Download INTRODUCTION: The Mass Context

Collective Dissociation in Mass Society
(Under review for publication)
By Christian J. Churchill, Ph.D.
© Christian J. Churchill, Ph.D.
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Do not cite without permission of the author.
Division of Social Sciences, St. Thomas Aquinas College, Sparkill, New York.
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Collective Dissociation in Mass Society
REFLEXIVE STATEMENT
Mid twentieth century sociologists frequently used the concept of mass society to analyze
problems of industrialized societies. Applications of this concept offered a dynamic
sociological frame in which to understand issues effecting individuals and groups. In
recent years, the mass society model has fallen out of usage. This paper explores the
enduring relevance of the theoretical model of mass society. While I do not claim mass
society theory should or could hold a central or dominant position in sociological inquiry
today, I do identify ways in which it is still useful – specifically in reference to my
concept of collective dissociation. To support this claim, I first examine two definitions
of mass society – one offered by C. Wright Mills in 1956 and the other offered by
Herbert Blumer in 1966. I then explore a sampling of social phenomena found in mass
society throughout the twentieth century and present today. If we take this theory
seriously and find ways to weave it into contemporary theoretical perspectives and
ethnographic work, it could provide a means to interpret and confront persistent social
psychological crises and systems of social injustice and inequality.
INTRODUCTION: The Mass Context
Contemporary industrialized and post-industrialized societies contain institutions whose
influence and power over the everyday lives of ordinary people are often beyond the
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control or understanding of the individual. This largeness of institutions and their
extensive reach into private and public spheres, in turn, can create political apathy and
social detachment. The concept of mass society helps to explain this situation because it
describes how disparate groups within a society are arbitrarily linked by large
bureaucracies, mass communications, and master trends which resist or evade local
control. While these forces touch disconnected portions of the population in uniform
ways, they also prompt local and distinct reactions. Yet individualized responses to mass
society seldom alter the social fact of the organizational strength and centralization which
characterize it.
John Steinbeck addressed the impersonality of mass institutions in his 1939 novel
The Grapes of Wrath in which he describes the agents of large landowners as “caught in
something larger than themselves….If a bank or finance company owned the land, the
owner man said, the Bank – or the Company – needs – wants – insists – must have – as
though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had
ensnared them….They breathe profits; they eat the interest on money” (Steinbeck, 1976:
40-1). Steinbeck here describes the culmination of the transition in modern history from
power vested clearly in feudal lord, monarch, priest, or other specific person to power
vested in organizational structures which obscure its precise location. The concept of
mass society offers a dynamic frame in which to analyze the enduring consequences of
this shift.
Mass society was a prevalent theme in social theory from the 1930s to the 1970s.
It is articulated in different forms by theorists ranging from Frankfurt School authors like
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Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse to sociologists rooted in American pragmatist thought
like C. Wright Mills and Herbert Blumer. Mid twentieth century American community
studies also rely on the concept. Among the most influential are Small Town in Mass
Society: Class, Power and Religion in a Rural Community by Arthur J. Vidich and
Joseph Bensman (1958), Crestwood Heights: A Study of the Culture of Suburban Life by
John R. Seeley, R. Alexander Sim, and E.W. Loosley (1956), The Levittowners: Ways of
Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community by Herbert J. Gans (1967), Middletown:
A Study in Modern American Culture by Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd (1929), and
The Exurbanites by A.C. Spectorsky (1955). The concept also informs sociological
bestsellers of the period like The Organization Man by William H. Whyte (1956) and The
Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character by David Riesman with
Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney (1953). The anthology Identity and Anxiety: The
Survival of the Person in Mass Society edited by Maurice Stein, Arthur J. Vidich, and
David Manning White (1960), meanwhile, provides classically rooted perspectives on
mass society along with analyses from Erik Erikson, Margaret Mead, George Orwell,
Paul Goodman, Dan Wakefield, Erving Goffman, Robert J. Lifton, Irving Howe, Karl
Jaspers, and Martin Buber among others on how mass experience impacts individuals. In
popular culture of the period, mass society (along with fears of Communist infiltration of
the culture) was arguably the menace implicitly lurking behind films like The Blob
(1958) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).
A central facet of mass society theory which remains relevant today is its focus on
the ways in which people whose lives are fragmented by the intrusion of mass institutions
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are made to feel at once a part of the whole while simultaneously isolated within it and
too fractured to engage collectively in meaningful rituals and actions. To exist within the
mass is to dwell within a heap of fragments, each seeking its own place in the pile but
none having access to a bonding agent which could set the pieces into cohesive form.
Mass institutions propagate the notion that commodification and technological innovation
either resolve or sufficiently alleviate the tension between this fragmentation and the
human desire for wholeness and integration. Yet while this internal contradiction is
implicitly addressed by many theorists of mass society, none give it a name.
