John Carey's Audience...?

An interesting point that was raised in this week's seminar concerned Carey's target audience for his book, The Intellectuals and the Masses. Upon first reading it, I assumed he was, if anything, more empathetic towards those that he described as 'the masses', i.e. lower and middle classes. This was largely down to the conspiratory voice which he seemed to employ throughout the book, revealing and condemning small snippets of private letters, (such as that of D H Lawrence, which I touched upon in my seminar paper).

However, one may argue that Carey does, at times, seem anxious of the masses themselves and their power to create 'products of mass culture', which are antagonistic to the public, as he cites Nietzsche as an example (pp.4). They have the freedom to represent what and who they desire, as they can be 'reshaped at will, in accordance with the wishes of the imaginer' (pp.23).

So in this respect, Carey may be sitting on the fence, championing the rights of the individual and fragmenting the intellectuals' interpretations of the masses, while also appreciating their worries and concerns over the direction of a 'mass society' in the future. This does, in turn, raise the question over how exactly to distinguish one as being a stand alone intellectual, or simply a cog in the monstrous social machine.

In times gone by, it was thought that an isolated knowledge, protected from the vast majority, defined a man (or back then to a lesser extent, a woman), as superior, due to this 'esoteric doctrine' being inaccessible to 'the herd', (as quoted from D H Lawrence - pp.71). A far simpler solution was to consider your social position as hereditary.

But as Carey continually points out, the concept of the masses is just that - a concept, an imaginary phenomenon that society seems to accept as real. The rift between classes may be real, but being wealthy or not doesn't determine a person's intellectual capacity and in this way, the aforementioned 'intellectuals' have been successful in embedding this mentality into the public, to create this fantastical divide. A loyal reader of The Sun may see him/herself as being incapable of understanding the more informative-based broadsheets, like The Times, but this may only be because said reader does not allow him/herself to understand them. The rift exists, but only in our minds.

Thus, while readers of his book may initially interpret Carey as 'the hero of the masses', I think he may actually be trying to distance himself from the term. Indeed, while not condoling the ideologies of the intellectuals either, he instead attempts to undermine the idea he is discussing, warning of the continued negative impact it may have in years to come.