Lazere-literacy & Media-politcal Implications

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Literacy and Mass Media: The Political Implications

Author(s): Donald LazereSource: New Literary History, Vol. 18, No. 2, Literacy, Popular Culture, and the Writing ofHistory (Winter, 1987), pp. 237-255Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468728 .

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Literacy nd Mass Media:The Political mplicationsDonald Lazere

M rUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN about the effects f mass media,especiallytelevision, n literacy nd learning n the UnitedStates,but themomentouspolitical mplications f these ef-fectshave not been adequately explored. I willmake a case here thatthe restricted ognitivepatterns nduced bymedia in audiences alsoinduce predominantly onservative ttitudes,not in the sense of areasoned conservative deologybut in the sense of an uncritical on-formityhat reinforces he social statusquo and precludes opposi-tionalconsciousness. willnot deal systematicallyerewith hepolit-ical implicationsof other aspects of media such as subject matter,structural eatures ncludingformats, ormulas, nd organizationoftime and space, or the makeup of producing institutions nd per-sonnel,but I have argued elsewhere, nrefutation f neoconservativecriticswho claimto finda left-wing ias pervadingAmericanmedia,that n spiteof some liberalelements, ach of theseaspects too has,on balance, a conservative omplexion.1Myown political eaningsare socialistic, nd partof theagenda ofthisessay-by no means a hiddenpartofit-is a concern thatmediainduced illiteracys contributing owardthekind ofone dimensionalsociety hat Herbert Marcuse warned about, in which thecapacitytoimagine alternatives o the statusquo, especiallyalternatives f a so-cialisticnature, has been systematically estroyed. I do not expectmore conservative eaderstosharethis oncern or toagreewith ll ofmy arguments n itssupport,but I do hope togain their ssentto theultimate hrust f my argument,which s that thelow level of cogni-tive development to which the discourse of American mass mediaand politics s presently eared is woefully nadequate for the effec-tivefunctioning f a democracy, nd that scholarsof literature ndlanguage, whatevertheirown politicalconvictionsmightbe, have aresponsibilityo worktowardraisingour publicdiscourse to a morereasoned level of dialogue between the ideologies of the rightandleft.Part of thisresponsibilityies in reorienting ur theoretical on-cerns, research, nd curriculato include thetopicsthatare surveyed,in a verytentativeway, n thisessay.

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NEW LITERARY HISTORY

My vantage pointon these ssues s thatof a scholar n compositionand literaturewitha collateral nterest n theory f culture and pol-itics.My explorations here begin with the striking ongruence be-tweenthecognitivepatternsdiscoveredbyresearch on theinfluenceof televisionviewingon children, concisesummary f which s con-tained in Kate Moody's Growing p onTelevision,2nd byresearch nEnglish on the nature of reading and writing eficiencies n collegestudents.Direct cause-effect elationships etween televisionviewingin childhood and readingand writingkills, specially n college stu-dents,are difficult o verify mpirically, ut thesimilarityfpatternsis too obvious to ignore.Mina Shaughnessy, pioneerresearcherofcollege remedial writing tudents,found theirmostcommoncogni-tive traits o be the following:difficultiesn concentratingnd sus-taining n extendedline ofthoughtnreadingand writing includingthematic, ymbolic, r propositionaldevelopment); lack of facilitynanalyticand synthetic easoning; deficiencies n reasoningback andforth fromthe concrete to the abstract, he personal to the imper-sonal, and the literal o thefigurative,nd in perceiving rony, mbi-guity, nd multiplicityf pointsof view.3The similarity etween thesepatterns nd those induced bytelevi-sion viewing n childrenextendsfurther o findings n several otherfields of scholarship, including (1) studies by cognitive-develop-mental psychologistsikeJean Piaget,Lawrence Kohlberg,and Wil-liamPerry fthecognitive raits ssociatedwith owerstagesof moralreasoning proficiency;42) historical nd psychological tudiesoforalversus writing-orientedulture and discourse;5 (3) studies in socialpsychology nd politicalsocializationdealing withthe authoritarianpersonality;64) sociologicalaccountsof a "culture of poverty";7nd(5) sociolinguistic esearchsuch as thatof Basil Bernstein nd ClausMueller finding restricted"inguistic odes and cognitive perationsin lower social classes, compared to the "elaborated" codes morecommon to the middle and upper classes.8 The problematicdefini-tion of class involvedin the last threegroups of studieswill be dis-cussed later.)This essay will not deal directlywith iterature. t should be evi-dent, however, hatthe issues discussed herehave thehighest ignifi-cance forthe futureof literature nd itsstudy.The cognitive apaci-ties lackingin the individuals studiedbyShaughnessyand these re-searchersin other fieldsare preciselythose mostcloselyassociatedwith iterature nd literaryriticism. his is a powerfulreaffirmationof thevalue of literary tudy t all levels of education forpromotingcognitivedevelopment and criticalthinking.Moreover, there arecountlessvaluable connectionsto be made betweenliterary cholar-

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LITERACY AND MASS MEDIA

shipand recentresearch nthe above fields;our critical oncernsandmethodscan make a distinctive ontribution o studies n thosefields,and such studies n turnpresentnew avenues for iteraryheory ndresearch that can contributegreatlyto revitalizing ur profession.For example, the methods of reader response research can be ap-plied to studying tagesofmoralreasoning, inguistic odes, and po-litical ttitudes n children nd adultsfromdifferingociologicalcon-trolgroups,both in theirreadingof literature nd in theirreceptionof television nd othermass media.To date, however,more studiesalong these ines havebeen done incompositionthan in literature, hough they re still t thebeginningstages in the former s well. One study,forinstance,conducted byAndrea Lunsford,a followerof Shaughnessy, pplied cognitive-de-velopmental stage theories to the teaching of college remedialwriters,who, accordingto Lunsford'sresearch,tend to be fixed inPiaget's egocentric nd Kohlberg'sconventional tagesof moral rea-soning, withcorrespondingly uthoritarian,good guys versus badguys politicalattitudes.9 unsford'sstudyaccords withmanyin thebehavioral and social sciencesfinding n explicitor implicit ssocia-tion of low levelsof literacy nd cognitivedevelopmentwithpoliticalattitudes hat re conservativenthe sense of conformistnd authori-tarian. The remainder of thisessaywillexamine point by pointthelinks between such conservatism nd cognitivedeficiencies.

