{"id":59,"date":"2024-08-23T14:01:58","date_gmt":"2024-08-23T14:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/routledgelearning.com\/rhr-cultureliteratureandthearts\/?page_id=59"},"modified":"2024-09-27T13:27:01","modified_gmt":"2024-09-27T13:27:01","slug":"theoretical-approaches-to-the-reception-of-popular-forms-of-entertainment-and-visual-culture","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/routledgelearning.com\/rhr-cultureliteratureandthearts\/essays\/theoretical-approaches-to-the-reception-of-popular-forms-of-entertainment-and-visual-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"Theoretical Approaches to the Reception of Popular Forms of Entertainment and Visual Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Patricia Smyth<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Theatre and Performance Department, University of Warwick<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This essay explores theoretical approaches to popular reception, drawing on discussions in the fields of theatre history, art history, and the history of visual technologies. Across a range of popular media, a new form of immersive realism emerged and, with it, a new mode of engagement. I consider critical accounts that frame nineteenth-century spectatorship as a \u2018fall from grace\u2019 compared with the rowdy interactive behaviour of audiences of the early part of the century or the traditional practices of folk culture. Recent scholarship that attempts to \u2018rehabilitate\u2019 nineteenth-century spectatorship is examined. The essay concludes by suggesting that some of the current discussion about affect may offer a new direction for work that foregrounds the spectators<\/a>\u2019 share in the creation of meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Introduction<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>The nineteenth century is seen as a period of rapid industrialisation and urban transformation in which a new kind of commercially-driven popular culture emerged. The public in this period was both larger and more urban than ever before as populations burgeoned and rates of migration to towns and cities increased (<\/a>Daly 2015). According to the classic view of nineteenth-century metropolitan life, this resulted in the breakdown of traditional communities and social atomisation in a newly deracinated population. How far this was the case across the country remains subject to discussion (<\/a>Plunkett 2013). However, an account of a visit to London in 1809 by the Swedish historian and poet Erik Gustaf Geijer is particularly evocative. Geijer wrote of feeling \u2018lonely among a million human beings\u2019 and continued:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>I have never had a more vivid conception of a desert than at the moment when I first found myself in the midst of the most populous city in Europe. I experienced quite vividly the sensation of being a <\/a>stranger<\/em>. Among savages the word means the same as <\/a>enemy<\/em>. But even that is a human relationship. Here I was mortally insignificant to the whole world, except to my postilion until he got his payment, and to mine host so long as he was waiting for his. Oddly enough, money is only a symbol of commodities of commodities. How much is a human being worth then, when he is a symbol of the symbol? \u2013 a shadow of a shadow?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>(<\/a>Geijer 1932, 83)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Geijer paints a picture of a city where the traditional bonds of community have been fully eroded and individuals have become mere ciphers of their purchasing power. While the question of how far older allegiances of, say, religion or metier continued to be active remains moot, nineteenth-century audiences had certainly become more socially diverse. As Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow argued in their study of London theatregoing in the latter part of the century, so-called \u2018working-class\u2019 theatres catered to an \u2018extremely broad social and economic spectrum\u2019, complicating any rigid definition of the \u2018popular\u2019 as a distinct realm separate from that of \u2018high\u2019 culture (<\/a>Davis and Emeljanow 2001, 230).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>If nineteenth-century audiences were notably more mixed than had previously been the case, the new popular culture itself was also marked by its capacity to move across boundaries and between contexts, whether social, cultural, or national. Developments in transportation meant that successful plays in London were rapidly adapted for the Paris stage, and <\/a>vice versa<\/em>. With regard to the visual arts, the sheer number of images that flooded the market in this period has been referred to as a \u2018media explosion\u2019 (<\/a>Farwell 1981, 2). New technologies could produce larger print runs more cheaply than ever before. This enabled the dissemination to wider and more diverse publics not only of original works but also of reproductions of paintings and representations of theatrical staging. Nineteenth-century visual culture is also marked by the circulation of images between different media. A painting exhibited in Paris might appear the following year as a \u2018realisation\u2019, meaning a scaled-up, three-dimensional replica using actors in place of painted figures, in an east end of London or transpontine (that is to say the Surrey-side of the River Thames) theatre (<\/a>Norwood 2009, 140; <\/a>Smyth 2022, 203).