued that “the same or virtually the same popular culture materials” were utilized by American audiences “in radically different ways and for radically different purposes,” and consequently “it may then appear that it is the audience which manipulates the product (and hence the producer), no less than the other way around.”⁸² For instance, in his 1950 article “Listening to Popular Music,” Riesman challenged Theodor Adorno’s argument in “On Radio Music” concerning stereotyped listening habits and called for not merely an analysis of the content of popular music but an investigation into the actual audiences who consumed such cultural forms. As Riesman explained, “the danger exists then of assuming that the other audience, the audience one does not converse with, is more passive, more manipulated, more vulgar in taste, than may be the case.” He pointed to the abrupt shifts in popular music tastes over the years as examples of the music industry reacting to, instead of directing, consumer demands. Riesman distinguished between majority tastes (those who digested popular music uncritically and used it primarily for social purposes such as camaraderie or personal distinction) and minority tastes (those who rebelled against commercialized forms through the development of sophisticated standards of listening). Consequently, he encouraged researchers to examine not only the sites in which music and other cultural goods were consumed but the particular character structure of the individual who used these goods for divergent purposes. As he observed, “we cannot simply ask ‘who listens to what?’ before we find out who ‘who’ is and what ‘what’ is by means of a psychological and content analysis which will give us a better appreciation of the manifold uses, the plasticity of music for its variegated audiences” (193).

      In this sense, Riesman was much more encouraged by the often idiosyncratic ways in which commodities were endowed with meaning and argued that the advantage other-directed personalities had over their inner-directed predecessors was precisely in the ways in which cultural consumption allowed for a rapid expansion of forms of identification. He challenged the tendency to divide leisure activities between active and passive forms, in particular, the tendency to promote “craftsmanlike leisure” activities as a way to recover the lost value of craft skill and to denounce the passive consumption of movies, popular music, novels, and magazines. Arguing that it was silly to try to convert a bobby-soxer into a craft hobbiest, Riesman believed that it was “a blind alley for the other-directed man to try to adapt his styles in leisure to those which grew out of an earlier character and an earlier social situation.”⁸³ In contrast to what he considered the “puritan” critique of mass culture, Riesman argued that the “great variety” of cultural products made possible by the standardization of the production process allowed for liberation from imposed characterological conformity. Riesman pointed in particular to Hollywood films as “liberating” agents—“even the fan who imitates the casual manner of Humphrey Bogart or the fearless energetic pride of Katharine Hepburn may in the process be emancipating himself or herself from a narrow-minded peer-group” (291). Where high modernists saw standardization, conformity, and manipulation Riesman saw complexity, discovery, and liberation. Of course Riesman was neither promoting anti-intellectualism nor espousing populist rhetoric; indeed, his defense of popular culture bore little resemblance to the uncritical democratization of popular tastes associated with certain forms of postmodernism in the 1960s. Instead, Riesman was trying to move beyond the simplistic dichotomy between elitism and populism, choosing instead to portray American culture not en masse but as divided into a series of audiences and tastes. This was the challenge he posed in his contribution to a Partisan Review symposium, “America and the Intellectuals.” He sensed within the highbrow rejection of American culture resentment against the success of the project of high modernism. As more and more members of the upper-class and middle-class strata became cultural aficionados themselves, intellectuals such as Dwight Macdonald and Clement Greenberg began to “[fear] the shifts in middlebrow taste which might leave [them] in the position of liking something also liked by a New Yorker or Harper’s audience.”⁸⁴ Lingering battles over literary and artistic canons were, according to Riesman, merely signs of confusion on the part of high modernists over the surprising popularization of such works.

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