In Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture, George Lipsitz wishes “to explore the ways in which collective memory and popular culture are peculiarly linked – how the infinitely renewable present of electronic mass media creates a crisis for collective memory, and how collective memory decisively frames the production and reception of commercial culture” (pg. vii). He further believes, “The ever expanding influence, reach, and scope of mass media has worked insidiously to legitimate exploitative social hierarchies, to colonize the body as a site of capital accumulation, and to inculcate within us the idea that consumer desire is the logical center of human existence” (pg. vii). He cautions, “This book is not one of those exercises that finds only the debased and distorted in American history and culture. For all its crimes, this is too good a country, its cultures too rich and varied and inspiring to justify that kind of pessimism, a pessimism that masquerades as critique but which is so one-dimensional that it ultimately serves as a form of collaboration with the oppressors” (pg. xvi).
Lipsitz writes, “The powerful apparatuses of contemporary commercial electronic mass communications dominate discourse in the modern world” (pg. 4). He continues, “Instead of relating to the past through a shared sense of place or ancestry, consumers of electronic mass media can experience a common heritage with people they have never seen; they can acquire memories of a past to which they have no geographic or biological connection” (pg. 5). Further, “Most often…culture exists as a form of politics, as a means of reshaping individual and collective practice for specified interests, and as long as individuals perceive their interests as unfilled, culture retains an oppositional potential” (pg. 16-17). Of television, Lipsitz writes, “By addressing viewers as atomized consumers, the medium obscures experiences of race, region, class, and gender. By turning politics into entertainment, television transforms citizens into spectators and turns politicians into performers” (pg. 19). Discussing sitcoms, Lipsitz writes, “Representations of generational and gender tensions undercut the legitimating authority of the televised traditional working-class family by demonstrating the chasm between memories of yesterday and the realities of today” (pg. 57). Further, “With its penetration of the family and its incessant propaganda for commodity purchases, television helped erode the social base for challenges to authority manifest in the mass political activity among American workers in the 1940s. Yet television did not so much ensure the supremacy of new values as it transformed the terms of social contestation” (pg. 73-74).
Discussing rock-and-roll as a window into class, Lipsitz writes, “Industrial labor created the preconditions for rock and roll, and the first rock-and-roll artists, entrepreneurs, and audiences came out of wartime working-class communities” (pg. 116). He continues, “Consumption of mass popular culture always involves varied motivations and complex choices, and it is difficult to account fully for any specific consumer choice. But at least part of the motivation for the middle-class white youth adoption of Afro-American and working-class music as their own in the 1950s stemmed from a collective judgment about the demise of the urban industrial city and the rise of the suburb” (pg. 122). Of film, Lipsitz writes, “Whether situated in the past, present, or future, commercial motion pictures invariably resonate with the value crises of the times in which they appear. Thus they are historical in the sense of being cultural artifacts and social-history evidence about the times in which they were made. But films are historical in another way as well: they reposition us for the future by reshaping our memories of the past” (pg. 164).
Lipsitz writes, “Story-telling that leaves history to the oppressor, that imagines a world of desire detached from the world of necessity, cannot challenge the hegemony of dominant discourse. But story-telling that combines subjectivity and objectivity, that employs the insights and passions of myth and folklore in the service of revising history, can be a powerful tool of contestation” (pg. 212-213). Further, “Counter-memory is a way of remembering and forgetting that starts with the local, the immediate, and the personal. Unlike historical narratives that begin with the totality of human existence and then locate specific actions and events within that totality, counter-memory starts with the particular and the specific and then builds outward toward a total story” (pg. 213). He continues, “Outside of popular culture, personal and collective memories of region, race, class, gender, and ethnicity continue to provide the raw materials for shared stories. But the pervasiveness of popular narrative forms and themes is not just a matter of the sedimented residue of historical communities and cultures. Mass society and commercial culture provoke a new popular narrative response, one that draws upon both old and new forms of cultural creation” (pg. 234).
Lipsitz concludes, “During the postwar era, commercial popular culture has functioned largely to fashion a symbolic order conducive to the interests of corporate America…They suppress knowledge about cultural and historical differences to unite the audience as a homogenous buying public; then they create and exaggerate petty divisions – based on brand loyalty, fashion, style – to divide the audience into market segments” (pg. 259). ( )