150: David Nye's American Technological Sublime

In American Technological Sublime, David Nye investigates the history of the social construction of the sublime in America from about 1820 to the early 1990s.  Nye's American sublime is somewhat like 18th century European concepts of the sublime, which involve human apprehension of something so big, beautiful, and incomprehensible that the mind is seized with terror, awe, and pleasure all at once; these extremes dominate the human mind, so that the person transcends the material world and comes into contact with the divine.  However, while the European sublime was a category of experience accessible only to educated individuals in contact with nature or sacred architecture, the American sublime has distinctly populist, nationalist, and capitalist overtones.  As early as the 1830s, American travellers in the West were reporting on the sublimity of the natural landscape, while people in the presence of massive new technologies were experiencing a transcendence usually reserved for nature or high art, and revivalists were recommending sublime tourist sites like Niagara as places to get in touch with the divine.  The American sublime was thus a popular, communal experience rather than an elite individual one; it was associated with emotions of awe, pleasure and terror rather than worldly transcendence; it could involve feats of engineering as well as high art and natural beauty; and its ties to American technological transformations of the landscape meant that the experience could be incorporated into nationalist narratives (love of country) and commodified into landscapes of fantasy and pleasure (Disneyland).  As Nye argues, the American sublime is key to American cultural identity.

Although the chapters are roughly chronological, Nye is more interested in talking about sublimeS rather than THE sublime, so that differences of time, place, and personal experience only add to his discussion.  Technological sublimes include the railroad as a "dynamic sublime" that awed in its ability to unite, expand, and enrich the nation; bridges and skyscrapers as a "geometric sublime" that "appeared to dominate nature through elegant design and sheer bulk.... the triumph of reason in concrete form;" factories, electric power plants, and other manufactories as a new "mechanical sublime, which regulates the mind and technologically supersedes nature;" the electrified urban landscape as an accidental "electrical sublime" that dominated night, embodied the values of capitalism and "transformed the appearance of the world;" the atomic bomb as a new, more terrifying form of the dynamic sublime, and Vegas and Disneyland (with nods to Niagara and the Grand Canyon) as the "consumer sublime," commodified pleasure landscapes that provide the rush associated with dislocation from the world of work in simulation of the sublime.

Throughout, Nye traces the ways in which increased articulations between the sublime and mass American culture have led to a watering down of what was once a transcendent, otherworldly dislocation from reality, even as they make that experience accessible to more people.  While he argues that the sublime is at once an individual and collective experience, he also shows how top-down and structurally conditioned that experience has been.

87: Steve Hoelscher's Picturing Indians

Steve Hoelscher's Picturing Indians: Photographic Encounters and Tourist Fantasies in H.H. Bennett's Wisconsin Dells argues that Bennett's photography turned the Ho-Chunk people of the Wisconsin Dells into objects of the "camera's colonizing gaze," but that the Ho-Chunk also subverted Bennett's exploitation of them.  Bennett's photographs can thus be read as negotiations of power, where visual images both represent and shape the material world.

Photographs of Native Americans exploded at the turn of the last century due to the rise of commercial photography, mass tourism, and the final conquest and colonization of Native Americans.  While the most famous photographer of Native Americans was Edward Curtis, who wanted to record a vanishing way of life, H.H. Bennett had the far less noble goal of profiting by selling images of Ho-Chunk people to white tourists visiting the Wisconsin Dells.  Yet while Bennett worked to stage photos that communicated white nostalgia for a vanishing way of life, his Ho-Chunk models actively worked to resist becoming tourist objects: they wore certain items, posed in certain ways, and used the money Bennett gave them for their own economic and cultural survival.  And in real life, the Ho-Chunk have managed not just to survive but to retain and buy back their homelands in a very real repudiation of American cultural and political imperialism.

Throughout, Hoelscher works from a wide range of primary sources, including five years of interactions with Ho-Chunk people and close connections with Tom Jones, a contemporary Ho-Chunk photographer.  He is careful to contextualize Bennett's photography in the cultural, political, and economic milieu in which it was created, and to balance Ho-Chunk and white perspectives.  The result is a profoundly interconnected relationship between Native and white cultures that uses Bennett's tourist photos as a nodal point.

84: Lizabeth Cohen's Town Center to Shopping Center

In "From Town Center to Shopping Center: The Reconfiguration of Community Marketplaces in Postwar America," Lizabeth Cohen shows that the shift in consumer spaces from downtown shopping districts to suburban shopping centers and malls threatens the public sphere on which democracy depends.

