Mass Media: From Collective Experience to the Culture of Privatization

Abstract

The project of developing a theory of mass culture and politically effective interpretations of the symbolic forms that organize social life has emerged from the transformations within capitalist society itself. Mass culture confronts us as a primary element of this society. By the same token, mass culture cannot itself be understood or analyzed except in the context of its role in producing and reproducing the social relations of capitalism. It is essential not to fall prey to the false dichotomy of labor and symbolic interaction, or to that between a libidinal politics and a politics oriented toward economic transformations. Capitalism does indeed exploit the body-the desiring body, but also the laboring body. The very possibility and effectiveness of mass culture, I will argue, lie in the way it organizes symbolic mediations and symbolic interactions in relation to the body and subjectivity as they are affected by the capitalist division of labor. Just as it is false to seek the distinctive reality of advanced capitalism in the autonomy of the psychological or the symbolic from the economic, it is also inadequate, I believe, to frame the distinction between 19th and 20th century capitalism only or predominantly in terms of the changing relation of society and the state. A broader and deeper mutation has occurred. The capitalist mode of production has evolved by transforming, in two phases, the relation between the economic and the symbolic dimensions of social life. In its first phase, it severed the economic from the symbolic, dissolving earlier social formations and producing the social conditions that Marx analyzed. But this process, which was always incomplete and contradictory, had consequences which have led to the second phase of capitalism. Now the economy, moving for itself, attempts to subsume the symbolic. Industrial production forcibly removed labor from all symbolic and affective contexts by turning the activity of producing into a quantity whose value could be abstractly designated by money. Wage labor reconstitutes labor as an expenditure of energy productive of exchange value. It separates from this activity all other expenditures of the body's energy, which, having been designated unproductive, manifest themselves in forms of erotic, aesthetic, and religious experience. These then stand in a completely eccentric relation to the dominant structuring force of society, namely, the economy. This division passes into the subject and bifurcates the producer's relation to the body. In its capacity to materially transform nature, the body becomes a pure instrument. The freedom of wage labor, as opposed to the labor of serf or slave, makes the body one's own only by turning it into one's own property. Just as capital deprived the producers of the