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theoretical ideas on cultural power and resistance. He emphasized that people ‘do not
really believe’ in ‘the primitive wish fulfilments’ of the culture industry and that it can
never totally succeed in moulding their consciousness or needs. He also argued that
modern subjectivity reflects the ‘antagonistic’ character of modern society in a way
that makes individuals ‘antagonistic in themselves’, and ‘both free and unfree’. 51
Hence, although the Frankfurt School emphasized the power of economic and
bureaucratic forces in its analysis of the culture industry, it did not deny the possi-
bility of resisting them.
In his later work, Habermas analysed the dialectics between the two large societal
systems of state and market, and the lifeworld (the horizons of meaning and inter-
pretation in which people act and communicate), whose interaction is steered by the
tools of money and administrative power, structured by the institutionalized roles of
employee, consumer and client, but which also depends on symbolic communication
between citizens. 52 The lifeworld is rationalized and differentiated by the two
modern systems, at the same time that it is threatened by their colonization. The
outcome of these processes remains open, carrying both authoritarian and emanci-
patory possibilities. The modern differentiation processes have meant that society
comprises a decentred network of plural but interconnected ‘particularized forms of
life and lifeworlds’, whose mutual interlacing through communicative action binds
society together, in spite of all its diversity. The lifeworld is in late modernity actually
an increasingly open network structure of pluralized and particularized (though still
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collective) lifeworlds. Habermas’s notion of the uncoupling of the systems from the
lifeworld is analogous to Bourdieu’s idea of the differentiation of power and resist-
ance in the modern evolution of relatively autonomous social fields.
Civil society and its public sphere are becoming increasingly mediatized. Media
institutions do not entirely belong to the systems, or to the networked lifeworld.
Although asymmetrically organized in terms of power, they mediate between the
systemic level and that of the lifeworld(s). They function as sites for power struggles,
both in terms of economic, political and symbolic power. Those struggles activate
contradictions as well as alliances between economic, political and symbolic power,
or between the advocates of the state, the market and civil society respectively. In this
way complicated patterns of power and resistance criss-cross, as they frame everyday
social and cultural practices, including media use. Some of these patterns of
power/resistance stem from systemic demands, others from lifeworld contexts, which
can never simply be seen as sites of resistance to systemic power, since the latter is also
always anchored in and dependent on the lifeworld practices that reproduce it.
Personal, social and cultural dominance are built into lifeworld relations and main-
tained either with the support of systemic power or in contradiction to it. Hence,
civil society’s demands for liberation from the administrative power of the state or the
economic power of the market cannot by definition be regarded as progressive or
democratic, as clearly revealed by the histories of fascism, racism and sexism.
Economic, political and symbolic power are thus each linked to corresponding
forms of resistance. Certain sets of oppositional acts turn against the dominant

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