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>The enthusiasm of this new public for certain plays, pictures, or news stories often perplexed contemporary commentators, who sought to fathom the seemingly mysterious motivations of crowds, an issue that continues to provoke lively discussion today; indeed, it has been argued that the technological transformation of this period is analogous to the digital revolution of our own time (<\/a>Crary 1990, 1\u20132). Understanding the experience of nineteenth-century popular audiences is therefore of key importance; yet research on historical spectators presents a particular set of challenges since the individuals in question rarely left any testimony of their experiences and so direct evidence of contemporary responses to art, theatre, or other types of spectacular entertainment is scarce. Information mainly comes from press reviews; however, critics were not representative of the broader public and their accounts of popular spectatorship are often coloured by their own prejudices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>This essay explores theoretical approaches to popular reception, drawing on discussions in the fields of theatre history, art history, and the history of visual technologies. Approaching the issue from different angles, a common thread may be detected. Across a range of popular media, we see the emergence of a particular form of nineteenth-century immersive realism. This mode presents certain difficulties for scholars since it has no generally recognised name, having never been allocated a style term, such as \u2018Realism\u2019 (with a capital \u2018R\u2019) or \u2018Naturalism\u2019. A recent study of Sensation drama refers to its visual effects as \u2018mind-bogglingly <\/a>real\u2019<\/em>, which conveys something of the magic and wonder of this aesthetic (Hofer-Robinson and Palmer 2019, xiv). Given the comparison that some scholars have noted between the nineteenth century and the technological developments of our own time, terms drawn from the discussion of new media may be of use. Caroline Radcliffe has argued that the nineteenth-century practice of realisation may be compared to the process of remediation, a term used by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin in their work on twentieth- and twenty-first-century media to describe the way in which each new technology references, while also claiming to surpass, the previous one (<\/a>Radcliffe 2012; <\/a>Bolter and Grusin 1999). Bolter and Grusin\u2019s account is somewhat teleological in that film is argued to remediate photography, while virtual reality remediates film. The nineteenth-century context is different in that a diverse range of technologies co-existed. These included not only painting and theatrical spectacle, but also panoramas (both 360-degree paintings-in-the-round, and moving panoramas), dioramas, stereoscopic photographs, and many more. In Bolter and Grusin\u2019s model, each new medium trumps the reality claim of the previous one, but it is more useful to think of nineteenth-century media as a network, with multiple iterations of a given image serving to validate the authenticity claim of the others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>The facility with which an image could be realised, or remediated, from one format to another worked to intensify the sensation that there was, in fact, no medium at all between the spectator and the image viewed. Bolter and Grusin describe this effect as \u2018immediacy\u2019, and this term can be usefully applied to nineteenth-century visual culture that invited the beholder to look \u2018through\u2019 signs of mediation and to respond as they would to a direct encounter (Bolter and Grusin 1999, 11). Evidence suggests that popular spectators expressly sought this type of engagement, choosing to overlook the technical aspects particular to a given medium, and responding instead to emotional content (<\/a>L\u00fcbbren 2023; <\/a>Smyth 2022). The idea of two distinct modes of engagement, each associated with a different social group, is seen in both art and theatre criticism. As David Solkin has shown, the crowds who visited the Royal Academy exhibitions were attracted to story, situation, and character. The tastes of connoisseurs were, in contrast, distinguished from those of the wider public by their \u2018ability to treat matters of form as distinctly separate from those of content\u2019 (<\/a>Solkin 2001, 159). Similarly, Jim Davis has shown how emotional response to theatrical performance became increasingly associated with lower class or provincial audiences as the century progressed (<\/a>Davis 2017, 530). These spectator positions are, of course, constructions, and contemporary sources do not provide a transparent window on to the experience of individuals; however, it stands to reason that in the context of a newly expanded public, spectators lacking specialist knowledge were more likely to respond to the emotions of a given story or situation since this type of engagement is accessible to anyone. The idea of a purely aesthetic engagement that excludes other types of affective response also originates in this period and arguably stems, at least partly, from the desire of some spectators to distinguish themselves from the \u2018crowd\u2019 (<\/a>Smyth 2022).