Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 13

Hypervisual Standard of Popular Culture

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Campbell's Tomato Soup can, to Jackson Pollock's rejection of all
European narrative in his abstract, endlessly spatial p>aintings, we
have the real gold, not the fool's gold, of New-World
hypervisualized culture--a culture producing no great German
existentialists or Italian opera stars but the nineteenth-century
school of "Luminists” and the twentieth-century nonpareil in light
writing, Ansel Adams. From Thomas Paine's popular political
pamphlets announcing, "In language as plain as A, B, C, I hold up
truth to your eyes" {Crisis 15), to the utilization of newspapers and
television by present-day "image specialists"—the entourage of
make-up men and cameramen, for example, testing the light to see just
what profile and demeanor Ronald Reagan should take when looking
out across the Berlin Wall (Weisman 188)—we find ourselves
contending with the Emersonian caveat that "perception is not
whimsical, but fatal" ("Self-Reliance" 156).
Moreover, since my primary purpose here has been simply to
expose the hypervisual ideal in all its "popular" power, I shall not
enter now into the obvious myriad of questions concerning the good or
bad effects of this intense ocularity—viz., the effect of television upon
one's imagination or aggressiveness or morals; the effect of
voyeurism/exhibitionism in "girlie magazines" upon women's rights
or male sexual response; the effect that "in contemporary American
politics, public figures are known primarily for their 'images’"
(Nimmo and Savage 1). I have merely wished to point out that the
unique and almost inconceivable power of the ocular ideal has been
the means of addressing D.H. Lawrence's most pertinent question"Why isn't the American a European still, like his father before
him?" (4)
I now briefly turn to test the extent to which the more "serious" or
high-cultural life of the New World both manifests the hypervisual
ideal and employs pop-cultural materials and standards in the
creation of its works—here, specifically, I turn to look at the classics
of American literary art in the light of a Walt Whitman's "popular"
observation about the New-World poet: "The others are as good as
he, only he sees it and they do not" ("1855 Preface" 715, emphasis
added).