In Rabelais’s tale the giant Gargantua is a vast and inescapable cluster of qualities and activities, less a human being than a force of nature: in his greed and incontinence, and in his voracious violence, he outdoes everyone else. “We can recognize,” says Julian Stallabrass, “in the old giant's size, ubiquity, gluttony, vast knowledge and warlike nature, qualities of our contemporary culture.”

In this brilliant polemic on our visual mass culture, Stallabrass argues that culture's status as a commodity is the most important thing about it, affecting its form, its relation to the viewer and its ideology. The great diversity of choice masks the extent to which this choice is managed by an ever-shrinking number of powerful owners. Stallabrass shows how the consistent and unifying capitalist ideology of mass culture leads to an increasingly homogeneous identity among its consumers. Even in marginal and radical cultural activities, like graffiti writing, can be found the tyranny of the brand name and the reduction of the individual to a cipher.

From the basic premiss that people are defined more by how they live (including what they consume) than who they are (in terms of race, gender or the other accepted categories of identity politics), Stallabrass begins with an analysis of subjects which affect specific interest groups? -- amateur photography, computer games, cyberspace and multimedia. He then works out to wider aspects of the culture which affect everyone, including shopping, cars, street furniture and television.

Gargantua raises profound questions about the nature and direction of mass culture. It also raises a challenge to the postmodern theorists' adherence to subjectivity, indeterminacy and political indifference. If manufactured subjectivities are always shot through with the objective, then their plurality may not be merely a colourful but meaningless postmodern smorgasbord, but rather the accurate reflection of our current cultural situation, and a map showing paths beyond it.

Julian Stallabrass teaches art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He is a regular contributor to Art Monthly and the Burlington Magazine. His High Art Lite is also available from Verso.


Publication
June 1996

224 pages
24 colour photos

Paper
1 85984 036 1
£12.95 / US$20.00 / CAN$26