Late Modernism. Robert Genter

would keep Poster “thrashing about” for a prolonged period, had in fact become more “at peace with himself” by ending his “ambivalence” and “animus” toward his family and accepting their “warmth and positive feeling” (544). Equally surprising was that such a resolution to his family turmoil had also resulted in the “sharpening” of Poster’s political position, enabling him to formulate a much more coherent and consistent critique of American society and strengthening his commitment to the Communist cause. As Riesman explained in his revised discussion, Poster’s case history was “an example of how radical political views may in certain situations be less directly related to the family pattern of emotions than in the picture portrayed by Lasswell and taken as the starting point of my original analysis.” Consequently, Riesman cautioned against the tendency within books such as Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer or Milton Rokeach’s The Open and the Closed Mind to regard any form of political allegiance as a form of fanaticism; if anything, Riesman believed that there was something slightly odd, if not pathological, about those who exhibited no rudimentary political attachment. Unlike Harold Lasswell or Lionel Trilling, Riesman refused to consider politics merely “the dumping ground” for private emotional or familial troubles. For him, studies of the authoritarian personality did “not carry us far” in understanding the outlooks, personalities, and political orientations of most, if not all, Americans.⁷⁶ Consequently, Faces in the Crowd was full of hesitations, corrections, and open admissions of speculation, something Riesman found missing in The Authoritarian Personality.

      The second misreading of his book that Riesman challenged was the tendency of hasty readers to equate the rise of other-directedness with everything fundamentally amiss in American culture. Riesman always fretted that the irony and speculation with which he wrote was misinterpreted as nostalgia for an inner-directed world steadily disappearing and as a mockery of the contemporary, other-directed society quickly emerging. In fact, his typology referred only to the mechanisms of conformity, internal and external, that directed individual behavior and not to the actual content or political orientation of any particular character type. All three types, tradition-directed, inner-directed, and other-directed, possessed the capacity for adjusted, anomic, and autonomous behavior. As Riesman explained, “the achievement of autonomy presents quite different problems when it has to be won against a background of inner-direction or of other-direction.”⁷⁷ In fact, he argued that other-directed personalities, continuously attuned to an everyday world of social expectations and demands, possessed a greater sensitivity to others and a greater capacity for understanding individual development. Unlike Erich Fromm, Riesman believed that the loss of the primary ties of blood, soil, and nation allowed for forms of relatedness, care, and compassion missing from earlier forms of social organization and that the weakening of inner-directed restrictions helped to expand everyday notions of the good life. Indeed, Riesman was quite befuddled by reviewers who marked the book as a tragic tale: “Not that Americans today are more conformist—that has always been a profound misinterpretation; and it is not that today’s Americans are peculiar in wanting to impress others or be liked by them; people generally did and do. The difference lies in a greater resonance with others, a heightened self-consciousness about relations to people, and a widening of the circle of people with whom one wants to feel in touch.”⁷⁸ The other-directed self, in this sense, was more responsible and more responsive to the demands for recognition, affection, and love from others within the community of action. Such a self was present to others, for others, and with others in a way that previous character types were not.

      Consequently, where high modernists saw only confusion, dread, and uncertainty as the life-denying consequences of recent social changes, Riesman saw mobility, flexibility, and openness as the life-affirming possibilities. As he explained, “Aldous Huxley’s acidly brilliant vision in Brave New World that advancing mechanization and organization require a graded retrogression in personality development may metaphorically describe what has happened to some people and some cultures, but it is no less true that standardization in machinery (once the earlier, more ferocious stages of industrialization are over) allows us greater rather than less variety in character structure.”⁷⁹ Riesman knew that character types were never a perfect fit; indeed, he seemed more interested in the ways in which individuals struggled and squirmed beneath the roles they had been assigned to play. Character was not destiny, the individual was not merely a replica of a particular social role, and personality was not reducible to a particular stage of psychological development. Willing to experiment with alternative roles in an endless struggle for autonomy, the other-directed personality was more self-aware and more self-conscious than his predecessors and therefore more able “to recognize and respect his own feelings, his own potentialities, [and] his own limitations.”⁸⁰ Although the other-directed personality was intruded upon by myriad visages and voices throughout the day, Riesman argued that social interaction was simultaneously threatening and benign, something to fret about and something to enjoy. Agreeing with his high modernist companions that the self was already constituted before it was self-constituted, he also argued that the self gained purpose, direction, and meaning through involvement with the projects of others and through face-to-face interactions with members of various peer groups.

      In this sense, Riesman’s formulation of identity bore little resemblance to high modernist notions of aesthetic self-formation. In a series of articles published in early volumes of American Quarterly, including “Listening to Popular Music,” which he had begun in 1947 but did not finish until after the publication of The Lonely Crowd, and “Movies and Audiences,” which he coauthored with his wife, Evelyn, Riesman challenged the disdain with which highbrow critics dissected America’s cultural landscape.⁸¹ Rejecting arguments that the culture industry completely manipulated passive audiences, Riesman criticized high modernists for their failure to address the reception side of cultural consumption and for their inability to appreciate how the divisions of class, race, gender, and religion affected the ways in which the interpretation of goods took place. Borrowing from the findings of Paul Lazarsfeld and his fellow researchers at the Bureau of Applied Social Research, which demonstrated that the meaning and content digested by consumers from mass media was often translated, distorted, or inverted by local opinion leaders and local settings, Riesman argued that “the same or virtually the same popular culture materials” were utilized by American audiences “in radically different ways and for radically different purposes,” and consequently “it may then appear that it is the audience which manipulates the product (and hence the producer), no less than the other way around.”⁸² For instance, in his 1950 article “Listening to Popular Music,” Riesman challenged Theodor Adorno’s argument in “On Radio Music” concerning stereotyped listening habits and called for not merely an analysis of the content of popular music but an investigation into the actual audiences who consumed such cultural forms. As Riesman explained, “the danger exists then of assuming that the other audience, the audience one does not converse with, is more passive, more manipulated, more vulgar in taste, than may be the case.” He pointed to the abrupt shifts in popular music tastes over the years as examples of the music industry reacting to, instead of directing, consumer demands. Riesman distinguished between majority tastes (those who digested popular music uncritically and used it primarily for social purposes such as camaraderie or personal distinction) and minority tastes (those who rebelled against commercialized forms through the development of sophisticated standards of listening). Consequently, he encouraged researchers to examine not only the sites in which music and other cultural goods were consumed but the particular character structure of the individual who used these goods for divergent purposes. As he observed, “we cannot simply ask ‘who listens to what?’ before we find out who ‘who’ is and what ‘what’ is by means of a psychological and content analysis which will give us a better appreciation of the manifold uses, the plasticity of music for its variegated audiences” (193).

      In this sense, Riesman was much more encouraged by the often idiosyncratic ways in which commodities were endowed with meaning and argued that the advantage other-directed personalities had over their inner-directed predecessors was precisely in the ways in which cultural consumption allowed for a rapid expansion of forms of identification. He challenged the tendency to divide leisure activities between active and passive forms, in particular, the tendency to promote “craftsmanlike leisure” activities as a way to recover