Oral versus Literate DiscourseHistoriansof literacy,ncludingEric Havelock, WalterOng, Jack

Goody, and Ian Watt,have correlated the social originsof writtendiscourse and of analyticreasoning. AccordingtoGoody and Watt:In oral societies hecultural raditionstransmittedlmost ntirely yface-to-faceommunication;nd changesn itscontent re accompanied ythehomeostaticrocess fforgettingrtransforminghose arts fthe raditionthat ease to be either ecessaryr relevant. iterateocieties,n theotherhand, annot iscard, bsorb, rtransmutehepast nthe ameway.nstead,theirmembersre facedwith ermanentlyecorded ersions f thepast nditsbeliefs; ndbecause hepast s thus et partfrom hepresent, istoricalenquiry ecomespossible.This in turn ncourages cepticism;nd scepti-cism,notonly boutthe egendary ast,butaboutreceiveddeasabouttheuniverse s a whole.Fromhere henext tep stoseehow obuildupand totest lternativexplanations:nd out of this here rosethe kind f ogical,specialized,ndcumulativentellectualraditionfsixth-centuryonia.Thekinds fanalysisnvolvednthe yllogism,nd intheother ormsf ogical

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procedure, are clearly dependent upon writing, ndeed upon a form ofwriting ufficientlyimpleand cursive to make possiblewidespread and ha-bitual recourse both to the recordingof verbal statements nd then to thedissectingof them. It is probable that it is only the analyticprocess thatwriting tself ntails,thewritten ormalization f sounds and syntax,whichmakes possiblethe habitualseparatingout intoformally istinct nits of thevarious culturalelementswhose indivisiblewholeness s the essentialbasis ofthe"mystical articipation"whichLevy-Bruhl egardsas characteristic f thethinking f non-literate eoples. (352-53)Marshall McLuhan's benign, superficial predictions about the post-literate age being ushered in by electronic communication fail to con-sider seriously the prospect of an attendant, universal regression ofreasoning capacities.Thomas J. Farrell, finding the same traits in his college remedialEnglish students that Shaughnessy noted, has applied to them WalterJ. Ong's intriguing hypothesis that children's cognitive developmentrecapitulates the historical development from oral to literate so-ciety.10According to Farrell, remedial students have been blocked inthe development of reasoning capacities from those that Vygotskyassociated with childhood speech to the more complex ones em-bodied in writing. Moody's and similar studies indicate precisely thesame block in children whose language processing capacities areformed through television to the exclusion of reading and writing.Moody writes:Television's most successfultechniques-short segments,fastaction,quickcuts, fades,dissolves-break time ntoperceptualbits.Reading requires per-ceptual continuity o track ine after ine. Television habituatesthe mind toshorttakes,not to the continuity f thoughtrequired by reading. The paceand speed of television ause children to be easilydistracted; hey re inun-dated with too manymessagesand cannot stoptomake sense of this confu-sion. Focusingand payingattention o printbecome an unnatural strainfortheconditionedTV viewer....When human eyesread a line ofprintthey ee letters-little black marks-one after henext n long, straight, arallel ines. To gathermeaning,eyesmove from eftto right.The image on the TV screen is produced and per-ceived in a completelydifferentway. Pictures exist as a constantlymovingfield of winkingdots in a see-throughgrid. It's quite possiblethat eft-righteye habitsemployed in readingare unconsciously roded byseveral hours aday of watchingtelevision.The eye and brain functions mployed in TVviewing ikelyputdemands on different artsofthe brainthan those used inreading, causing incalculably ifferent indsofcognitive evelopment t theexpense of readingand writing ptitudes. 63, 67)

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LITERACY AND MASS MEDIAOral discourse can of course be highlycomplex and analytic-

usuallywhen it takesplace betweenalready iterate peakersand au-diences. Exclusively ral-visual anguage acquisition nchildren,how-ever, imits he probabilityf their aterdevelopingmore adult,com-plex capacities n either peech or written iscourse.Beyondthe evelof children'sprogramming, elevision s obviously apable ofmakingintellectualdemands on viewers, s in televisedShakespeare or "HillStreetBlues," the rareprogramthatrequiresthe audience to synthe-size motifs ut ofa mosaicofcharacters, vents, mages,and sounds.It is widely dmitted n the media business,however,that most masscommunication imed at adults,bothin television, adio, records,orfilm, nd in print, s at a literacy evel not muchhigherthan that ofchildren'sprogramming. n order to maximizeratingsand sales ofadvertisedproducts, commercial media must appeal to the largestpossiblemarket, hus to the owest ommon denominatorofcognitivedevelopment. Having an adult populace that s fixed in an infantilementalityalso conveniently happens to prevent people from be-coming verycritical bout either advertisedproducts,the corpora-tions thatproduce themand those that own themedia, or the wholesociopoliticalorder in whichthosecorporationsplaya central role.Similarly,Americanpoliticaldiscourse has regressedfrom hemar-athonLincoln-Douglas debates to theglib,attenuated format f tele-vised debates, thirty-second pot commercials, nd managed pressconferences.The professional onsultantswhodeveloped the formatof rapid-fire,"top-forty" tories for local newscasts ustified it byclaiming, People who watch television hemostare unread, unedu-cated, untraveled and unable to concentrate n singlesubjectsmorethan a minuteor two."11William Safirereportsthat when he was aspeech writer orPresidentNixon,Nixon toldhim,"We sophisticatescan listen to a speech for a half hour, but after ten minutes theaverage guy wants a beer."12And Howard Jarvis,author of Cali-fornia's notorious tax-cutting roposition 13, when asked whyhespent all of his advertisingfunds on television rather than news-papers, replied, "People who decide electionsdon't read."13The crosscultural tudies by Michael Cole and SylviaScribneroforality nd literacy n present-day ocieties conclude that n Africanculturesthatare stillprimarilyral,people's reasoning n oral modesbecomes highly ophisticated owardmeetingthe needs of theirpar-ticular ociety.'4William Labov has reached similar onclusions nhisstudies of the blackAmericanlanguage and subcultureof the innercity.15An articlebyCole and JeromeBruner, however,argues thatexclusiveacquisitionof language throughblack dialectand oral cul-