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>The visceral power of spectacular illusion has been seen both then and now as somewhat troubling. As the art historian David Freedberg has argued, the power of certain images to prompt strong emotional responses analogous to those that we might feel if confronted with a given situation in real life is considered \u2018too embarrassing, too blatant, too rude, and too uncultured\u2019. Such responses \u2018make us aware of our kinship with the unlettered, the coarse, the primitive, the undeveloped\u2019 (<\/a>Freedberg 1989, i). This view rests on traditional suspicion of idolatry, which runs through nineteenth-century commentaries. As Martin Jay has explored, a dominant strand of twentieth- and twenty-first-century anti-visual thought subsequently built on these traditional attitudes, adding a political dimension (<\/a>Jay 1994). This approach, in which vision is equated with voyeurism, objectification, and other forms of false knowledge, is exemplified in Guy Debord\u2019s concept of \u2018the spectacle\u2019. In Debord\u2019s view, the whole of capitalist society functions according to the logic of commodity fetishism. The multisensory experience of reality is reduced to phantasmagoric images, while the other senses, especially that of touch, are downgraded. Touch has a privileged status in this discussion. If vision is seductive yet unreliable, touch has the potential to expose its illusions. As Jonathan Crary writes, the spectacle involves the \u2018unloosening of the eye from the network of referentiality incarnated in tactility\u2019 (<\/a>Crary 1990, 19).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>In nineteenth-century discussions, as now, disdain for the emotional effects of spectacular illusion was manifested in calls for the \u2018proper\u2019 boundaries of the arts to be reasserted. As Jane Moody has explored in her account of illegitimate theatrical culture in this period, \u2018defenders of \u201cThe Drama\u201d\u2019 opposed what they considered to be a \u2018theatre of meretricious spectacle\u2019 in favour of the supposedly more rational pleasures of language (<\/a>Moody 2000, 28). In recent scholarship, arguments against spectacle and for an interactive mode of reception are framed in political terms. As Jay writes, \u2018the spectacle\u2019 is the antithesis of festival, since it \u2018operates by radically separating individuals, preventing dialogue [and] thwarting unitary class consciousness\u2019 (<\/a>Jay, 1994, 427). In art historical scholarship, as Freedberg has explored, the emotional power of images is downgraded in favour of a purely aesthetic appreciation of formal qualities, and an aversion to story and narrative as somehow outside the proper concern of visual art. Here, too, the fracturing of illusion is framed as a form of political critique. For example, in his history of nineteenth-century art, Stephen F. Eisenman justifies the focus of the book on canonical modernist examples by stating that \u2018formally innovative works\u2019, by which he means those that in one way or another draw attention to the materiality of the medium, \u2018may in fact be judged more significant than conservative ones because they played a greater role in bringing about (or, at least, compellingly addressing) historical change\u2019 (<\/a>Eisenman 1994, 13).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Some recent scholarship has attempted to counter negative evaluations of popular spectacle, for instance, by insisting upon the self-reflexive awareness of popular audiences or on the haptic aspect of a given entertainment, understood to invite a more active form of engagement (<\/a>Voskuil 2002; <\/a>Hill 2018). However, in making these arguments, the authors of these studies tacitly accept a view of spectacular entertainment as a conduit of ideology imposed upon a passive public. This essay examines these approaches before proposing a new direction. Drawing on affect theory, I focus on the openness to interpretation of images as a way to consider the spectators<\/a>\u2019 share in the creation of meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Critical accounts of nineteenth-century spectacular entertainment<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>One of the clear themes to emerge in critical accounts of nineteenth-century spectacle is the idea that the new commercially-driven popular culture represented a \u2018fall from grace\u2019. According to this view, earlier habits of rowdy theatrical spectatorship or the traditional practices of folk culture are presented in utopian terms as allowing for just the kind of active participation that is supposedly no longer possible in modernity. For instance, in his analysis of Hogarth\u2019s <\/a>Southwark Fair<\/em> of 1734, Jonathan Crary posits that the painting juxtaposes the tail end of popular \u2018carnival\u2019 culture, represented by the lively interactions of the disordered crowd, with the new mode of spectatorship, exemplified in the peep box, a form of itinerant entertainment that invited spectators to view a scene through a small aperture, prominently situated in the foreground (<\/a>Crary 2002). According to Crary, the presence of this apparatus in Hogarth\u2019s picture signals the advent of a new form of engagement in which the individual becomes an \u2018isolated consumer of a mass-produced commodity\u2019 (<\/a>Crary 2002, 8). As he writes, \u2018The prioritization of visuality was accompanied by imperatives for various kinds of self-control and social restraint, particularly for forms of attentiveness that require both relative silence and immobility\u2019, thus, \u2018the multifaceted festival <\/a>participant<\/em> is turned into an individualized and self-regulated <\/a>spectator<\/em>\u2019 (Crary 2002, 9, 11).