Organisierte Modernität? Konstruktion und Konzeption der Massenkultur in Frankreich

Organised Modernity? Construction and Conception of Mass Culture in France

Since the end of the nineteenth century, the rise of mass culture in France was an ambivalent experience giving stimulation to attempts of scientific re-conceptualisation and regulation of society. On the basis of this observation, the article analyses scientistic descriptions of mass culture and cultural policies as conceptions of order and practices of ordering. At the turn of the 19th century, the early French theories of mass culture remained post-liberal compromises. After the end of the Second World War, intellectuals and cultural technocrats developed more large-scale projects of collective renewal by dirigisme. In the 1970s, the thus developed configuration of experts and cultural planning of the state suffered a serious crisis raising the questioning of the organisability of the modernity of massculture. The French history of the perception of mass culture therefore appears as a history of cultural engineering and its limitations.