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NEW LITERARY HISTORYtureputsblackchildren t a disadvantage nschools and other realmsofAmericansocietydominatedbyStandard Englishand written ul-ture.16 his echoes Goodyand Watt's hesis hat ince thebeginningsof literate ocieties, ccess to writtenanguage within hem has been aprime mark of dominant social classes, a form of what the FrenchsociologistPierre Bourdieu calls "culturalcapital."17There maybesomewhat of a tautologyhere in the factthatsociety's ecognition fliteracy, r at least standarddialect,as a signof status n those whopossess it and of inferiorityn those who don't is to some extentanarbitrarymatterof class bias; thereis no denying,however,that nour society's sophisticated information environment, facility nreading and writings indispensablefor either social dominationoreffective pposition.Ben Sidran's Black Talk provides an interesting idelighton thisissue.18American blacks, restricted ince slavery days to oral dis-course,wereable to code oppositional messages nboth the yrics ndmusical structure of the blues that were indecipherable to thewriting-oriented hitemind. Here again, thisconfirms hat oral dis-course, or what Basil Bernsteincalls restricted odes, maybe highlysophisticatedwithin subculture houghnot functionaln thelargerculture. The significance f thecomplex coding in the blues is that twas the recourse of a dominatedgroup denied access to overtpolit-ical communication, specially nwritten orm.There is a clear correspondence in contemporaryAmerica oforality nd literacy o hierarchies f social class and power, althoughthe cause-effectrelationship s problematic.Oscar Lewis identifiesthe traits foral culture, uch as the ackof a strong ense ofpastandfuture referredto by Goody and Watt,with those of the culture ofpoverty.19n regard to mass media, studies of the class makeup oftelevision iewers howthat, bove the evel of the underclasswho aretoo poor and alienated to own televisions, oorer and less educatedpeople watch the most and are most credulous about what theywatch.20 hus the oral culture of television s bound to reinforce heoral culture of poverty. Furthermore, as John Fiske and JohnHartley'sReadingTelevision ointsout, those who produce televisionusuallycome fromthedominant, iterate lasses.21One hears abouttelevision nd advertising xecutiveswho refuse to let theirchildrenwatch television est trot theirminds.) In thissegmentof class rela-tionships, hen, iteracy epresentsnot ust culturalcapitalbut socialcontrol,withdangerous potentialforpropagandisticmanipulationofviewers.Finally, psychologists onfirm hatthe information rocessing n-volved in watchingtelevision s a passive cognitiveoperation com-

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pared to the active mental effortnecessaryto decode written an-guage.22This passivity einforces he absence ofaudience interactionwithbroadcastersand of controlover media institutions nd mass-mediated politics.All these aspects of orality n media transmissionand audiences, then,contribute o a mood ofanomic,resignedaccep-tance of powerlessness nd submission o the statusquo.

Egocentrism nd SociocentrismAs Moody suggests, he substitutionf thetelevisionworldfor thereal world mpedes cognitivedevelopmentfromwhatPiagetcalls theegocentric-or "narcissistic"n psychoanalytic erms-to the recip-rocal stage in which mature object-relationsare established. Theever-increasing rivatizing f cultural ctivity-playsand films noweven pornographicones) viewed at home rather than in a theater,musicheard on radio, records,or television atherthan in a concerthall,televisedsports, nd so on-leads toward thesolipsismofJerzyKosinski'svidiot in BeingThere.The resulting nhibition f normal

ego formation erpetuateschildlikedependencyon parentaland po-liticalauthority.The egocentriccognitive tage is also most suscep-tible to ethnocentric nd to what Piaget termssociocentricbiases,hence to chauvinisticpropaganda manipulatingthem.23Moreover,the empirical research of George Gerbner's "Cultural Indicators"projectat the AnnenbergSchool of Communications,University fPennsylvania,ndicatesthatheavytelevisionviewerstend to developexaggerated fears of violence in the streets nd of foreignenemies,makingthemsusceptible o simplistic ppeals to law and order and tothe officialuse of forcebythemilitarynd police.24Lack ofAnalyticReasoning

Among the further ognitivedeficienciesfoundbyresearchers nthe language of mass media and its receptionby audiences are anabsence of theanalytic nd syntheticmodes ofreasoningnecessary orelatethe personal and the impersonal,concreteand abstract, auseand effect, r past, present, nd future compare the"presentorien-tation"of the cultureof poverty nd of oral societies),as well as toview issues in sufficient omplexity o resiststereotyping, ither/orthinking, nd demagogic emotional appeal.25 In the presentAmer-ican political context these cognitivedeficienciescomprise yet an-

