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62 Consuming Media

It is more problematic to try to locate power and resistance in two opposite camps.
Such a romantic, reifying and essentializing conception is widespread, not least in
cultural studies, where for instance John Fiske – building on Stuart Hall’s ideas –
argued that the preferred meanings encoded by ‘the power-bloc’ in the products of
the media and cultural industries tend to be decoded by ‘the people’ in unpredictable
and oppositional ways. This move detaches interpretation from the strategies of
economic power, and the ‘semiotic power’ ‘to construct meanings, pleasures, and
social identities’ is transmitted from ‘the power-bloc’ to ‘the people’. 48 These
constructions of ‘the power-bloc’ and ‘the people’ conceal any internal differences
and contradictions on both sides. Also, although meaning is produced rather than
reproduced at the moment of media use, there are institutionalized and structural
constraints in which this moment of interpretation takes place and which are not
addressed in Fiske’s analysis. It is important to recognize that texts are always inter-
preted in contexts where hegemonic ideological formations as well as material limi-
tations constrain people’s options. Resistant readings require efforts to break free of
daily routines that tend to affirm existing structures, and each resistance on one level
(for instance in class or generational terms) can easily in turn result in a reinforced
pattern of dominance along another dimension (for example when it comes to
gender, sexuality, or ethnicity).
The different forms of power are intertwined in everyday media consumption,
giving rise to intersecting sets of resistance along the corresponding axes. Yet different
schools of thought have continued to overemphasize either structural power or the
agency of individual or popular resistance. Some forms of ideology critique, political
economy and structuralist theories of social institutions or symbolic orders have exag-
gerated the power of structures to position, shape and steer individuals and masses.
Others have instead constructed overly optimistic analyses of consumers’ or subcul-
tures’ subversive uses of media contents. 49 In order to avoid such pendulum swings
between extreme positions, it is necessary to distinguish between weak and strong
forms of power and resistance. It was not wrong for cultural studies to break away
from the old Frankfurt School view of the culture industry as moulding the
consciousness and desires of the masses. The most totalizing and pessimistic analyses
by Adorno, Horkheimer and the young Habermas failed to understand the complex-
ities and inner contradictions of late-modern media culture. They are hard to sustain
after Raymond Williams’s critique of the whole concept of masses and mass culture:
‘The masses are always the others, whom we don’t know, and can’t know. … To other
people, we also are masses. Masses are other people. There are in fact no masses; there
are only ways of seeing people as masses.’ 50 But other and less totalizing lines of
thought were also present already in the early and classical Frankfurt School, and
Habermas’s later work has productively integrated some of cultural studies’ perspec-
tives on the media to modify his own models in ways that deserve a more construc-
tive treatment in cultural studies as well.
For instance, Adorno’s critique of the culture industry can be reconstructed in
light of his later philosophical and aesthetic writings to reveal highly sophisticated