The new landscapes of postwar mass consumption had three major effects on American community life:

• by commercializing public space, they brought market segmentation, including divisions by race and class, to community life
• by privatizing public space, they privileged the rights of property owners over citizens' rights to free speech
• by feminizing public space, they gave women more of a claim to the suburban landscape, but they circumscribed their power by constructing them as consumers only

If mass consumption was supposed to bring standardization in merchandise and consumption patterns, the way it structured (and continues to structure) space actually did the opposite.  Further, the dependence on private spaces for public activity and the increasing privatization of public space threatens democracy: if people no longer have a space to speak our minds or critique larger systems of power, how are we a democracy at all?

83: Lizabeth Cohen's Making a New Deal

In Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, Lizabeth Cohen uses the new social history/ history from the bottom up to figure out "how it was possible and what it meant for ordinary factory workers to become effective unionists and national political participants by the mid-1930s."  Like E.P. Thompson, Cohen studies Chicago workers' slow progress to class consciousness and unionization in the 1920s and 1930s by looking at whole people embedded in complex communities instead of at the working class as a narrow block defined by productive labor.  Accordingly, she argues that daily life both inside and outside the workplace, combined with changes in politics and the developing consumer market, led to new choices in a new world where daily lives eventually lead to political decisions.

In other words, Cohen looks at how the cultural became political.  She shows that in the 1920s, Chicago, people may have worked together in factories, but they went home to ethnic enclaves and kept their money in their communities: shopped at local stores, banked with local banks, listened to ethnic radio stations, watch movies at local theaters, etc, even though national chains were already penetrating the city.  They participated in popular culture not as a homogeneous mass but as ethnic and racial communities, each interpreting cultural products differently.  Their only organizational experience was in forcing welfare capitalism to meet their needs.

69: Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering

In This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, Drew Gilpin Faust uses a wide variety of primary materials to understand the cultural implications of the Civil War.  Working from correspondence between soldiers and their families and friends; poetry and writings by Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce, and others; and the voices of the legions of relief workers, coffin manufacturers, government bureaucrats, and other support staff, Faust shows new processes of dying and killing, along with new ways of making sense of these processes, helped shift the nation from a relatively unstructured agrarian federation to a modern, centralized, bureaucratic, industrial state.

The Civil War produced some 620,000 dead, which made death not just one of many features of the war but the defining element of it.  The sheer mass of bodies, generated by the combination of old styles of warfare with new, technologically-enhanced ways of killing, created huge logistical issues.  Soldiers died in new and gruesome ways, which made identification difficult; but even if they didn't, there was still the problem of mitigating bodily decay while trying to identify thousands of bodies and return them to their families.  These new problems generated new social and technological systems: refrigerated coffins, new embalming practices, streamlined accounting methods, and new bureaucratic systems to oversee the sheer volume of bodies needing to be processed.  Dealing with death thus helped businesses and the nation develop more modern systems for mass production and distribution.

30: Kathy Peiss' Hope in a Jar

Some books on feminism and women's culture make me really psyched to be a lady.  Some make me feel like a grumpy old stick in the mud, grousing about too-short skirts and a lack of self-respect among the younger generation.  Unfortunately, Hope in a Jar belongs in the latter category.

I'm not trying to say that it's an unnecessary or uninteresting book - it's quite the opposite, actually.  Hope in a Jar is a history of the American cosmetics industry "from the bottom up," and Peiss takes pains to show how women and minorities actively participated in and shaped beauty culture and the cosmetics industry that grew out of it.  It's the first book to take this industry seriously by looking at it from this perspective; even better, Peiss is an American Studies scholar, so she does that thing where she tells you a lot about both her little slice of life and about its impact on American culture as a whole.  Accordingly, Elizabeth Arden, Madame C.J. Walker and Mary Kay, among others, are portrayed as both intimately connected to the all-female networks, grassroots marketing strategies, and white-focused beauty standards developed in Americas beauty culture and savvy businesswomen who brought fresh ideas into American business culture.  Therefore, after WWI, when the beauty business mushroomed (along with the rest of the economy) into a male-operated, mass-media behemoth, it was instrumental in bringing both female consumers and female businesswomen into the mass market, thus empowering women in the interwar economy.

Women were also empowered in those interwar years by the application of makeup itself.  Rather than succumb to sedate mass-market beauty prescriptions, women followed the lead of their favorite actresses and painted up; bobbed hair, short skirts, and rouged lips and cheeks defied authority and emphasized women's sex appeal.  How better to celebrate their new status as equals in the marketplace than by asserting their physical presence and personal autonomy?