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>In theatre history, the contrast between the raucous, sociable audiences of the earlier part of the century and the more decorous behaviour of later spectators is seen as an effect of changes to staging such as the development of the proscenium arch and the clear separation of the acting space from the audience. In an article on the scenic designs of Philippe de Loutherbourg, Christopher Baugh argues that this new configuration \u2018indicated a clear function for the audience: a neutral, observing passivity, with an invitation to retain an anonymous distance\u2013not to engage physically with the act of performance, for fear of breaking the illusion\u2019 (<\/a>Baugh 2007, 266). The repositioning of the spectator that Baugh describes here took place across a range of nineteenth-century media. A comparable relationship of beholder to image may be seen in the Diorama, a French invention by the scenic designer and future inventor of the Daguerreotype, L.J.M. Daguerre, which opened in London in 1823, having been successfully introduced in Paris the previous year. The Diorama consisted of a large painting, often depicting Gothic ruins or a landscape, on a transparent medium, approximately 70 by 45 feet, which when lit from above and behind created subtle effects of movement such as the twinkling of stars and the darkening of the sky. The illusion of depth was partly achieved by the novel use of a darkened auditorium, so that the image appeared as a kind of hallucination without any external reference point that might indicate its true nature. The proscenium stage and the Diorama were quite different, then, since theatre auditoria remained illuminated until the late nineteenth century. However, both of these, and, indeed, the peep box, share the common aim of immersion in the illusion, aided by the eradication, so far as possible, of external reference points that might signal the artifice of the spectacle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>Crary refers to \u2018self-control\u2019, and this type of approach is indebted to Foucault\u2019s conception of the \u2018self-disciplining\u2019 of the modern subject, according to which, instead of punishing the body for infractions, power restructures the self, conditioning individuals through everyday practices to behave as well-functioning units in a capitalist society. Crary and others argue that the focused attention required by the new visual culture worked to discipline the spectator, effectively preparing them for existence in a commodity culture of phantasmagoric images. In his book <\/a>Suspensions of Perception<\/em>, Crary cites Richard Wagner\u2019s operas as an example of spectacular culture that compels this type of response, but, as Brian Hand has pointed out, his analysis could equally be applied to popular dramas such as Dion Boucicault\u2019s <\/a>The Colleen Bawn<\/em>, first performed in London in 1861 (<\/a>Hand 2000). This was the first play to be dubbed a \u2018Sensation\u2019 drama, by which it was meant that its success with the public depended on one or more extraordinary \u2018sensation scenes\u2019. In the case of <\/a>The Colleen Bawn<\/em>, the play\u2019s appeal was thought to have rested on a pivotal sequence, which took place in a moonlit \u2018watercave\u2019. The villain, having previously lured the heroine into his boat, was seen to row her to the centre of the dark pool, where he attempted to drown her by pushing her into the water (created using layers of blue gauze). After sinking and rising three times, the heroine was rescued at the last moment by the hero, diving in to save her. This highly suspenseful action would certainly have commanded the kind of focussed attention that Crary identifies as part of the disciplining of the modern subject; however, one objection to such a view is that it denies the agency of spectators, who are imagined as the passive receptors of the \u2018top down\u2019 narratives embedded in seductive, yet inauthentic, cultural products.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>In the following section, I look at recent approaches that seek to assert a more active role for spectators. I also touch on what is known as the \u2018modernity thesis\u2019. This dovetails to some extent with Crary\u2019s arguments about attention and is often invoked in discussions of the high-tension situations of Sensation drama. Spectators are said to have been primed by the \u2018stress, and bodily peril\u2019 of the urban environment to crave entertainments that aroused feelings of thrill or anxiety. As Ben Singer writes, \u2018the modern individual [\u2026] internalized the tempos, shocks, and upheavals of the outside environment, and this generated a taste for hyperkinetic amusements\u2019 (<\/a>Singer 2001, 62). This has prompted counter-arguments by John Plunkett and others, who oppose the idea of a single model of spectatorship and advocate \u2018micro-historical\u2019 approaches which acknowledge regional and cultural differences in the way that modernity was experienced (<\/a>Plunkett 2013, 5). My own objection is that it defines the spectator\u2019s experience according to a narrow range of extreme affective responses, such as terror and shock, leaving little room for more creative or imaginative engagement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n