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NEW LITERARY HISTORYother factor contributing to conformity, uthoritarianism, andpassivity.People sufferingfromimmediate, ntensepoliticaloppression-the situationof theproletariatn Marx's scenario forsocialistrevolu-tion,of Third World colonies, of American blacks who waged thecivilrightsmovement-need little bstract nformationr sophistica-tion n reasoningto be persuaded thatchange is intheir nterest.n asociety ike present-dayAmerica,however,the grosserformsof in-justice and conflicthave been greatly educed and themajority fthepopulation socialized into a mood of at least passive assent. Eventhoughmajor evilsin the social systemmay persist, heytend not tobe readilyfelt or understood throughthe firsthand xperience ofmostpeople outside of thehaplessunderclass. n order forpeople toperceiveand effectivelyppose suchevils, heyneed notonlyto haveaccess to a diversity f information ources,many of which are inprintand written t an advanced level of literacy, ut to have theanalyticreasoning capacities to evaluate distant eventsand abstractdata. The handicap here of people at low levels of literacy s com-pounded bythenonanalytic raits fmass media.The mindat advanced stagesof cognitivedevelopment eeksbothtorelatepersonal,specific mpressions oexterior, eneraltruths ndto ground abstractgeneralizations n concreteexamples. Americanmass culture, however,tends to lurch between unrelated poles ofconcreteness nd abstraction,nsuch a wayas toavoid critical nalysisof sociopolitical ssues. On the one hand, media ceaselesslymultiply,withtacitapproval, concrete mages of the statusquo-commodityconsumption, elebrities, ow-totechniques, he activities f govern-mentofficials, nd so on. On theotherhand,whenmedia discoursedeals with bstractions,t is usuallynot in order to critically uestionthe value system mplicit n theseconcrete mages,but to propagateequallyunexamined platitudes bout theAmericanwayoflife,patri-otism,democracy, nd the free world.These abstractions an be rea-sonablyconcretized nd defended,butall too often nour publicdis-course theyare not.When politicians,news,and dramaticmedia reporteventsrelatedto issues such as crime,racial conflict,feminism, ommunism, ndThird World insurrection, heytend to approach such events as iso-lated phenomena, outside a framework f causal, historical, r classanalysis.For example, conservativemedia criticshave accused televi-sion dramatic programsof liberal bias in avoiding the portrayalofblack or Hispanic criminals.A more plausible explanationis that atruthful ortrayalof such criminalswould have to be placed in thehistorical nd economic context of racial and class discrimination-

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LITERACY AND MASS MEDIAnot withthe intentionof absolvingindividualsfromresponsibility,butofexploringthecomplexities findividualversus social responsi-bility. he simplistic ormulasof genres ike thehalf-hour op show,however,preclude such complexities, o theirproducers' onlyalter-nativeto fuelingracistprejudices is to evade the issue by portrayingnearly all street criminalsas white. In any society, t serves the in-terestsof the dominant classes to have volatile issues mystified ybeing portrayed n accounts ackingtheanalytic pecificityhatmightraise questionsabout the intrinsicnequitiesoftheestablishedorder.A similarmystifications accomplishedwhen politicalevents are re-ported outside of a dialecticalanalysisof historical ction and reac-tion thatmight mplythe impermanenceof the statusquo. For ex-ample, American politicians' and news media's discussions of theCold War and Third World or black Americanuprisings endtodis-regard as a possible factor he naturalcycleof historical hange thatmay be leading to the decline of world dominance by the UnitedStates, Western Europe, and the white race. Similarly, fficial ac-counts of anti-Americanforces n Cuba, El Salvador, or Nicaraguachronically gnore the contextof a century f United Statesmilitaryand corporateinterventionn CentralAmerica thatmayhave maderebellionand acceptance byrebelsof communist upport inevitable,disastrousthoughtheconsequences mightbe forall concerned.

Restricted inguisticCodes in theWorkingClassClaus Mueller sums up a growingbody of research in sociolin-guistics nd political ocialization nEurope, England,and the United

States that supports Basil Bernstein'sthesis about restricted odesand authoritarianism n the workingclass: "Conformity nd alle-giance to establishedauthority s well as resistanceto change werefound to be politicalpredispositions f individualsbroughtup in thelowerclasses. Empiricalresearch also demonstrates hatclass-specificfactors such as conformity, eceptionto one-sided arguments,andthe absence of skepticism orrelate withthe susceptibilityo persua-sion and manipulation" 100). ApplyingBernstein'sthesis to mediacontent nd audience response,Mueller cites a studyofthelanguageof themiddle-classNewYorkTimes nd working-class ew York ailyNews, which respectively mbody elaborated and restricted odes,and anotherstudyof a German tabloidequivalentof theDailyNewswhose language was characterizedby "concretemetaphors,dichoto-mized statements, implified entence structures, ypifiedformula-tions, an undifferentiated ocabulary,and stereotypifications.he

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NEW LITERARY HISTORYuse of a restricted ode by these papers results n unqualified de-scriptions fpoliticalrealitywhich moreoftenthan notare conserva-tively lanted.... Sensationalism,repetition, nd a simplistic epic-tion of politicalreality ontribute ittle o the readers' knowledgeofsociety" 98).Along lines similar to those of twentieth-century arxists likeGeorgLukacs,AntonioGramsci, nd theFrankfurtchool,whohaveargued that theworking lass has been deflectedthroughfalse con-sciousness fromthe role Marx foresaw for t as thevanguardof thesocialistmovement,Bernstein nd Mueller imply hatthe injuriesofcapitalistic lass structure, ducation,and controlledmedia have im-posed the restrictedinguistic odes thatpreventworkersfrombeingable to understandsocialistic deas thatare in theirown interest.Ac-cordingto Mueller: "Today's working lass symbolism as become soopaque that tis impossiblefor the workerto link his situation o anideological frameworkwith whichhe could understand,and moreimportantly,ct upon the deprivationhe experiences.... The con-cept of alienation,forexample, can hardlybe made operative politi-callybecause a semanticbarrierbuilt of a restrictedanguage codeexcludes it fromthe worker's deational world. This sortofdifficultywas encounteredbyWestGerman trade unionswhichtried to makethe symbol participation' meaningfulone forthe workers" 115).Richard Ohmann, commenting n Bernstein and Mueller in an ar-ticleentitled Questionsabout Literacy nd PoliticalEducation" pub-lished in Radical Teacher, resentsa similarhypothesis bout Amer-ican workers' ttitudes:A number f studies .. suggest hat nly fewpeople-those sharingnpower rinfluence,y nd large-have ordered ndrelativelybstractn-derstandings f society.This is not to say,of course,thattheirunder-standingsre right, r thatworkers re not nmanywaysmoresensible.)Workers' elief ystemsendto be lessconceptual,morefixed n concretethings,morecenteredn the ocal and particular.heir ideas on specificissues lso tend obemore ragmentednd nconsistenthan he deasofthemorehighlyducated ndprivileged.inally,heAmerican orkinglass sa whole acks consensusnbeliefsndvalues, ompared otheruling lassandtheprofessionalndmanagerialtrata.26(Ohmann's last two sentences cho Fiskeand Hartley's nalysisof thedifference n class and powerbetweenthose who programtelevisionand its primary udience.) Ohmann continues to say that researchsuch as Bernstein's does imply hat a totalizing ystem f ideas suchas marxismwould be uncongenial,byvirtueof itsform, o workers."

