Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture
Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture
复制标题
大众文化中的物化与乌托邦
作者：
F. Jameson
大众文化理论--或者大众受众文化、商业文化、“流行”文化、文化产业，因为它有不同的名称--总是倾向于将其对象与所谓的高雅文化相对立，而不去反思这种对立的客观地位。正如经常发生的那样，这一领域的立场将自己简化为两个镜像，基本上是按价值分阶段的。因此，我们所熟悉的精英主义的主题，以大众文化所接触的人数之多为依据，为大众文化的优先地位辩护;对高雅或封闭文化的追求，于是被污名化为一小群知识分子的身份爱好。正如其反智的主旨所表明的那样，这种基本上否定的立场几乎没有理论内容，但显然是对美国激进主义根深蒂固的信念的回应，并表达了一种广泛的感觉，即高雅文化是一种建立的现象，它与机构，特别是与大学的联系不可挽回地受到污染。因此，所援引的价值是一种社会价值：与华莱士·史蒂文斯或亨利·詹姆斯相比，与《教父》或《大白鲨》等电视节目相比，前者更可取，因为前者显然讲的是一种文化语言，对更广泛的人口阶层来说，比知识分子所代表的社会阶层更有意义。然而，激进主义者也是知识分子，因此这种立场带有内疚之旅的可疑色彩;同时，它忽视了许多最重要的现代艺术形式的反社会、批判、否定（尽管通常不是革命）的立场;最后，它甚至没有提供阅读的方法，即使是那些它珍视的文化物品，也没有兴趣谈论它们的内容。
The theory of mass culture--or mass audience culture, commercial culture, "popular" culture, the culture industry, as it is variously known--has always tended to define its object against so-called high culture without reflecting on the objective status of this opposition. As so often, positions in this field reduce themselves to two mirror-images, and are essentially staged in terms of value. Thus the familiar motif of elitism argues for the priority of mass culture on the grounds of the sheer numbers of people exposed to it; the pursuit of high or hermetic culture is then stigmatized as a status hobby of small groups of intellectuals. As its anti-intellectual thrust suggests, this essentially negative position has little theoretical content but clearly responds to a deeply rooted conviction in American radicalism and articulates a widely based sense that high culture is an establishment phenomenon, irredeemably tainted by its association with institutions, in particular with the university. The value invoked is therefore a social one: it would be preferable to deal with tv programs, The Godfather, orJaws, rather than with Wallace Stevens or HenryJames, because the former clearly speak a cultural language meaningful to far wider strata of the population than what is socially represented by intellectuals. Radicals are however also intellectuals, so that this position has suspicious overtones of the guilt trip; meanwhile it overlooks the anti-social and critical, negative (although generally not revolutionary) stance of much of the most important forms of modem art; finally, it offers no method for reading even those cultural objects it valorizes and has had little of interest to say about their content.