I call this dissonant experience collective dissociation. By that I mean a
constellation of personal and public crises which obtain when a group of people is treated
as a coherent whole while individuals within the group experience a sense of atomization,
alienation, and disconnection from one another. This can occur when the public as a
whole is instructed or taught to think of itself as a homogeneous unit yet, even as it may
accept this formulation, it experiences in its material and psychic life a disconnection
between its component groups. The individual in these circumstances similarly may sense
an internal psychic disintegration within and between the component parts of the self
because of a split perceived by the person between self and society. The outcome is a
sense that even while one is immersed in the busy crowd of mass society, one is also
profoundly alone.
The rise of postmodern theory, which begins roughly at the same moment mass
society theory fell out of use, is perhaps attributable to mass society theorists’ failure to
sharply define how collective dissociation is experienced by individuals within the mass.
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For a central strength of postmodern theory is its focus on the fragmentation of the
modern world and the ways in which individual experience is refracted through the
shards of that fragmentation. Postmodernism’s appeal has been its ability to step into the
void left by mass society theory’s inability to describe and illustrate that refraction in
ways that appear relevant to a world altered by the seismic shifts brought about through
the social movements of the 1960s – 1990s. I believe collective dissociation at once
provides a bridge between mass society and postmodern theory while also confirming the
inherent strengths of mass society theory. Moreover, collective dissociation challenges
the pessimistic strain within postmodernism which claims that the world is too fractured
to say anything meaningful about it (Rosenau, 1992: 138-66; Churchill, 1998; Lyman,
1997).
As noted by Stephen Pfohl in his book Death at the Parasite Care: Social Science
(Fictions) and the Postmodern (1992: 6), C. Wright Mills may have been the first to
describe this era as “a post-modern period. Perhaps we may call it: The Fourth Epoch”
(Mills, 1959: 166). Yet Mills retained the modernist theoretical frame of his
contemporaries in his approach to the problems of mass society. Postmodern theorists of
the last third of the twentieth century, while influenced by Mills to varying degrees, have
taken a radically different tack to critiquing master trends in society, specifically in the
degree to which they incorporate a fractured perspective into their analysis (Jackall,
1994). We may gain much, however, by returning to the more coherent frame offered in
mass society theory as we attempt to understand the social psychological and political
crises of the early twenty-first century.
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The authors who offer the most specific definitions and analyses of mass society
are C. Wright Mills in a chapter titled “The Mass Society” in The Power Elite (1956) and
Herbert Blumer in his little known article “The Concept of Mass Society” (1988 [1966]).
Mills and Blumer emerge from a common theoretical background. In Mills’s “Situated
Actions and Vocabularies of Motive” (1940) and Blumer’s Symbolic Interactionism:
Perspective and Method (1969), they argue for a sociological perspective rooted in
George Herbert Mead’s work Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social
Behaviorist (1934) claiming: (1) the self is an object to itself; (2) social actors are
engaged in an endless process of creating, reifying, and reconstructing meanings for the
objects they share in common; and (3) sociologists can only understand the meanings
people give to their actions by observing those actions in situational context. Mills and
Blumer’s theories of mass society contrast at various points, but the value of considering
them together is in (1) the authors’ shared theoretical assumptions and (2) the fact that
they are the only theorists who posit specific frameworks for understanding mass society;
other authors of that period mostly refer to it as an amorphous and generally accepted
idea without precisely defining it as Mills and Blumer do.
The models of mass society which Mills and Blumer develop provide essential
tools for analyzing social problems today. Following an assessment of Blumer and
Mills’s models, then, I present an argument for using mass society theory as a means to
see how contemporary society is broadly organized. Because of the limitations of an
article format, it is difficult to offer much more than a brief survey of the indications and
symptoms of mass society today. As a whole, this article may best serve as a suggestion
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for additional research. It suggests that mass society theory should be reevaluated in the
context of my concept of collective dissociation (though other options certainly exist) and
that it consequently could be employed by sociologists as a useful analytic tool but not
that it necessarily should or could reclaim its once dominant position. As a springboard to
that discussion, I will briefly review salient aspects of Blumer and Mills’s models.