Right.  Here's where my inner grump comes in: even if makeup can be seen as liberatory (which, hey, in the 1920s it probably was), it still focuses the attention on a woman's body, on appearances, on sexuality.  At the risk of sounding like a generation-late Andrea Dworkin or a watered-down Maureen Dowd, women are always already seen as sexualized bodies, so emphasizing those bodies isn't particularly subversive.  And anyway, the slide back from subversive subject to sexualized object is just too easy when both take the female body as their reference point.

But I digress.  That kind of feminism definitely had its place, and Peiss' book is good at exploring its empowering intersections with mainstream beauty culture.

29: Joy Kasson's Buffalo Bill's Wild West

Buffalo Bill's Wild West is one of those cool pop culture books that simultaneously teaches you a ton about a cultural product and about the culture that produced it.  In this case, the product is the ever-evolving, politically-topical, travelling western variety show hosted by "Buffalo Bill" Cody around the turn of the last century; the culture that produced it is turn-of-the-century America, a world as uneasy about the conflict and exploitation in its past as it was about the growth of industrial capitalism in its midst.  Arguing that Buffalo Bill himself was among the first modern American celebrities, Kasson shows how his Wild West shows knit together celebrity, American history, and cultural memory into a new narrative of American national identity.

Kasson uses a lot of interdisciplinary hoopla to achieve her goal, but basically, her argument goes like this.  Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show was enormously popular starting in the 1890s, and its producers constantly tweaked it to incorporate both audience feedback and topical stories, so we can safely consider it embedded enough in turn-of-the-century American culture to have both affected and reflected the mood of the times.  Further, the show presented itself as both authentic history and spectacle, and Buffalo Bill himself was both a real person and a widely-publicized invented celebrity.  By walking a very hazy line between fact and fiction, the show started an enduring link between American history and popular culture, where history becomes a spectacle created by the people for their own edutainment.  Conflicts, wars, even struggles with Native Americans get whitewashed; in the name of pleasure, even the bloodiest battle scenes end with Indians - yes, real Indians! - and Anglos reconciled to the applause of the audience at the end of the show.

And finally, from history as edutainment, it's but a few short steps to national identity as edutainment: to paraphrase my friend Jessica, we like the lies we tell ourselves; if we tell them enough, eventually we come to believe them.

I like this book because it is readable, but also because it still rings true today.  Have you been to Disneyland?  Seen Lincoln?

26: Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media

Reviews of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man seem to follow roughly the same format: a brief overview of McLuhan's life that characterizes him as a wacky, provincial English professor-turned-overnight-celebrity; a few vague references to his most famous dictums; and an extension of his work to today's media, with an insistence that despite the passage of time, McLuhan's work is still surprisingly fresh and new and relevant. 

Be that as it may (hey, I'm all for finding relevance, even if I don't have the need to call someone a prophet), McLuhan's language is as obtuse as it is lovely, which makes for hard slogging.  Since one of the things he's known for is his tendency to write in aphorisms, I think the easiest way to summarize him here is to write out the three that gave me the most trouble, plus a fourth that gives me faith in humanity.

"the medium is the message"

This is the phrase McLuhan is probably most famous for.  Because it is so short, it's also a hard one to wrap my head around, and McLuhan wasn't much for giving careful explanations. The "is" doesn't help, either, because it implies that the two things are equal - which is confusing because it implies a tautology.  The way that this makes sense to me is to think about the relationship between social media and communication forms: a tweet or a Facebook status update or a Tumblr post is radically different from a blog post both in length and content; with less space and a greater emphasis on visuals, whatever information you're trying to convey in these smaller, more networked formats gets compressed, transformed, digested.  It's less medium = message and more medium --> message.  And the most successful messages are those that are well-tailored to by synergistic with their medium.

"the content of any medium is always another medium"

Ok.  Thanks, McLuhan, for defining a word with itself.  He goes on to explain, however, in his chapter on radio, that "[t]he content of the press is literary statement, as the content of the book is speech, and the content of the movie is the novel.  So the effects of radio are quite independent of its programming."  In a way, media are like a hall of mirrors or like Baudrillard's simulacra, copies of copies of copies; or maybe, in a more subversive vein, like Judith Butler's processes of translation.  They are telescoping, reflecting and repeating one another like a big, coordinated multimedia ad campaign.  And because of the time-space compression of newer media (see the blog-to-Twitter progression), older media are kept alive, at least for a time, within newer media: books within e-books within blogs and so on.

