M
Marxism, Neo-Marxism
Mass Consumption
Media, Mass Media
Mediatization
Metaphor, Metonym
Modernity, Modernism
Modern Architecture

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MARXISM, NEO-MARXISM

Marxism -- A Hegelian-inspired philosophy that concentrated on political economy; an economic-deterministic perspective of the world. Marx's base-superstructure theory (economic base provided for cultural superstructure) was later elaborated by theorists such as Antonio Gramsci (hegemony). See also Marx, Hegel.

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MASS CONSUMPTION

See also Culture Industry.

Tenets:
a) Mass consumption - modern, and now postmodern cultural life promotes standardized, mass production products that are designed to be consumed in a faddish way.
b) Now styles in clothes, furniture, food, music, etc. are much less predictable.
c) Postmodernity leads to an extension of culture but also an expansion of commodification of culture (this can be seen positively and negatively).

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MEDIA, MASS MEDIA

Two very important terms, and they often don't mean the same thing, although they are often used interchangeably.

First, a quick note about something that Communications and Journalism professors never stop going on about: Media is a plural, the singular of which is medium. So television, for example, is a mass medium, whereas TV, newspapers, radio, etc are collectively the mass media. Got it? Using media incorrectly is an automatic "F" in some classes, so beware.

Anyway, a medium is really only a term for any channel of communication between two or more people (as in a "spirit medium" which some living people use to contact the dead). A mass medium is a specific form of medium and a type of communication that allows one producer to communicate simultaneously with more than one person (or millions of people, for that matter). That's why newspapers, television, the World Wide Web, etc. are all considered mass media (plural when you're talking about them collectively).

More to come . . .

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MEDIATIZATION

See also Baudrillard:
Mediatization is the general process by which the transmission of symbolic forms becomes increasingly mediated by the technical and institutional apparatus of the media industries (Thompson):
a) Television is the central media in this process.
b) Acceleration of media saturation has continued (eg. "in car" entertainment, VCRs, Walkman).
c) Process leads to mediated quasi-interaction due to lack of real interaction betwen people.

NB: See also valorization - the process through which symbolic forms attain value; both symbolic value and economic value.

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METAPHOR, METONYM

Briefly: In semiotic theory, both metaphors and metonyms are regarded as phrases/signs that stand for something else (a referent). Everyone knows what a metaphor is (e.g., "A Mighty Fortress is Our God"). However, metonyms are supposed to have some sort of indexical or iconic relationship to the thing being described. What does this mean? Well, a good example of a metonymical relationship between a symbol and its referent is the use of the word "Crown" or the symbol of the crown to denote British or other Commonwealth government activities (e.g., Crown lands, the Crown Prosecution Service, or the crown symbol on police officers helmets). The Crown denotes the state and all it stands for, but the crown also refers to the physical crown worn by the head of state, the queen.

See also:

• Semiotics
  
• Signs, signification
  

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MODERNITY, MODERNISM

k.i.s.s.
Perhaps one of the best ways of understanding modernism and its bastard successor, postmodernism, is to look at examples of how these concepts have affected different areas of our culture, arts, sciences, and so on. For a brief outline of how this has happened, click here to check out Modernism and Postmodernism: Some Symptoms & Useful Distinctions (part of this site's new media literacy project). (5/98)

Beyond this, we have to remember that modernity and modernism are two different concepts. So what is modernity? Well, one way of describing it is to call it a period of history characterized by a complex set of industrial developments, including the increasing concentration of people in towns and cities, greater geographical mobility occasioned by steam engines and railway networks, and enormous popular faith in industrial and technological progress. This all took place sometime between the 16th and early 20th centuries.

Modernity, in a nutshell, is the continuation of the Enlightenment project. One way of classifying it in broad terms is as the most recent of the three great eras of Western development, the other two being the Classical era of the ancient Greeks and the medieval era.

"The modern era, from the deep perspective of the historian of human thought, began after the Renaissance, or possibly with the Enlightenment, or at any rate when ever ideas such as technological progress and the discovery of knowledge through reason and science began to undermine the authority of religion" (Woolley, 171).

Modernism, however, is not exactly the same thing:
"Modernism can be thought of as the self-concious response in the arts to the experience of modernity that appeared in the arts" in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (Ibid.) It embodied "a radically altered aesthetic form and perspective: the modernist stress upon art as a self-referential construct instead of as a mirror of nature or society" (Lunn, Marxism and Modernism, p. 41). It was supposedly the development of "impersonal poetics, dehumanization in the visual arts, collective or mass characters in theatre, and the fragmentation of personality in the novel" as important features in the cultural landscape that led, directly or indirectly, to the rise of modernism. This "revolt against positivism in natural science and social thought, anticipated by Baudelaire and Nietzsche in the 1860s and 1870s, gained momentum by the 1890s and 1900s." Such threats to positivist science and secular optimism were brought on, in part, by a political and intellectual crisis of liberalism.

This undermining of liberalism eventually spread from the artistic to the political realm. "That much modernist culture grew out of such a weakening of liberal optimism helps to explain how it was not until the 1920s, and especially the 1930s, that a group of German marxist intellectuals became sympathetic to the alternative culture of the modernists" (Lunn, pp. 39-40). Indeed, "it was modernists [such as Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno] who moved toward Marxism, and not vice versa" (Lunn, p. 69). Even though the direct attempts to use modernists aesthetics for Marxist ends was short-lived (as in Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia, for example), modernism's impact on wider society was to prove much deeper.

cf. Postmodernity, postmodernism
Postmodernism, in effect, represents either a continuation of modernism, or a radical break with modernism. No-one is yet quite sure.
5/98

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MODERN ARCHITECTURE

According to architectural critic Charles Jencks, the death of Modern architecture can be pinpointed: "Modern Architecture went out with a bang . . . [I]t died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3:32 p.m." (Jencks, 1991, p. 23). This was the time when the prize-winning Pruitt-Igoe housing scheme was destroyed. This scheme had been classically modern, built "according to the principles of the Congress of International Modern Architects, which put economic and sociological issues above those of style [or humanity] as the imperatives of architectural progress" (Woolley, 170).

See also:

• Architecture in Postmodern Style.

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