a. The Blumer Model
Herbert Blumer begins his article “The Concept of Mass Society” by arguing that
sociology’s use of the terms “industrial” and “urban” fails to paint an accurate picture of
modern society because they are too vague (Blumer, 1988 [1966]: 337-339). Making the
case for a mass society model, he writes,
The inadequacy of these traditional attempts to pinpoint a specific genre of
modern society gives us further cause for considering carefully a new and
seemingly more promising approach to the problem. I am referring here to the
view that pictures modern society as a mass society. Even though the historic
origins of this view are over a century old, it has become prominent only during
the last thirty years. Although used in the literature only in a most nebulous and
fragmentary manner, its main components may be arranged to form a reasonably
coherent scheme. (Blumer, 1988 [1966]: 339)
For his model Blumer presents two frameworks, one focusing on mass society’s
structural components and the other on its social psychological aspects. In the first
framework, he posits four structural elements: (1) “its massiveness,” (2) “the
heterogeneous form of society’s structural elements,” (3) people’s unimpeded access to
public life, and (4) constant change (Blumer, 1988 [1966]: 339-44). Emile Durkheim’s
notion of organic solidarity runs implicitly through this formulation. According to
Durkheim, pre-modern, pre-mass, non-commercialized society is characterized by
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mechanical solidarity which predetermines one’s purpose and place within the social
order. In modern, mass, commercialized society, however, organic solidarity obtains
giving the person a high degree of autonomy and requiring the individual to function
independently. The individual, seen here as an organ within the social body, needs
society for his or her own survival. But the social body, in turn, can easily survive
without the individual in the same sense that the human body can endure without many of
its organs and appendages (Durkheim, 1984 [1893]: 85). Thus in Blumer’s structural
formulation for mass society, “mass sales, mass communications, mass transport, mass
entertainment, mass education, mass legal systems and mass war” (1988 [1966]: 340)
form a social body which is unmoved by the ability or lack thereof of individuals within
it to cope with mass conditions.
These mass elements would not exist, of course, without people, but the volume
of humanity seething in and out of them renders particular individuals (with the exception
of elites) as dispensable, nonessential organs. People only register in the view of mass
institutions to the extent that they swerve in large numbers toward or away from the
agendas of those institutions. So while mass life offers a wide variety of social, lifestyle,
identity, career, and political options, it provides little to allow these options to cohere;
and while mass society refreshes old trends with new ones from moment to moment, it
does not offer individuals the means to make sense of their location within these changes.
Instead it encourages a focus on the trend of the moment while disparaging that which
came before and implicitly promising the present trend will itself be forgettable when the
next prefabricated trend arrives. Thus the organic social body moves forward providing
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little or no means for individuals to obtain a sense of how the system works as a whole or
what it means for their existence. This promotes a sense of dissociation from the
collective social body of which one is a part.
Blumer goes on to argue, “However enormous they may be, however great the
lack of intimate relationships between their members, the institutions of mass society do
in fact fulfill their functions” (Blumer, 1988 [1966]: 346). To explain the functionality of
a social system in which actors are perpetually dissociated from one another and from the
whole, he outlines the following three chief aspects of mass social psychology: (1) the
ability of the individual to alter role performance quickly and frequently; (2) the ability to
switch from role to role with agility; and (3) the dominance of heterogeneous modes of
expression and thought as opposed to extreme conformity (Blumer, 1988 [1966]: 351).
An image of characterological dexterity emerges from this description, but it is equally
plausible that such role switching and the lack of visible conformity that attends it is a
response to the social anxiety created by feeling swallowed by the mass. Cultivating
multiple personas and being anticonformist in a mass context is likely symptomatic of a
fear that one must be psychologically limber to stand out from the anonymous crowd. It
is the development of character types which can withstand this pervasive anxiety and,
ultimately, now view it as problematic that allows the mass system to endure and expand.
b. The Mills Model
Like Blumer’s, Mills’s model of mass society consists of two related frameworks.
The first describes the formation of public opinion; the second describes what Mills calls
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“psychological illiteracy.” Together, he claims these frameworks explain how centralized
power achieves dominance over the mindset and actions of the average citizen. This sets
Mills apart from Blumer in two ways: (1) he does not ascribe to mass society the benign
functionality of a social system operating on its own but instead perceives eilte power in
pursuit of social, legal, and economic dominance at its core, and (2) he identifies this
power dynamic as a source, more tangible than any evident in Blumer’s model, for the
fracturing of the modern sense of self which, as we have discussed, is a key issue of the
postmodern era which Mills himself anticipated (1959: 166).
In Mills’s first framework, he identifies two types of citizenry: publics and
masses. The chief distinction between these types is that publics act whereas masses are
acted upon. He offers four ways in which the manipulation of public opinion forms a
mass mentality at ease with or ignorant of being acted upon: (1) the society has far more
opinion recipients than opinion makers – i.e., the mass media disseminates opinion and
the citizenry absorbs it; (2) this imbalanced ration of opinion makers to receivers prevents
citizens from effectively answering back to elites and authorities – protest in this situation
is portrayed by elites and opinion makers as a form of immaturity or hysteria; (3) this
causes a state of political impotence throughout the population which prompts apathy
from below in the face of pervasive propaganda from above proclaiming the vitality of
democratic institutions; and (4) this apathy allows for institutionalized authority to
penetrate the public – i.e., instead of authority emerging from the public it is foisted upon
the public.
