“In many ways, I feel that elements of the cultural studies movement and postmodernism, in emphasising human agency vis a vis the media, have obscured the extent to which the media influences people.” Indeed. morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/its-…
This is actually an important point. I was introduced to social theory in the '80s when there was no worse accusation than of engaging in a "Frankfurt School" style analysis which assumes consumers, voters etc are dupes of media, advertising etc 2/
This was considered elitist and puritanical - "what a hypocrite you are claiming to care about the proletariat and then attacking consumerism. Clearly their motorcycles & cars & (etc) are what's really important to them - they're just subversively reinterpreting them 3/
So basically all consumers were treated as if they were in subcultures & all subcultures were countercultures. Anyone who thought PR manipulated anyone was an idiotic fuddy duddy Marxist throwback. I used to call this "liberation in the imaginary" 4/
The irony is the Frankfurt school Marxists - for all they really were elitist & puritanical - we're also Jews who'd had to flee Nazism - one of the first ideologies to use modern advertising & PR techniques to seize and hold power 5/
Were those who became Storm Troopers "ironically reinterpreting" the propaganda they were getting from Goebbels? Sure maybe to a degree. The point is WHO THE FUCK CARES if they followed orders & carried out atrocities anyway 6/
Now that we're moving back toward fascism again we really need analytic tools that can avoid the absurdities & pessimism of e.g. Adorno but still allow that people can be duped & manipulated in horrific ways - even that they can't really be free w/out an understanding of this 7/