 "the bad news sells the good news"

Ever wonder why the news is always bad?  It's because bad news draws the viewer in to gawk or recoil in horror at the spectacle, so that the good news - the advertisements that show you what you can buy to make the horror go away - can catch you at a vulnerable moment.  Thus, when McLuhan was writing, anyway, commercials and programming were combined into one big program, so that program flowed into ad flowed back into program.  The interesting thing is that because a series of commercials is really a set of fragmented, disconnected texts, programmers rely on viewers' brains to fill in the gaps and connect the fragments into a larger coherent narrative.  Luckily, our brains are trained - ideologically, repetitively - to look for common threads, and to see nothing strange about a seamless integration of real life news, entertainment, and injunctions to consume.

Although "the medium is the message" seems to argue that content follows form, the telescoping nature of media seems to ensure that we stay on a technologically-mediated level playing field of reflected images, and the media themselves seem capable of sheer manipulation, I don't think that McLuhan was necessarily a technological determinist.  I say this because of his discussion of bicycles:

"It was no accident that the Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics, or that early airplanes seemed in some ways like bicycles.  The transformations of technology have the character of organic evolution because all technologies are extensions of our physical being."

Technologies may condition the way humans communicate, but human beings are still very much a part of the technological system; technological change is still "organic evolution" because technologies are "extensions of our physical being" and therefore humans, not technologies, control the direction and rate and quality of technological change.  To folks who fear that the culture industry is going to take over the world and we'll wake up one day and find ourselves in the middle of Idiocracy, McLuhan argues that humans have the power to stop that kind of development from happening.  Which, if you think about it, was a necessary, albeit old school, message for Cold War America, presented in an interestingly old-fashioned print media-turned-celebrity package.

13: Michael Denning's The Cultural Front

Michael Denning's The Cultural Front, for all its weighty historical detail and analysis, centers around a single theme: that the 1930s amalgamation of labor and cultural interests into a "Popular Front" might be little-known now, but it resulted in a "laboring of culture" that is still reverberating, at least in left-leaning circles, today.
What Denning means by "laboring of culture" is the tricky part, because he sees labor and culture as dialectically related parts, which means that each shapes the other and that they're therefore as difficult to separate as a codependent high school couple.  So he spends the first half of the book tracing their conjoined public appearances, including the shared language of the "labor movement," the "proletariat," and the "work," "toil," and "struggle" of labor activists and artists; the "proletarianization" of the culture industries, as children of working-class parents increasingly work as singers, artists, novelists, actors, cartoonists and make mass culture more like working-class culture; and the "social democratic" labor politics that influenced (and was influenced by) everything from textile strikes to fiction to dinner-table conversation.

The result of all this cross-pollination between labor movements, the people in the working-class, and cultural production, Denning argues, was a mass movement to permanently connect American labor with American culture.  That way, American culture could represent and be represented by the people, and Leftist and communist social visions could be realized. 

And lest his readers think he's making all of this up, Denning spends the whole second half of the book proving it by analyzing products of this labor-culture combo: John Dos Passos' U.S.A, John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, Billie Holiday's love songs, experimental musical theater, gangster films, and something he calls the "ghetto pastoral," of which A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is probably the best-known example.  By thoroughly examining each of these cultural productions formally (er, he spends a good 50 pages talking about metaphors and narrative structures in the Dos Passos section alone) and simultaneously situating them in their cultural and historical context, Denning shows that yes, in the 1930s, labor and culture were thoroughly intertwined.

Of course, mass culture is not super communist or particularly pro-Labor today; if anything, the profusion of reality TV shows, re-released remakes of Spiderman movies, auto-tuned pop music, and baby animal YouTube videos that populate mass culture serve more to distract us than to incite us to revolution.  But lest this decoupling of labor and culture prove that the Popular Front didn't have as much impact on American culture as Denning claims, he closes his book with this quote from cultural theorist Fredric Jameson:


history progresses by failure rather than by success…. It would be better to think of Lenin or Brecht (to pick a few illustrious names at random) as failures – that is, as actors and agents constrained by their own ideological limits and those of their moment of history – than as triumphant examples and models in some hagiographic or celebratory sense.

In other words, while the movement failed to permanently connect labor and culture, the people in it were both ordinary and extraordinary: they were totally human, but we are still trying to figure out the full implications of the things they produced, the ideas they had, and the politics they espoused.  And hey, maybe the most successful movements are those that show us how ordinary humans can create history.