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How is it that American intellectuals, who had for 150 years worried about the deleterious effects of affluence, more recently began to emphasize pleasure, playfulness, and symbolic exchange as the essence of a vibrant consumer culture? The New York intellectuals of the 1930s rejected any serious or analytical discussion, let alone appreciation, of popular culture, which they viewed as morally questionable. Beginning in the 1950s, however, new perspectives emerged outside and within the United States that challenged this dominant thinking. Consuming Pleasures reveals how a group of writers shifted attention from condemnation to critical appreciation, critiqued cultural hierarchies and moralistic approaches, and explored the symbolic processes by which individuals and groups communicate.
Historian Daniel Horowitz traces the emergence of these new perspectives through a series of intellectual biographies. With writers and readers from the United States at the center, the story begins in Western Europe in the early 1950s and ends in the early 1970s, when American intellectuals increasingly appreciated the rich inventiveness of popular culture. Drawing on sources both familiar and newly discovered, this transnational intellectual history plays familiar works off each other in fresh ways. Among those whose work is featured are Jürgen Habermas, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Walter Benjamin, C. L. R. James, David Riesman and Marshall McLuhan, Richard Hoggart, members of London's Independent Group, Stuart Hall, Paddy Whannel, Tom Wolfe, Herbert Gans, Susan Sontag, Reyner Banham, and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.
- Sales Rank: #1054169 in Books
- Published on: 2012-03-05
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.48" h x 1.53" w x 6.46" l, 2.08 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 504 pages
Review
"Consuming Pleasures offers a brilliant survey of major transatlantic thinkers. Horowitz is an accomplished historian who has mastered, in stunning depth and breadth, the literature on each of his principal subjects. Lucid, elegant, and engaging."—Howard Brick, author of Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought
About the Author
Daniel Horowitz is Mary Huggins Gamble Professor of American Studies at Smith College.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Preface
As I neared completion of this book, I turned to Google to track down a quotation. Up on the screen came a 1937 article by Marion C. Sheridan titled "Rescuing Civilization through Motion Pictures." Right away I wondered if this was the Dr. Sheridan who taught me English in Hillhouse High School. Sure enough, the publication identified her as a teacher in my hometown, New Haven, at my high school, one that employed some teachers with Ph.D.s from Yale. She had earned hers in 1934, and perhaps a combination of sex discrimination, a desire to remain in New Haven, a genuine commitment to high school education, and the Great Depression persuaded her to teach in an urban public school that in the 1950s maintained some aspects of its elite character. The 1960s radical Andrew Kopkind, who preceded me in high school by several years, later described her as "the hated English teacher, Dr. Sheridan, Dr. Marion C. Sheridan, this big, right-wing Irish fascist." Memory plays funny tricks on us all. Accurately or not, I remember Andy Kopkind living in the only Republican household in our neighborhood and Dr. Sheridan as a slight and severe but not especially political woman, more bluestocking than "right-wing Irish fascist."
What struck me when her 1937 article appeared on the screen is that almost three-quarters of a century before I completed this book, my high school English teacher had written on a subject central to Consuming Pleasures: how to deploy sophisticated literary theory, in her case that of the British critic I. A. Richards, to understand popular culture. "The way to rescue civilization, by way of the motion picture," Dr. Sheridan asserted in the year before I was born, "would be to sharpen in every possible way the perceptions of those who attend, so that they will be critical of what they see and cognizant of and responsive to the best when it was projected before them on the so-called 'silver-screen.'"
Because in Consuming Pleasures I present a series of intellectual biographies through which I explore how writers from a wide range of vantage points found ways of seeing that broke through the prevailing understandings, I wish I could show that this book had its origins deep in my past, perhaps in a class where Dr. Sheridan taught me how to appreciate all those double feature B movies I saw at Saturday matinees. But honestly, I cannot. What I can do is appreciate the continuities and contingencies of my life as a student. More salient to my project is the subject I have been working on since the early 1970s, the story of how intellectuals have responded to affluence and consumer culture. This book thus continues an exploration I began with The Morality of Spending: Attitudes toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875-1940 and continued in The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939-1979. In those books I traced shifts in moral stances toward consumer culture.
In the United States, I argued, traditional moralism was the pervasive approach until the 1920s. Writers in this vein positively valued self-restraint and criticized the supposed immorality of workers and their families, who, it was assumed, relied on alcohol, gambling, and permissive sexual expression as they pursued problematic pleasures. In the 1920s a different approach, the new moralism, developed among intellectuals. Owing much to a Protestant jeremiad tradition, new moralists argued that consumer culture weakened the moral fiber of citizens, tempting them to excess. They focused more on how capitalism generated consumer goods than on the reception of those goods by ordinary Americans. They relied on a sense of moral superiority, a belief that critics of shopping were wiser than shoppers themselves. Intellectuals, they believed, participated in a high culture that was more intriguing and enriching than the debased low culture in which consumers indulged. Fears of declension, excess, and pleasure suffused the writings of those who found mass culture problematically degrading. For many intellectuals, consumer culture raised questions about authenticity and the political implications of defining American superiority in terms of the increased acquisition of consumer goods. Above all, they believed, commercial culture threatened to undermine the stability, character, and restraints necessary to sustain American values. This tradition culminated beginning in the late 1930s, when New York intellectuals, influenced by the rise of totalitarianism in Europe, set the terms of debate in ways that made it difficult for cultural observers in the immediate post-World War II period to talk seriously and analytically, let alone appreciatively, about popular culture.
The new moralism was influential well into the 1960s, when the alternative that this book traces began to take hold. Postmoralism, not unrelated to postmodernism, underwrote an embrace of pleasure and symbolic exchange, often avoiding or transcending moral issues that bothered earlier generations of intellectuals. With its arrival, American writers shifted their attention from an emphasis on self-restraint to the achievement of satisfaction through commercial goods and experiences, a change this book explores.
Sometimes I think my timing is exquisitely off. The Morality of Spending and The Anxieties of Affluence, explorations of the tradition of moralistic scorn, appeared in the middle and at the height of the postwar boom in consumer culture. Work on this book, which explores the emergence of ideas about the pleasures of consumerism, began in 2004 as that boom reached it apogee and neared completion when, in response to the economic crises of the century's first decade, talk of a return in public discussions to thrift, prudence, and simple living reappeared. Perhaps Dr. Sheridan would have appreciated the ironies.
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
An extraordinary interpretation of intellectuals and popular culture
By Robert H. Abzug
This is a book of signal importance. Daniel Horowitz has, in the past, provided us with eyeopening views and refreshing interpretations of questions concerning consumption, affluence, and wonderfully insightful biographies of Betty Friedan and Vance Packard. Consuming Pleasures, however, is his masterpiece. It is a magisterial look at the ways in which intellectuals in both Europe and the United States dismissed, interpreted, and celebrated popular culture from the 1940s through almost the present. As a historian of a certain age, I often watch my colleagues turn various eras of my life into history with great trepidation. Like a veteran reading about war, my usual reaction is--they don't get it. Horowitz not only gets it, but for the first time on many issues and on the whole sweep of an era, I find myself saying, upon finishing chapter after chapter of this book--Now I get it! Superb scholarship, clear writing, and acute observation make this book a must read for anyone interested in how we have come to view our everyday lives and those who have shaped that vision.
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