The chapter is devoted to the relationship between power and the cultural arena. The importance of public discourse, its requirements and limits, is illustrated. Gramscis notions of hegemony and dominance are applied, with modifications, to our analysis of power. The role of the masses is discussed, together with the notion of totalitarianism and the importance of culture in dictatorial regimes such as the fascist and Nazi ones. Different notions of civil society, as contrasted to the state, and its role are considered, then religion as a charismatic-traditional form of power. Technocratic knowledge leads to a discussion of the role of the elites. Specialization is counterposed to general culture, recalling the debate on the two cultures (literary culture and social culture, Snow) or the three cultures (also including the humanities) and the importance of interdisciplinary culture and research. Positive and negative aspects of the new social media (Blogs, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc.) are illustrated, with cautions against the risks of corruption of the social discourse.

This chapter examines the petition system in the early People’s Republic of China. While the state’s policies related to “handling letters and visits from the people” were in some ways a continuation of long-standing traditions, this chapter argues that Maoist political culture reshaped letters-and-visits work in revolutionary ways. Interacting with the people by answering their letters and talking with them in government reception offices were two of the concrete tasks associated with the implementation of the Communist Party’s most fundamental governance strategy, the mass line. Work with letters and visits was one of the instruments Party leaders themselves used to observe and gauge the nature and success of their mass-line work. Documents from this endeavor certainly show that the people’s views were not consistently represented in political discourse and that mass-line rhetoric did sometimes aid Party Central in its more authoritarian endeavors. However, the history of letters and visits also reveals that the early PRC state was never able to fully realize the potential of petitions as a surveillance tool. At the same time, the central importance of mass-line discourse gave both rhetorical and practical power to ordinary people, in ways that had marked effects on state and society.

Few concepts have become as closely associated with war literature as trauma. War literature revolves around the isolated voices of soldiers and their deeply unsettled afterlives – it takes as its subject matter the individual experience and consequences of war. This chapter argues, however, that the mass may be more than incidental in our understanding of how war literature embodies trauma. An overwhelming experience, trauma is deeply entangled with mass warfare, industrialisation, and the homogenous, empty time of global capitalism. The question of mass or scale is central to how we have come to conceptualise trauma more generally, whether in relation to genocide, pandemics, ecological limits to growth, or the political consequences of global finance or even mass trauma itself. Understood as a structural condition of anxiety, trauma is now even encroaching upon the future as a pre-traumatic foreboding of militarism and the threat of global catastrophe. Examining these links between war and the mass, this chapter suggests a reconceptualization of trauma that associates its characteristic temporal dislocations with questions of scale, uniformity, and incomprehension.

This chapter examines Brecht’s approach to film not as a mimetic means of reproducing reality but as an indexical means of producing reality. It considers key passages of “The Threepenny Trial” and several interwar fragments in order to elucidate Brecht’s distinction between actual and functional reality and to elaborate the concept of the cognitively capable masses, whose collective perception made recognition of actual reality possible. It then offers brief analyses of the key films Brecht worked on, Kuhle Wampe and Hangmen Also Die!, which provide examples of the strategies Brecht employed to bend film to his aims of modeling mass-based cognition and reality production. These attempts opposed industrial norms, cultural convention, and the regulatory force of the state. They succeeded infrequently if at all, as Brecht himself acutely realized. Assessing the success and failure of these experiments allows greater insight into the potential of the medium of film in the second quarter of the twentieth century and creates potentially useful points of comparison to the complex relationship between representational media and the networked production of reality in our own times.

This chapter introduces the first of the fifteenth-century teacher Johannes Tinctoris’ three ‘registers’ of polyphony: the music for the Mass, beginning with the Mass cycle (setting the Ordinary of the Mass, in liturgical terms) and its development during the Renaissance, then the Propers of the Mass, then finally the Requiem. Whereas the setting of Propers and their chants is a practice as old as polyphony itself, the Mass cycle and the Requiem were more recent phenomena. Guillaume Du Fay’s ‘Missa L’Homme armé’ appears as a case-study, showing how the Mass cycle builds on the work of previous composers of Mass-music in England and aspects of the isorhythmic tradition (which in a sense it supersedes), whilst introducing new elements that condition the form’s later history through to the end of the Renaissance. The end of the chapter highlights the porousness of practice sketched earlier with regard to the boundary between mass-music and motets, discussed in the following chapter.