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LITERACY AND MASS MEDIAAnd he concludes, "When we tryto communicateto workers a so-cialistunderstandingofthings,mustwe thinkof our taskas, in part,makingup a cognitive nd linguistic eficit?Or shouldwe take tthatthe problem is more in the ways we talk and write,and attemptsomehow to translate marxism nto more concrete and immediateterms than the ones we ordinarily use?"27Another lluminating erspective n thisproblemwas provided byArmand Mattelart, Belgian sociologistof communicationworkinginChile withthe Allende Popular Unitygovernment uring ts threeyearsin power from 1970-73. Mattelartdiscussed the difficultiesfa socialistgovernment,with trongworking-class articipation,ryingto improvise alternatives to the institutions nd conventions of awhole systemof mass culture established for capitalistic nds andprojecting middle-classworldview,exemplifiedbytheDisney pro-ductions Mattelart and Ariel Dorfman had previouslycriticized nHow toReadDonaldDuck. About thehalting xperiments ncommuni-catingthe socialistexperience throughnewspapers publishedbythecordones ndustriales, nits of popular power founded by militantworkers n the Santiago suburbsin 1972, "a kind of embryonic so-viet,' he observed withregret:In thispartisan olitical ress, ll thenormalityfdaily ifewas absent.The not-said asconsiderable;n otherwords, ew ocial elations ere m-plicitlyedefined utfewwere xpressed xplicitly.I remembereing na cordonustone month efore hecoupd'etat, ndthetalkwasaboutthechangeswhich hesemenhadexperienced ith heirwives nd children,uring he threeyears fPopularUnity. etnever, i-ther nthepress f thecordones,r that ftheextreme eft, r inthetradi-tional ress, ad this ype f fundamentalhange nspired theme ormassinformation.Allthebooks bouttheChilean xperiencealk boutpoliticaltrategynthe trictense f the erm, ut hey gnore,partfrom fewiterarylights,therichness fthis opular xplosion. his stherealrepression:hepeoplelive another ife, more mportantne,andyet an'texpress t,except nfamiliar atherings;hen hey obackto thefactories,nable ospeakof twith heirworkmates,heir ompanera,heir hildren.28

LimitedImaginationPerhaps the mostprofoundly onservative orce n all of thecogni-tive patternsdiscussed here is theirpotentialfor inhibitingpeoplefrombeingable to imagineanysocial orderdifferent rom he estab-lished one. The present reality s concreteand immediate,alterna-

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NEW LITERARY HISTORYtives abstract nd distant;ability o understandan alternatives fur-therobstructedbylack of the sustained attention pan necessaryforanalyticreasoning,the capacityto imaginebeyondthe actual to thehypotheticalwhichsemantically ntailsreasoningfromthe literal othefigurative nd symbolic), nd a sense of irony,necessary o ques-tionthe social conditioning hat endorses the statusquo.Such widespread constriction f imaginationwould be a conserva-tiveforceblockingfundamental hange inanysocialorder-as itun-doubtedly s in an ostensiblyeftistountry ike theU.S.S.R., and as itwould be to a lesser extent n a firmly ntrenched iberal Americaunder a sequence of charismaticDemocrats like Rooseveltor Ken-nedy,or even in the most deallyrealized socialist ociety.Nor is thepointof thisargumentthatchange is alwaysa priori eneficial;evenleftists an respect,to a point,the classic conservativepositionthatpeople mayshowgood sense inpreferringobear those llstheyhaverather hanflyto othersthattheyknow not of. What s at issue is thehypothesis hatpeople's loss of the capacityto imaginethingsotherthanthey re could preclude their upporting hangesthat would infact be stronglyn their nterests.Withoutnecessarily spousing so-cialism,forexample, can we not entertain hepossibilityhatsuch astateof mind would keep socialistic oliciesoff heAmericanagendano matterhow demonstrably referable heymightbe to capitalisticones, in generalor on particular ssues?

Qualifications nd CounterargumentsI want now to anticipate ome objectionsthatcan be raised to the

foregoing analysis. One necessary qualificationof it is that massmedia, and particularly elevision n recentyears,have in some waysoffered inguistic odes and a world view that re more literate, om-plex, and cosmopolitanthan the indigenous local cultureof manysegmentsof their audience. Hence the viewpoint f fundamentalistChristians nd manyother conservatives hattelevision,Hollywoodfilms, nd "theEasternnews media" are hotbedsof iberalism.Never-theless,whiletelevision's anguage,forexample, may promotehighercognitivedevelopment in previously lliterate ectors of the public,studies such as those reported by Moody indicatethat it leads to aregression n literacy n sectors,mainlyof the middle class, whosechildren'scognitivedevelopmentwas previously tructured argelythroughreadingand writing. urthermore, submit hatmass mediahave tended to replace the parochiality f local culture not withasubstantiallyeftist lternativebut merelywith differentmodes of

