I'm currently attempting to work out the critical and historiographical foundations of my dissertation and Richard Ohmann's Selling Culture has been on my mind. His opening synthesis on Marxism and mass culture is especially rich. Some juicy morsels are presented below. I returned to Ohmann foremost for his interpretation of Production and Capital, which forcefully describes the political economy of modern mass communications while navigating some of the traps many modernists fell into. Here's how Marx lays things out:
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society - the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. (Ohmann, 42)
Ohmann notes, of course, that “...this determination works through the agency, not just of “people,” but especially of some people.” Marx continues:
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. (Ohmann, 42)
Here is Ohmann's breakdown of these passages:
Like any ruling class, the bourgeoisie extended its power by controlling the means of mental production. And so the general theory offers an explanation of how mass culture arose, and how it works - even though Marx and Engels had not experienced it when they wrote. The bourgeoisie, which comes to own the means of communication along with other means of production, uses the media as a channel for its beliefs, values, and total understanding of the world. Its aim is to legitimate its rule, making its interests seem natural, inevitable, and universal, so that the other classes will accept their subordinate positions. Since the largest and most threatening of these, the working class, is not held in place by fixed hierarchies, as were medieval serfs, but is supposedly “free” within the market system and democratic polity which the bourgeoisie has created, the task of culture in maintaining the class system is proportionately greater. THe bourgeoisie must create, in fact, a mass culture, to produce docile minds in the heads of millions. And it is able to do this by building on the very processes of mechanization it has used to revolutionize material production and the means of communications necessary to support it. Railroads, postal systems, and steamships, steam presses, and the telegraph easily adapt to the creation and distribution of mass culture, as do later innovations like electric power and lighting, wireless transmission of sound and images, photoengraving, and motion pictures. Mass culture fuses the bourgeoisie’s mastery of production and its need to master the consciousness of its subordinates. (Ohmann, 43)
As most of us know, this is the view generally taken up by the Frankfurt School:
The Frankfurt School theorists held that the culture industry, along with the whole apparatus of mental production and commodity consumption, colonized and supervised leisure time so as to eliminate critical ways of thinking and even the inner life itself. It replaced an earlier, organic working class culture with one imposed from without, that created a host of false needs to be met by commodities and by the products of the culture industry. This hedonistic culture, both cause and consequence of weakening primary institutions like the traditional family, flattened consciousness almost into a state of narcosis, subduing the exploited, and blocking the desire to organize for socialism, at last among the traditional working class. (Ohmann, 44)
The theory of hegemony holds that the capitalist ruling class, in gaining control of production, also comes to dominate most major institutions, from legal to military to cultural. In this way it defines the situations within which all people live their lives, and sets limits to the possible - or at least plausible - choices they can make, relations they can enter into, ideas they can have. In other words, the capitalist version of reality saturates the common sense (Gramsci’s term) and daily activity of all classes. The ruling class thus dominates the others quite systematically, yet its domination works through means that are often indirect and even unintentional. To be sure, it means to keep society as a field open to its project of cultivation, and has the power to do so through direct coercion up to a point. But it prefers not to, and usually does not. For one thing, the legitimacy of the social order in the eyes of subordinate classes depends on their belief that they are free and that their institutions - including the media - are open (and most members of the bourgeoisie themselves share this belief.). Thus, the hegemonic process, when it is working well, is a system of rule that depends on widespread, active consent more than on force or manipulation. (Ohmann, 45)