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The elimination of a serious role for the public in crafting opinion and converting
it into political policy and action is a key indication of collective dissociation. Individuals
in the mass are surrounded by media which manufacture opinion at a distance but
represent it as “conventional wisdom” supported by “opinion polls.” People can choose
to believe that these points of view represent their attitudes or they can choose to ignore
opinion disseminated by the mass media. In both cases, however, the person is
involuntarily included by mass institutions in a collective process from which he or she is
fundamentally dissociated. Individuals who accept manufactured opinion as their own are
dissociated from understanding how public debate is manufactured. Meanwhile, those
who understand they have no real role in crafting and steering public debate will likely
turn apathetic and disconnect from political involvement altogether. When this apathy
prompts large numbers within the mass to collectively dissociate from the political
process, a power vacuum opens and is easily filled by mass institutions and the elites who
control them.
In Mills’s second framework, he describes the social psychology of mass society
which he calls a form of “psychological illiteracy” (Mills, 1956: 311). By this he means
that the structural framework of mass society prevents individuals from being able to read
a social situation for what it is and where it comes from. This social psychological state is
indicated by the following symptoms: (1) individuals receive all or most information
about social realities indirectly and chiefly through the mass media; (2) there is a lack of
competing accounts of social reality which individuals can compare against each other in
order to form a reasoned political position; (3) the mass media creates a “pseudo-world”
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for public consumption and in which the chief ideas and images are altered to fit the view
of reality most desirable to the elite; and (4) small scale discussion conducted with the
real expectation that it will lead to political change disappears because individuals
understand, with varying levels of awareness, that such discussion has little or no chance
to guide policy and action at the middle and upper reaches of political and economic
power (Mills, 1956: 314).
As with the formation of public opinion, these four symptoms of “psychological
illiteracy” emerge because the world is represented in unreal terms to a public. The
public’s increasing disengagement from debate and participation, in turn, points to a
collective form of dissociation between human beings and their social order. Individuals
experience a commonality in their mutual experience of illiteracy, but this form of
disconnection from social reality leads to a sense of atomization instead of common
cause. Rather than propelling people to demand change, the power of this system is in the
way it saps citizens of the energy and ambition to effect change.
Perhaps the most disturbing portion of Mills’s description of “psychological
illiteracy” is the role he ascribes to mass education in making people comfortable with
mass conditions. Public schools at the start of the twenty-first century are filled with
corporate commercial influences in the form of vending machines in the hallways and
textbooks funded and shaped by multinational corporations (Schlosser, 2002). The
consequences of this conversion of public educational space into marketing terrain is
anticipated by Mills when in the midst of his mass society argument he writes:
In a community of publics the task of liberal education would be: to keep the
public from being overwhelmed; to help produce the disciplined and informed
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mind that cannot be overwhelmed; to help develop the bold and sensible
individual that cannot be sunk by the burdens of mass life. But educational
practice has not made knowledge directly relevant to the human need of the
troubled person of the twentieth century or to the social practices of the citizen.
This citizen cannot now see the roots of his own biases and frustrations, nor think
clearly about himself, nor for that matter about anything else. He does not see the
frustration of idea, of intellect, by the present organization of society, and he is
not able to meet the tasks now confronting ‘the intelligent citizen.’ (Mills, 1956:
319)
COLLECTIVE DISSOCIATION IN CONTEMPORARY CONTEXT
Blumer and Mills both observe that social institutions and trends have become gigantic
and often feel overwhelming, yet they offer significantly different analyses of this
problem. While Mills’s analysis focuses on the increase in centralization and control in
the hands of a few over the life chances of the many, Blumer’s assessment describes mass
society as a more dynamic structure open to individuals maintaining control over their
lives if extenuating conditions allow. At the core of both models, though, is the idea that
the individual must find his or her way to a role and function within a social structure
dominated by large, super-human institutions. So while we see in Blumer and Mills a
split in style and emphasis emanating, roughly, from Blumer’s grounding in Emile
Durkheim and Mills’s grounding in Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen, the content of their
critiques is complementary. The source of that interrelation appears to be their common
origins in Mead. For Mead’s central question is: How do individuals reach out from their
isolated experiences to create in-common social objects which in turn foster the
emergence of self and society? Similarly, Mills and Blumer ask: How can the individual
understand his or her self and how can social order endure when the mechanisms for
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developing, defining, and reexamining in-common social objects have been taken over by
mass institutions whose goal it is to displace individual thought, action, and
communication with pre-formulated variants?
The troubles and issues which arise from being required to live in the mass
conditions described by Mills in 1956 and Blumer in 1966 are forms of collective
dissociation. Social order and cultural identity are perceived and experienced much
differently now than in the 1950s and 1960s, yet it seems that the experience of collective
dissociation and the conditions leading to it are not so dissimilar from the mid twentieth
century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the mid twentieth century, a
common concern of social science was the apparent public tendency toward conformity.