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LITERACY AND MASS MEDIAconservatism nd conformity,n the form of nationallyregimentedconsumercultureand patterns fcognitiveformation.29Secondly,manyconservatives' erceptionsof the political mplica-tionsof declining iteracy nd thenegativecognitive ffects f televi-sion, rockmusic,and so on is quite the opposite of mine: thattheyundermine workerefficiency,ocial cohesion, and support for au-thority. he left nd right-wingnterpretationsre notmutually x-clusive. It is quite possible that a decline in literacy nd reasoningfaculties,withresulting nomic inefficiencyn workers, s simply nunforeseenby-product fa wholenationalculturededicatedto engi-neering compliant consumers and employees. In the late sixties,violentpublic reactionagainsta perceivedexcess of critical hinkingby college studentshelped to justifythe cuts in fundingthat havereduced Americanpublic schools to a shambles.By the 1980s,how-ever,even big businesswas promoting return to liberaleducationand thefosteringfcritical hinkingkills nan attempt o correct heexcess of compliancy.The growing credibility ap underminingAmerican institutions'authoritywhetherthatauthoritywas meritedor not,and whateverthe role ofmedia indiscreditingt)has createdonly na passivesensethe legitimation risisperceived bycritics n both the left nd right.As Erich Frommnoted about theauthoritarian ffects fmasssocietyin his 1941 classicEscapeFromFreedom: The resultof thiskind ofinfluence is a twofoldone: one is a skepticism nd cynicism owardseverything hich s said or printed,whilethe other s a childishbeliefin anything hat a person is told with uthority. his combinationofcynicism nd naivete s verytypical f themodern individual. ts es-sentialresult s to discourage himfromdoing his own thinking nddeciding."30 n otherwords,people (especiallythosewhose memoryspan has been stuntedbymass media) mayvoice skepticism owardauthorityn general,yetbe gullible n each newmanipulationbyau-thorities,ikeCharleyBrown withhope eternally pringing hatLucywon'tpull the football waythis ime.Likewise,Americanstoday maybe cynicaltoward the statusquo, but they re equally cynicaltowardanyalternative.The resulting pathy,then,simply eaves social con-trolopen to those powerfulenough to exercise it,while themasses,like those in Dostoevski's The Grand Inquisitor,"gratefullyede theburden of authority o those moreclever,be they crupulousor not.When I ask my composition students to write on what would gothroughtheirminds iftheyweredraftedtofight nCentral Americaor the Middle East, themostcommonresponsesare eitherthattheydon't know enough about the situationto evaluate it themselves, otheywould have to trust the judgment of our government even

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though itmaybe unreliable,or else thattheywould be opposed onprincipletofightingntheseforeign ountriesbut thattheywould goanyway, ut of fear of punishment r peer pressure.I can also anticipatea conservativerebuttalarguing that low lit-eracycan be manipulated politically y the leftas well as the right,thatpeople at low levelsofcognitivedevelopmentcannotadequatelyunderstandsupply-side conomics,thetheory fnucleardeterrence,thedistantbut real evils ofcommunism, nd so on. Similarly, onser-vative ntellectuals hastizedtheNew Left and counterculture f thesixtiesforbuying nto the media-inducedmyths f immediategratifi-cation n expecting nstant ocial transformation. hese lines ofargu-ment contain much validity.And demagogic emotional appeals cancertainly e used for eft-wingauses, as byStalin or Mao, or to rallythemasses againstthe statusquo as wellas in supportof it,as Hitlerdid in his rise. But in order forthisto succeed, theremusteitherbemassive,active discontent r else the oppositionforcesmustbe ableto control communicationsmedia, education,and so on-as, forex-ample, if communists were able to expose American children to350,000 propaganda messages by the age of eighteen,as theyarenowexposed tocomparable propaganda forcapitalism nthe form fthatmanytelevision ommercials.The lower stagesof cognitivede-velopment,basicallythoseof children, re mostsusceptible o socio-centric ppeals to supportourcountry, urrace and ethnicgroup,oursocioeconomic system that is, capitalism, specially n the idealizedform of it packaged as "freeenterprise"or supply-side conomics),and to fearforeignraces,nations, nd ideologies. It is muchless easyto rallypeople at this evel to international ooperationand pacifismthan to aggression,patriotism,nd retribution gainst alleged atro-citiesbyour Enemies. These low-level ociocentric ppeals are rein-forcedby the massive socialization n Americanism, reeenterprise,and religionthat our children receive n thehome,primary nd sec-ondaryschools,and church, s well as through dvertising, ublicity,and governmental dicts.The most profitablepath formedia, then, is clearlyto reinforcethis conservative ocialization.The sheerweightof inertia n the es-tablished social order is a stronger onservative orcethanany ideo-logical principle. t is a strugglefor mostpeople just to getbyfromone dayto thenext; social stabilitynd the forceofhabit and routineease theanxietiesofdaily ife. For people who simplydo not want tobe bothered withcomplicated analyses of intangible social ills orreasons tochange their omfortable outine, simplisticallyonserva-tive ideology provides a welcome rationalization. o although someleftist nfluencemaybe asserted,say,by college teachers and some

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segmentsof the media, and although it may indeed sometimesbemanipulative, it is apt to be stronglyoutweighed by conservativeinfluences.

The Question ofClassReturningnow to the referencesto social class in several of thescholars citedhere,therehas been muchcontroversyince the earlysixtiesover the empiricalvalidity f Bernstein's,Oscar Lewis's, andothersuch studiesand over thepossibleclassbiasesof the researchersthemselves.Much of this controversy tems from the fact that al-though some scholars involved,such as Bernsteinand Mueller, seetheir studies comprising leftist ritiqueof class-structuredociety,theirfindingshave also been appropriated byconservativesikeSey-mour MartinLipset and ArthurJensen,who see them either as ajustificationfor "compensatoryeducation" toward middle-class so-cializationor as evidence of intractabledifficultiesn educating thepoor and racialminorities,nboth ofwhich ases blame has tended tobe shiftedfrom the discriminatory ature of capitalistsocietyontothe victims f that discrimination.Furtherconfusionon this ssue has resultedfrom the ambiguousor differing efinitions f class among thevarious scholars nvolvedon both the leftand right.Correlationsbetween political attitudesand economic status,occupation, level of education, culture, andcognitive development are often not established sufficiently.Norhave many of these scholars adequately delineated particular seg-ments withinclasses, between which there are apt to be significant

differencesn the criteria tudied. It is oftenunclear in studiesof theworkingclass whethertheirsubject is onlythe industrialproletariator also white-collarworkers nd the petitbourgeois-whether it in-cludes both organized and unorganized labor, men and women,urban and rurallaborers,thehardcorepoor,whites nd otherraces,and so on.Crucial though it is for these disputes and ambiguitiesto be re-solved in media scholarship, heir resolution s not essentialfor ourconcerns here. The salientfacthere is that none of the disputantswould claim that the cognitive raits ssociatedwithrestricted odes,exclusively ral culture,the culture of poverty, r the authoritarianpersonalityre beneficial oeither ndividuals r a progressive ocietyin contemporaryAmerica-no matter n what social class they ap-pear. To the extentthat illiteracy nd mass media perpetuate re-stricted ognitivecapacities, these forcescontribute o an impover-

