Q&A
with Daniel Horowitz, Mary Huggins Gamble Professor of American
Studies
 Daniel Horowitz’s latest book on the
culture of consumption, published this year by the University
of Pennsylvania Press, traces a shift among American intellectuals,
away from a condemnation of all things popular culture toward
a critical appreciation of its “rich inventiveness.” Horowitz
analyzes the writings of leading mid-20th-century intellectuals
such as Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, C.L.R. James, Stuart
Hall, Susan Sontag and others in illustrating a pivot of
the way America regards and consumes popular culture.
Horowitz
is also the author of Anxieties of Affluence:
Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939-1979 and The
Morality of Spending: Attitudes Toward the Consumer Society
in America, 1875-1940.
Horowitz recently responded
to questions for the Gate about Consuming
Pleasures.
______________________________________________________________________
 Gate: How
did you go about choosing the writers to feature in Consuming
Pleasures?
Daniel Horowitz: As
often happens, this book took me in unanticipated directions.
After writing two previous books (Morality
of Spending and
Anxieties of Affluence) in which I focused on writers
who saw consumer culture as dangerous, I knew
from the outset I wanted to concentrate on people who saw
it as pleasurable. When I started, I thought I would carry
this story up to the present but along the way leads distracted
me. To be sure, at the start I knew some of where my attention
would rest, but time and time again, mention of some other
person what I was reading compelled me. The result is a book
more international in scope, less wide-ranging chronologically,
and more deeply researched than I had anticipated.
Gate: In
your view, how did a conglomeration of leading intellectuals
come to
change tack on the collective attitude toward consumerism
and materialism?
DH: The shift
from moral threat to symbolic promise, originating in the
1950s, if not earlier, and then in full bloom by the 1970s
and 1980s, rested on a series of changes both in consumer
culture itself and in ways of understanding society. The
increasing role of popular culture in America made it increasingly
difficult for observers to deny or see as temporary or totally
unacceptable the onrush of popular culture. Generational
shifts also played important roles, especially the waning
of the memories of totalitarianism. In addition, changes
in attitudes toward race, class, gender, and sexuality played
critical roles in underwriting fresh understandings.
Gate: What
are the future ramifications of your research, as the lines
between
pop culture and more refined tastes become continuously
blurred? Will cultural divisions one day
be indistinguishable?
DH: Historians
are more skilled in explaining the past than predicting
the future. Yet it is clear to me that for many Americans,
especially younger ones, the lines between levels of culture
that once seemed distinct are now indistinguishable. In the
last third of the 20th century, many people moved from
seeing culture positioned vertically (with Mozart or Plato
at the top and comic books or graffiti near the bottom) to
understanding cultures as positioned horizontally, juxtaposed
and integrated rather than separated.
Gate: Where
do you fall on the intellectual spectrum? An appreciator
of popular
culture or one who prefers high art and consumerist
tastes to remain
distinct?
DH: Because
this book charts the movement from hesitation to admiration,
some readers will think I have "gone native," overboard in
my own welcoming of the popular. Yet the 15th-century art
of Sassetta compels me more than that of 20th-century Warhol.
I enjoy performances of Baroque operas and Mozart symphonies
more than that of contemporary musicians, whose concerts
my students have on relatively rare occasions been able to
cajole me to attend.
Moreover, it is important to
remember that the story I chronicle—of
the shift from moral scorn to playful engagement--is not
a Whiggish narrative of progress toward a wholly laudable
triumph of consumer culture. Costs, challenges, and opportunities
pervade all responses I examine—the oppositional, skeptical,
ambiguous, and embracing. If moralistic condemnation is problematic
because of its biases and blind spots, then celebratory acceptance
is even more worrisome for a number of reasons, including
its frequent inattention to the causes and costs of excess--environmental
degradation, the growing gap in wealth and income between
the rich and everyone else, and the erosion of standards.
My measuring writers by a yardstick hardly means I approve
of the end point that they strove toward or failed to arrive
at. |