Among scholars and in popular literature too, analysts were sometimes careful to indicate
that exterior conformity was not necessarily evidence of internal psychological or
political sameness. While it is safe to say this was a correct assertion, it is also evidence
that collective dissociation was then a chief outcome of mass life. That is, while in their
persons individuals may have sensed themselves to be different, on the exterior the forces
of mass society emphasized collective uniformity. In this experience of differing
internally but feeling compelled to conform in presentation of self (physically and
attitudinally), the ultimate result would likely be a sense that one was quite alone in a
crowd of same-faced others. Thus the popularity of David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd
and that of the many fictional portraits of individuals isolated in the prison of their minds
while dwelling within a surging mass (Huxley, 1960 [1932]; Orwell, 1984 [1949];
Wilson, 1955).
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The surface “gray flannel suit” dullness of Mills and Blumer’s era which
produced the sociological critique of conformity may seem to have been erased by
succeeding decades of youth rebellion, gender liberation, sexual experimentation, civil
rights struggles, culture wars, the emergence of postmodernist theory and architecture,
and a multitude of other shifts in social perception and structure. Yet while these shifts
represent both substantive and stylistic changes, the impact of collective dissociation is
nonetheless still prevalent. Ironically, even while collective dissociation is evident as a
mass society crisis in the face of these society-wide shifts, these shifts are likely
responsible for the decline of mass society theory and the rise of postmodern theory. As
Robert Jackall has argued, postmodern theory can be seen as an effort to re-enchant a
world made barren of magic and spontaneity by post-Enlightenment bureaucratic
industrialization (Jackall 1994). The various liberation movements of the 1960s – 1990s
did result in significant corrections to prior (and ongoing) social injustice. It is dubious to
claim, however, that these changes have had any bearing on the encroachment of mass
institutions into everyday life. Rather, these forms of liberation are easily subsumed into
the mass paradigm and converted into the self-celebratory propaganda of all mass society
institutions (Marcuse 1964). The crucial point is that the appeal of social liberation
movements to the individual’s desire to be recognized as unique and thus somehow
secularly redeemed is acute. This desire to believe in the redemptive powers of social
liberation had, in the academy, the effect of sparking a wholesale rejection of mass
society theory with its emphasis on “master trends” (Gerth and Mills 1954) and society-
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wide issues. Scholars shifted to the postmodern description of a fractured world incapable
of repair.
The emergence of a multicultural sensitivity since the 1950s is evidence of the
liberatory aspect of Blumer’s model of mass society in which the person has many
options for self realization in the public sphere. Yet these changes within the social order
happen in the context of mass institutional agendas and are quickly incorporated into the
commercial apparatus of the mass economy (Marcuse 1964). And while it is difficult if
not impossible to finally determine whether the causation of public conformity is a
consequence of institutional influences or individual proclivities, sociological analysis
usually reveals that broad public trends are in large part the product of institutionally
rooted pressures. Thus the opening up of mainstream society to previously marginalized
groups can be seen as a form of induction into mass life with all of its consumerist,
careerist, and bureaucratic dimensions. Though social class has played little role to this
point in my analysis, the tendency of the bureaucratized new middle classes to hue to
broad trends in mainstream culture serves as a useful example here.
The tone of new middle class life is set by the behavioral expectations defined in
the mass bureaucratized institutions in which individuals at this status level work, play,
and seek meaning. This in turn requires groups newly admitted to this class to cohere to
the rules of mass life. Thus as options for new middle class life are extended to ever more
groups, those groups respond by accepting the reality that their variously diverse
lifestyles, status attitudes, consumption aspirations, educational quests, sexual
proclivities, and other trajectories must be subsidized by adherence to the demands of a
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bureaucratic career and of bureaucratized leisure. To mold the specific individual to the
requirements of bureaucratic mass institutions often requires that there exist a split or
dissociation, experienced collectively throughout the class, between internally felt
individualism and the externally obedient careerist self (Bensman and Vidich, 1987;
Ehrenreich, 1989; Mills, 1951:324-54; Levy and Churchill 1992).
The ubiquity of references in modern advertising and in leisure-oriented
journalism to pursuits and products designed to enhance and display one’s uniqueness is
a symptomatic response to the anxiety provoked by collective dissociation. This anxiety
has its roots in the sense that no one else except oneself can be aware of one’s own true
character and needs amid such mass experiences and ways of living as predominate
today. Paradoxically these pursuits and products are themselves produced by mass
institutions and are likely to prompt the same anxiety which they purport to resolve. This
is ultimately a realization of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism (Marx 1972 [1867]).