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ished, powerless mentalityn millionsof people who belong to di-verse social classesbyothercritiera uchas income evel, race,and soon. Teachers in colleges withupper-middle-class, uburban whitestudents have been struckby the similarityn cognitivedeficienciesbetween many of these students and the inner-city lack and His-panic studentsShaughnessy tudied.C. WrightMills and the Frank-furt chool theorists lausibly uggestedthatmasssociety nd culturehave created a new class division n whicha large percentageof theproletariatand middle classes-including millions of relatively f-fluent people-have become homogenized in the consciousnesscomprised by the authoritarian ognitivepatternsdescribed above.Conversely,Alvin Gouldner hypothesized n an essay called "TheNew Class as a Speech Community" hata "culture of criticaldis-course"-his termforBernstein's laboratedcodes-has become themain determinant fmembership nthe dominantclassincontempo-rarysociety,whose members nclude both the administrators f thestatusquo and, in smallernumbers, ts most articulate ritics.31All other thingsbeing equal, there is no denyingthe liberalizingeffect f highereducation, elaborated language codes, and the cos-mopolitanoutlook bredbytravel nd access tohighculture. The factthatcreative iterature n particular s characterizedby precisely hecognitivetraits n Bernstein's elaborated codes-irony, ambiguity,multiplicityfviewpoints, nd so on-is a powerfulreaffirmation fthe value of literature nd itsacademic study.)And mostempiricalresearch confirms hatthehigherthe class and literacyevelofaudi-ence members,the more discriminatingheyand their children areapt to be in receivingmedia messages. The major exceptionto thisrule is thoseat theverybottomofthe social ladder,whosealienation,while not usually leading to an articulatedcritical onsciousness,atleast serves as a skeptical shield. In a studyof public attitudes inAmerica toward the Vietnam War, Bruce Andrews asserted that"lower-status roups" were the leastwillingto supportgovernmentpolicy.One reason,he suggested, s that "with ess formal ducation,politicalattentiveness,nd media involvement, heywere saved fromthe full brunt of Cold War appeals duringthe 1950s and were,as aresult, nadequately socialized into the anticommunistworld view."This analysiswas somewhatbelied,however,byAndrews'sacknowl-edgment that much of the opposition fromthesegroups was of the"win or getout" variety.32This is not to argue thathighereducation or social class inevitablyleads to liberal or socialist beliefs. In the contemporaryAmericancontext laboratedlinguistic-cognitiveodes are formanypeople thepreconditions orsuchbeliefs,buttheybyno meansguaranteethem.

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Countervailing factors such as the blandishments of prosperity,power, or the elitist ocial milieu of highcultureoften make peoplewho are bornintoor attaintheupper social classes as conservative s,or more so than,those in lower classes. (The conservative ffects fpower on academic and journalistic ntellectuals s thecentralthemeof Noam Chomsky's everalbooksattacking the new Americanman-darins.") On immediate ssues such as labor disputes,unionized in-dustrial or clerical workersare likelyto be more militant han,say,college professors, houghthe former re less likely o be capable ofsynthesizingmilitancy n concrete ssues into a systematiceftist de-ology.And regardlessofself-interest,ducated people may rationallyassimilate eftist erspectivesyetmovebeyondthemtoa refined on-servativephilosophy.Indeed, elaborated codes are necessaryfortheformulation f anyreasoned ideology-socialist, liberal, conservative, ibertarian,orwhatever.The implication f myentireanalysishere is not thatcul-turalcritics nd educatorsshould try o impose a leftist oliticalper-suasion on thepublicor students.Theydohave a responsibility,ow-ever, to help deprogram public and studentsfromthe uninformedconservatismnduced by lliteracynd massmedia,while at the sametimestriving o raise Americanpublic discourse to the higher evelsof unconstricted ebate betweenall reasoned ideologies.

CALIFORNIA POLYTECHNIC STATE UNIVERSITYNOTES

1 See the introductoryections nd readings nAmerican edia and Mass Culture: eftPerspectives,d. Donald Lazere (Berkeley,1987).2 Kate Moody,Growing p onTelevisionNew York, 1980), hereafter ited in text.3 Mina Shaughnessy,Errors ndExpectationsNew York, 1977), pp. 226-74.4 JeanPiaget,TheLanguageandThought f heChild New York, 1955); PiagetSampler,ed. Sarah F. Campbell (New York, 1976); Lawrence Kohlberg,ThePhilosophyfMoralDevelopmentSan Francisco,1981); WilliamPerry, orms f ntellectualnd EthicalDevel-opmentn theCollegeYears New York, 1970).5 See Eric A. Havelock, Preface o Plato (Cambridge,Mass., 1963); Jack Goody andIan Watt,"The Consequences of Literacy," n Language and Social Context,d. PierPaolo Giglioli New York, 1972), pp. 311-57, hereafter ited in text;WalterJ. Ong,ThePresence ftheWord New Haven, 1967) and OralityndLiteracyNew York, 1982);MarshallMcLuhan, TheGutenbergalaxy Toronto, 1962); and Lev Vygotsky, houghtandLanguage Cambridge,Mass., 1962).6 Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, .J. Levinson, R. N. Sanford,TheAuthoritarianersonalityNew York, 1950); Gordon W. Allport,The NatureofPrejudice,25thanniversary d. (Reading,Mass., 1979); MiltonRokeach,TheOpen nd ClosedMind(New York, 1960); Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (New York, 1960), pp.87-179.7 Oscar Lewis,FiveFamilies:Mexican Case Studiesn theCulture fPovertyNew York,

