The Voting Public: Power and Mass Culture

According to Bolter and Grusin, remediation of the self involves the reflexive influencing of media by social conventions and of social conventions by media.  Adorno and Horkheimer, conversely, see the remediations of the self by media as a direct result of society’s power structure perpetuating itself by appropriating media for the purpose of shaping “selves” into “the masses.” Specifically, in their chapter, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” they explain, “It is claimed that standards were based in the first place on consumers’ needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance.  The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows even stronger” (1113).  For them, the culture industry functions as a means for social control by remediating consumers’ needs to suit the political and economic objectives of the few in power who wish to stay in power.

This shaping of individuals into consumer identities has social and political implications in a much more direct sense as well.  In his discussion of voting behavior and public ideology in Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Jurgen Habermas provides the following excerpt:

Were one to compress into one sentence what the ideology of mass culture actually amounts to, one would have to present it as a parody of the statement, “Become what you are”: as a glorifying reduplication and rejustification of the state of affairs that exists anyway, while foregoing all transcendence and critique (216).

The excerpt is followed by an end note, and I incorrectly assumed that it stemmed from an earlier reference to Raymond Aron.  All the same, I could not help but write “A&H” in the margin, and as it happens, I did so for good reason. When I looked it up, this statement did indeed come from Theodor Adorno. 

            With this reference, Habermas links voter participation and the political decisions of the public with already established power structures.  Habermas connects political ideology to mass culture, and from there, calls upon Adorno to connect mass culture to the stifling of public incentive to action.  The insidiousness of the phrase, “Become what you are,” lies in its apparent espousing of the greatness of being yourself while it simultaneously implies that there is no need to attempt improvement, no room for personal change or growth.  Like the consumers who believe their cultural preferences reflect who they are as individuals, voters recognize themselves the most when supplied with ideology in line with what they already think.  Hearing their own views simply “generate(s) a rather homogenous climate of opinion” (Habermas 213), and from that perspective, hearing opposing views only realigns voters all the more with theeir own party. 

            The prescience of Habermas’ observation is striking.  Here we are, over forty years later, approaching an intensely polarized and hostile presidential election: both the party leaders and the voting blocs which pledge allegiance to them have abandoned any pretense of fostering a public united in its efforts toward a common good.  Instead, each party strives for extremism because their constituents know their way is the right way so the more extreme their opposition to their foes, the more justified and righteous they feel.  The majority of the voting public is aligned with one or the other extreme position, whether they believe in them in their entirety or not, just as sports fans are aligned with teams and consumers are aligned with particular brands, both without question.  Identification leads to loyalty, loyalty fuels identification, and how and with what we identify shapes who we are and how we act.  Rather than practice a critical self- and social awareness, these voters sustain their senses of who they are by sustaining the status quo. 

Works Cited

Bolter, David J. and Richard Grusin.  Remediation: Understanding New Media.  Cambridge:

MIT, 2000.  Print.

Habermas, Jurgen.  Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of

Bourgeois Society.  1962.  Trans. Thomas Burger.  Cambridge: MIT, 1989.  Print.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno.  “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass

Deception.” Excerpt from Dialectic of Enlightenment. 1947.  The Norton Anthology of

Theory and Criticism.  Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 2010.  1110-

1127.