We also find evidence of collective dissociation in the pervasive flattening of
mainstream popular culture. On a somewhat trivial level, this is evidenced by the
ubiquity of plastic as a design material in buildings and mechanical objects, but it extends
to the production of popular music by Fordist technique, the assembly and consumption
of “fast food” (Schlosser, 2002), the structuring of higher education on a mass consumer
model in order to respond to demands from “the marketplace” and “customers” (Veblen,
1957; Sinclair, 1970), and the simplification of political debate to fit into easily digestible
“sound bites” instead of working out arguments through careful and detailed analysis. In
other words, mass society does seem to make room for the diverse life trajectories found
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throughout the public in Blumer’s model. But the public is addressed nonetheless in
monolithic fashion and is offered increasingly standardized options for material, political,
and entertainment consumption thereby fulfilling Mills’s prediction that mass experience
would lead to more rather than less uniformity. The public continues to be treated
collectively even as individuals feel more fractured from others and within themselves for
having been forced into such collective patterns of desire and action.
James R. Beniger, in his article “Personalization of Mass Media and the Growth
of Pseudo-Community” (1987), offers the concept of “pseudo-community” as a tool for
conceptualizing the experience of the person in late twentieth century mass society. He
suggests that the public generally knows when it is being treated as a crowd of easily
persuaded, gullible automatons. Consequently, Beniger argues, advertising and other
forms of mass appeal which obviously treat the public as a herd tend to sound hollow and
fail in their objectives of selling either ideas, goods, or services. To counter this problem,
Beniger argues, mass communicators use sophisticated techniques to appear as though
their message to the public is in reality a reaching out of one individual to another.
Beniger first describes Robert Merton’s analysis in his book Mass Persuasion (1946) of
Kate Smith, a celebrity singer with an ordinary presentation of self, who was recruited to
sell war bonds for the United States government. Smith was presented to the public as
“just plain folks” (Vidich and Bensman, 2000: 29) and the war bond drive succeeded in
convincing everyday people that, like Kate Smith, they too could and should join in
supporting American troops with personal investments. Beniger goes on to describe how
several decades later the emergence of computers and laser printers allowed mass
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produced letters to appear as though each were signed by the writer for delivery directly
to the recipient thereby appearing to diminish the social distance between organization
official and individual member or donor.
Beniger’s point is that while mass communications prevent and exclude
personalized encounters between sender and recipient when the sender is an institution,
that does not preclude the individual recipient’s desire to feel as though the
communication is personal. Thus institutions devise infinitely new techniques to make
the public feel as though the mass appeal is really a direct appeal. Beniger sees this as
replacing actual community, which requires authentic and direct communication, with
pseudo-community which only requires that a communication successfully appear or feel
real or personal.
In Mills’s vocabulary, what Beniger describes is the fabrication of a “pseudoworld” (Mills, 1956:314) in which actual events and feelings are represented but in a
form so utterly manipulated that they do not show the world as it is but rather as it might
be in a surreal consumerist fantasy. For example, young people may smile and enjoy
themselves while dancing on beaches and at parties, but to present a beverage made of
corn syrup and carbonated water as the central catalyst of such action replaces the
complex reality of youthful revelry with the simplistic pseudo-reality which says that
access to this experience is only possible via ingestion of a specific product (Fromm,
1955:133). Again, the individual recipients of these mass communications are placed in a
dissociative trap in which they are asked to think of themselves as part of a collective
whole coagulated purely through marketing rather than through the substantive
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interrelations which lead to authentic communities. While it might seem obvious that this
crisis requires a postmodern analysis because of its fragmenting effects, that proscription
would overlook the salient analysis offered by the mass society lens which allows us to
see dissociation as both a fractured individual experience yet also part of and impossible
without larger all-encompassing patterns of manipulation and persuasion evident
throughout contemporary cultures of consumption.
Meanwhile, Beniger’s description of advertisers’ and politicians’ need to devise
new methods to appear genuine as their target audiences pick up on the ruses behind sales
techniques is a clear manifestation of Blumer’s claim that mass society requires constant
change. For example, the telefundraising industry has learned that donors have begun to
see the letters sent to them for fulfillment of pledges they have made on the telephone in
response to philanthropic solicitations as junk mail. One strategy to counter this is the use
of software developed by GTE to allow the telefundraiser to record personal information
revealed in the telephone conversation such as a recent illness, the birth of a child, or
anything else. This information is then incorporated into the standardized pledge
fulfillment letter (McBrearty and Calhoun, 1994). While the letter still bears the now
familiar laser-printed facsimile of the organization leader’s signature, the content of the
letter can speak directly to the donor’s personal experiences. Reading such a letter, it is
surmised, the donor will be personally touched by a reference to his or her real life
circumstances and more likely to send a donation to the soliciting organization. If this
technique succeeds, it does so not because it is a genuine communication between human
beings who care for one another but rather because it successfully impersonates that
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relationship. Yet even that success is apt to be short-lived in a market of savvy donors.
Following Blumer’s rule of constant change, this ruse will quickly need to be replaced
with another. Economically, this may stimulate the segment of the software industry
organized around manipulation of donors. But the social psychological effect will be the
deepening of a sense in the public that in the mass experience one disconnects from other
people and from reality, all while mass institutions claim to encourage the reverse.