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254 NEW LITERARY HISTORY1959) and La Vida (New York, 1965); The Culture f Poverty: Critique,d. EleanorBurke (New York, 1971). "The culture of poverty"was an ill-chosenphrase thatpro-voked much controversyn the sixtiesbecause it was interpretedn some quartersofthe left as falsely mplying hat poor people, especiallyblack and Hispanic, had animpoverished ultureor none at all. This was not the ntendedmeaningof the term-perhaps "psychology f poverty"would have been a less ambiguous wayof denotingthe internalizedpatternsthat oftenresignpeople to povertyregardlessof what theinitial, xternal causes of itmaybe.8 Basil Bernstein,Class,Codes, ndControl, vols. London, 1971-75); Claus Mueller,The Politics fCommunication: Studyn thePolitical ociologyfLanguage,Socialization,andLegitimationNew York, 1973), hereafter ited n text;SocialClass,Race,andPsycho-logicalDevelopment,d. MartinDeutsch,IrwinKatz,and ArthurR.Jensen New York,1968).9 Andrea Lunsford,"The Content of Basic Writers'Essays," CollegeCompositionndCommunication,1, No. 3 (1980), 278-90.10 Thomas J. Farrell, Developing Literacy:WalterJ.Ong and Basic Writing," asicWriting,, No. 1 (Fall/Winter 978), 30-51.11 DwightNewton,"Bedlam on the News Beat," San Francisco unday xaminer ndChronicle, 6 March 1975, Sunday Scene section,p. 14.12 WilliamSafire,Before he all (New York, 1974), p. 314.13 LosAngeles imes, 0 Feb. 1980, Pt. 2, p. 1.14 Michael Cole and SylviaScribner,Culture nd Thought: Psychologicalntroduction(New York, 1974); SylviaScribner and Michael Cole, ThePsychologyfLiteracyCam-bridge,Mass., 1981).15 WilliamLabov, "The Logic ofNonstandardEnglish," nLanguageandSocial Con-text, p. 179-215.16 Michael Cole and JeromeBruner,"Some Preliminaries o Some Theories of Cul-turalDifference," n YearbookftheNationalSocietyorthe tudy fEducation(Chicago,1972).17 Goody and Watt,p. 341. See Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron,Repro-duction n Education, ocietynd Culture, r. Richard Nice (London and BeverlyHills,1977).18 Ben Sidran,BlackTalk New York, 1971), pp. 2-13.19 Lewis,La Vida,p. xlviii.20 Among the manyempiricalstudiesconfirming hispoint,see George Gerbner,LarryGross,MichaelMorgan,and NancySignorielli, Charting heMainstream:Tele-vision's Contributions o PoliticalOrientations," ournalofCommunication,2, No. 2(1982), 100-127.21 JohnFiske and John Hartley,ReadingTelevisionNew York, 1978), pp. 109-26.22 See, e.g., Moody,p. 67.23 Jean Piaget,"The Development in Childrenof the Idea of the Homeland and ofRelations WithOther Countries," nPiaget Sampler, p. 37-58.24 George Gerbner and Larry Gross, "The Violent Face of Television and ItsLessons," in Children nd theFaces ofTelevision: eaching,Violence, elling New York,1981), pp. 149-62.25 For further nalysisof the conservative ffects f stereotypingn theregulariza-tion of media formulas, emporal and spatial frames, ee Todd Gitlin, Television'sScreens: Hegemony in Transition," n Cultural ndEconomic eproductionnEducation,ed. MichaelApple (London, 1982), pp. 202-46, as well as Theodor W. Adorno's sem-inal essay"Television and the Patterns f Mass Culture," nMass Culture,d. BernardRosenberg and David Manning White (New York, 1957), pp. 474-89. Adorno ob-served, "The more stereotypes ecome reified and rigid in the presentsetup of cul-



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LITERACY AND MASS MEDIA 255tural industry, he less people are likely o change theirpreconceived ideas withtheprogressoftheir xperience.The moreopaque and complicatedmodern ifebecomes,themore people are temptedto cling desperately o cliches which seem tobringsomeorder into the otherwiseununderstandable" p. 484).26 Richard Ohmann, "Questions about Literacyand Political Education," RadicalTeacher,No. 8 (May 1978), 24.27 Ohmann, p. 25. Ohmann revised hisposition, n a directionmore critical f Bern-stein and Mueller on grounds of their definitions nd methods, n "Reflections onClass and Language," College nglish, 4, No. 1 (Jan. 1982), 1-17. See also the subse-quent exchange betweenOhmann and two commentatorsnCollege nglish, 5, No. 3(March 1983), 301-7.28 "Cultural Imperialism,Mass Media and Class Struggle:An InterviewWithAr-mand Mattelart,"nsurgentociologist,, No. 4 (Spring 1980), 76-77.29 In an exchangebetweenChristopherLasch and Herbert Gans on thispoint,Ganspresented a liberal pluralistcase for the broadening effects f mass culture,whileLasch's position, s in his The Culture fNarcissism: mericanife n anAgeofDiminishingExpectationsNew York, 1978), was similar omine here. See ChristopherLasch, "MassCultureReconsidered,"democracy,,No. 4 (Oct. 1981), 7-22 and HerbertGans, "Cul-ture, Community, nd Equality,"democracy,, No. 2 (Apr. 1982), 81-87; see alsoLasch, "Popular Culture and the Illusion of Choice," democracy,, No. 2 (Apr. 1982),88-92.30 Erich Fromm,EscapeFromFreedomNew York, 1941), p. 250.31 AlvinGouldner, "The New Class as a Speech Community,"n The Future f ntel-lectuals nd theRiseoftheNew Class New York, 1979), pp. 28-42.32 Bruce Andrews,Public ConstraintndAmerican olicy n VietnamLondon, 1976).Noam Chomsky itesAndrews as evidence thatthe lower classes had sounder instinctsabout Vietnam thanmany ntellectuals-but he casuallyrelegatestoa footnote hekey"winor getout" qualifier.Noam Chomsky,Towards NewCold War:Essays n theCur-rentCrisis ndHow WeGotThereNew York, 1982), pp. 89, 405-6.

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Lazere-literacy & Media-politcal Implications