Page 234 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Notes 219
marketability of the programme. It is this underlying matrix of
commodified values, not authentic musical considerations that
ultimately determines the success of the contestants. The sophis-
tication and extent of the market differentiation employed is
illustrated by the frequent success of ‘innocent’ young boys
performing songs deemed to be old-fashioned. In the guise of
breaking the mould of viewers’ expectations, they all too predict-
ably appeal to older viewers for whom they have been chosen.
3 ‘Through this process individuals unconsciously adopted the
values of alienated culture, so that they unwittingly subscribed to
a degraded version of humanity’ (Rojek 2001: 34).
4 Furthermore, any potential role for celebrity figures as an
embodiment of anti-traditional social resistance tends to be
quickly packaged as a cultural commodity. This process can work
both upwards and downwards in so far as it reduces punks to the
visual content of London tourist postcards and elevates such
previously counter-cultural figures as Mick Jagger to the British
Knighthood (June 2002) or Johnny Rotten to the Reality TV
programme I’m A Celebrity – Get Me Out of Here! (January 2004).
5 Potlatch refers to the practice among the rich in some indig-
enous tribes of burning all their possessions in a dramatic
cultural reversal of the Western capitalist notion of conspicuous
consumption.
6 See Rojek (2001: 91, 92), especially such comments as ‘We are
drawn to celebrities for a variety of reasons. These can only be
concretely established through empirical investigation’ (2001: 92).
Such sentiments indicate an a priori resistance to the theoretically
based approach of the culture industry thesis.
7 In the sixteenth century, Etienne de LaBoetie introduced the
notion of voluntary servitude (servitude volontaire). Whereas for
Boetie people, by laziness, do not adequately appropriate their
freedom, for Spinoza, people even fight for their slavery, as if it
were their salvation. In an essay at the end of Pauline Reage’s
erotic classic, The Story of O, Jean Paulhan relates how in 1838 a
group of newly freed West Indian slaves massacred their former
owner and his family for not taking them back into bondage.
8 Although, given the rise of product placement, commercial
tie-ins, and so on, this less obviously commercialized aspect of
movies is perhaps debateable.
9 As Lowenthal (1961) suggests in his essay ‘The little shop girls go
to the movies’ and Adorno writes in ‘The culture industry:
enlightenment as mass deception’ (Adorno and Horkheimer
1997).

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