In a more recent advertising scheme which reflects the theories of Beniger, Mills,
and Blumer, the July 15, 2001, New York Times Magazine reported in a article titled
“(Buy Me)” that a new form of advertising called “undercover marketing” (Rutenberg,
2001:21) has emerged. The companies behind this trend hire stylish, attractive young
people to go to bars or other popular public venues and audibly discuss within the context
of otherwise normal conversation the brand of beverage they are drinking. The idea
behind this scheme is to avoid the market skepticism of the target audience by making
them interested in a product because peers seem to be excited about it rather than because
of a pseudo-world advertisement. The marketer in this instance is exploiting people’s
desire for community by slipping advertising into their community setting without
appearing to do so. While this is precisely what Beniger means when he describes the
growth of pseudo-community, the genius of the strategy is that it appears to be a part of
the genuine community at the bar or wherever else undercover marketing occurs. The
strategy grows out of a need to constantly change marketing strategies as target markets
becomes aware of how their resistance to advertising is being subverted and will likely
need to be replaced with yet another form of campaign sooner than later.
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Another though more visible advertising strategy designed by a British firm to
counter resistance to traditional forms of solicitation is described in a February 21, 2003,
Chronicle of Higher Education article titled “In Your Face.” The firm pays college
students $6.80 per hour to tattoo on their foreheads “semipermanent color transfer[s]
made out of vegetable dye…[that] last about a week” (Payne, 2003:6) and which
advertise products. One student quoted in the article explains, “ ‘Advertising is
everywhere you look. I don’t see the difference between an advert on a billboard and an
advert on my forehead, except that I’ll be earning money from it being there’ ” (Payne,
2003:6).
The pragmatism voiced by this student and evidenced by the advertising firm are
two aspects of the same phenomenon, itself a mirror image of that illustrated by
undercover marketing. Rather than a disguised attempt to subvert the target audience’s
aversion to ubiquitous advertising, forehead tattoos welcome the audience to embrace
marketing as a form of practical financial exchange in which both parties are winners. In
this zero-sum game, however, eroded community bonds are not replaced. Rather they are
further disintegrated by a form of communicative action which asks the recipient of the
message to engage in the limited process of buying a product rather than in the deeply
complex process of forming a human bond. Yet the dynamism of this form of targeted
mass marketing is that it successfully presents itself as a means to human connectivity.
The recipient of such signals is encouraged to dissociate the substance from the
representation of connection.
23
These examples and the social processes they illustrate are a confirmation of
Marx and Engels claim that “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly
revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production,
and with them the whole relations of society” (1972 [1872]: 476). For Marx and Engels,
this created a society in which “All that is solid melts into air…” (1972 [1872]:476). For
advertisers, then, the key to success is to have a new strategy ready to be employed as
quickly as the old one’s potency melts into the chaotic atmosphere of commercial
exchange. Mass society, then, creates a world in which communicative action is stable
only as long as it adequately convinces the public that the illusions it claims for reality
are acceptable.
These illusions are rarely mistaken for reality. Few people genuinely believe that
purchasing a rugged truck will transport them to the rocky edge of a stunning canyon
where an advertisement places the truck to entice new buyers. There is here a more subtle
process at work, though. For placing the truck in that stylized representation of nature is
not actually meant to infer that its purchase will transport the buyer to that specific
location. Rather, the use of that image is rooted in the seller’s understanding that in a
world in which bureaucracy and all the other burdens of mass society predominate,
individuals often maintain a reservoir of fantasy which allows them to escape the
mundane and overwhelming to be transported to a psychological oasis in which they are
as free as that vehicle seems to be. In other words, the advertiser knows that the car is less
useful for “all that is solid” about it and more for its ability to be associated with all that
“melts into air.” What is being sold is not the truck but an escapist commodified fantasy
24
of secular redemption from mass reality. Within this context, though, what is inescapable
is the collective dissociation from reality, between persons, and between the aspects of
self which can distinguish fantasy from reality.
CONCLUSION: The Need for a Nonfragmented Perspective
The concept of pseudo-community in Beniger and its antecedents in Mills’s pseudoworld and Blumer’s rule of constant change, along with Marx and Engels’s critique of the
bourgeoisie, contribute to the idea that what happens in the mass experience is collective
dissociation. For while genuine communication serves as a cohesive glue forming
community by bonding person to person, pseudo-community is the result of genuine
interpersonal communication being supplanted by manipulative communication between
dominant mass institutions and atomized, scattered individuals. Though these individuals
may to varying degrees perceive that they are cohering parts of a cohesive collective
body, the means by which they are being addressed in the main portions of their waking
life are designed to prompt them to respond with isolated and discrete forms of behavior
which suit the agendas of mass institutions rather than with complex forms of behavior
which create complicated and inefficient yet bonded and genuine communities of human
beings.
