Democracy and Popular Culture

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The John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy

Democracy and Popular Culture

April 19-20, 2002
The John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy
The University of Chicago

Introduction

Schedule

Introduction

This conference will be devoted to exploring the current state of popular culture and its relation to democratic life, an issue that has become increasingly contentious not only in the United States but in much of the world. Americans have always had an ambivalent relation to cultural distinctions, as even the earliest foreign observers noticed, and that ambivalence seems to bear some relation to the American understanding of democratic society. In the decades following the Second World War, however, the rise of a so-called “mass” or “pop” culture – popular films and music, comic books, then television – attracted the attention of American intellectuals, who found themselves divided over just what this development meant for the state of culture generally, and what it reflected about the nature of American life. Partisan Review, the leading periodical of the New York intellectuals at the time, ran an important symposium called “Our Country, Our Culture” that posed the question in stark terms: did the acceptance of democracy as a political principle, one that had proved its strength in the face of fascism, necessitate the acceptance of democratization in cultural life, and if so, was that a problem?

Developments over the past forty years – the growth of an enormous entertainment and media industry, the embrace of popular culture by mainstream cultural institutions, the dominance of American popular culture abroad, the institutionalization of the academic study of popular culture – might seem to have rendered such questions outdated. We do not think so. On the contrary, it strikes us how intensively divided opinion on them remains. In the two decades following the apparent triumph of the democratic idea in world politics we have seen the rise of a renewed pessimism about the cultural possibilities of democratic life in the West and around the world. Are we, as critic Neil Postman put it in the title of his best-selling book, “amusing ourselves to death”? Or are such concerns simply another form of American provincialism? Can we really say we understand the nature and effects of popular culture, and the role it plays in modern democratic life?

The aim of this conference will be to assess democratic cultural pessimism critically. To do so we will invite a range of participants for whom these issues have been central, including journalistic critics, and scholars from various disciplines. We will have four sessions. The first, “Our Country, Our Culture, the American Debate,” will be devoted to the history of the high/low cultural debates in American intellectual life and what we have to learn from them now. The second session, “Democracy in Culture,” will bring together a group of journalistic critics to discuss how they see the relation between high and popular culture in their own domains today, and what forces for democratization are at work in them. The third session, “Popular Culture and Citizenship,” will reverse the poles of that question and ask: how has the rise of the popular culture industry affected the nature and possibilities of democratic citizenship in our time? A large fourth session, “Americanization? Popular Culture Abroad,” will give the floor to scholars and critics from other regions of the world – Eastern and Western Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia – to discuss how debates over popular culture are handled there, how the presence of American popular culture affects local cultural and political life, and whether they share the pessimism about culture and democracy that has become so evident in the United States.