Within this context, individualism thrives as an ethic and an ideology, but that
does not mean that the individual as a distinct social entity has survived. For collective
dissociation has the paradoxical effect of isolating individuals while denuding them of the
ability to be individually effective in the mass context. Yet the individual self still
25
maintains a keen desire to be seen and heard and, moreover, a tendency to believe that
mass institutions are willing and able to accomplish these ends for him for her. Thus the
more impersonal mass institutions become, the greater is their use of individualism in the
way they portray their relationships with their clients be they customers, students,
charitable donors, or citizens. At the highest reaches of social class in the United States,
the individual is indeed preserved in elite preparatory schools, Ivy League universities,
alternative liberal arts colleges, in the sales boutiques of the metropolitan center, in
deluxe apartment buildings and gated suburban communities, in the offices of therapists,
and other milieux. But at the middle and lower reaches of the class scale, the individual is
more often guided into options designed by persons and effected by forces neither seen
nor heard. That is, they are collectively asked to believe that the forces which cause their
dissociation instead bring them together.
The crisis of collective dissociation is vital for us to understand because of the
radical threat it poses to the humanist thread which connects all major world traditions in
art, philosophy, science, and religion. Until the middle nineteenth century, though human
freedom was generally more constrained than at present, little existed in the way of
massive institutions with the capacity to masquerade as instruments of connection while
functioning as forces of disintegration. The combination of fast advancing industrial and
communications technology which began with the Industrial Revolution (itself,
ironically, a result of the Enlightenment quest for greater human freedom through reason
and science) opened the way for this process of displacing humanist traditions with antihumanist pseudo-connections. That process, now late in its second century, continues
26
today and has become so familiar that any critique of it is seen as a form of utopian
fantasy.
A cursory review of Western and Eastern thought, however, reveals that
contemporary industrialized society – whether we call it modern, postmodern,
hypermodern, or ultramodern – is the antithesis of those traditions. For in those traditions,
a central recurring theme is the quest for integration whereas in mass society, the
tendency is to represent disintegration as integration (Epstein 1995; Fellman 1998). It is
the shape-shifting capacity of institutions within mass society to create this illusion which
makes collective dissociation the social psychological epidemic of out times.
The degree to which human beings will be able to grasp and remedy the dominant
crises of this era will likely be determined by the degree to which the majority of people
feel they are in contact with reality instead of propaganda. It will also depend on their
sense that having made contact with reality they have the capacity in union with others to
bring about change. Current trends, however, points in the reverse direction of such
possibilities. Our social environment has effectively been converted into an apparatus
through which mass institutions convey with ever increasing efficiency the signals that
the world, by and large, is not in a state of crisis and, to the extent that problems may
exist, these same institutions can be relied upon to lead the way to their resolution.
The reason sociology needs a concept like collective dissociation in order to
understand this situation is because mass institutions already have and use it. They play
upon the anxieties wrought by collective dissociation. Their promises for a better future
filled with better products play directly to the desire to fill in the social psychological
27
voids which collective dissociation creates and leaves empty. But rather than embracing
this problem and seeing it as all encompassing, for the better part of the last century
mainstream sociology and its sibling disciplines have instead embraced theoretical trends
like postmodernism, rational choice theory, functionalism, systems theory, the
“abstracted empiricism” (Mills, 1959: 50-75) of survey and quantitative research, and a
range of other perspectives which may contribute relevant pieces of analysis but which
shrink from presenting an overarching conceptualization of what is at the core of modern
social psychology and its discontents.
The concept of collective dissociation is one means to craft such far reaching
analysis, but it is only an example of what needs to be done. It is arguably the chief role
of social science to identify the master trends and main troubles of each era in a manner
accessible and relevant to both scholars and the general public. To the extent that these
disciplines veer toward infinitely discrete analyses and toward esoteric celebrations of the
fragmentation which threatens a humanistic and just social order, they have lost their way
and are to blame for their increasing irrelevance to mainstream debate. Meanwhile, the
language they have forgotten how to speak has been mastered by the main institutions of
mass society and is being used to deepen the crises which social science was devised to
confront and help resolve.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For their helpful comments, either directly on this text or through general conversation on
the topic, I wish to thank: Arthur J. Vidich, Gerald E. Levy, Deborah J. Cohan, Henry
28
Vandenburgh, Gordon Fellman, Douglas Pressman, Jody Jeglinski, the participants at the
2002 St. Thomas Aquinas College Faculty Research Retreat, and my students. I am also
grateful to the editor and reviewers at Humanity and Society, Corey Dolgon, Chet
Ballard, and Dan Egan, for their extremely helpful and generous comments and
suggestions. I am entirely responsible for any errors which occur in the text.
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