Page 25 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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10 Critical Theories of Mass Media
juxtaposition of the term industry next to culture in the Frankfurt
School’s term makes it an already politically rooted statement.
Critical theory argues that attempts to see political meaning in acts
of consumption actually serve to aestheticize the everyday further
rather than politicize it. The deeply conservative properties of
uncritical consumption are glossed over. Aesthetic appreciations of
commodity culture are fuelled by often impressively imaginative
interpretations – but they frequently fail to recognize the true
political implications of its essentially commodified nature.
According to Ang (1985), it is misguided to debate whether
cultural products are inherently progressive or conservative because
this approach fails to appreciate fully the independently important
nature of pleasure as a distinct, politically neutral entity. In relation
to the US television series Dallas, Ang argues that, ‘pleasure is first
and foremost connected with the fictional nature of the position and
solutions which the tragic structure of feeling constructs, not with
their ideological content’ (cited in Alasuutari 1999: 11; emphasis in
original). Again, this represents a fundamental point of departure
from the culture industry thesis which is not anti-pleasure per se but
which highlights the manufactured, manipulative ways such pleasure
is produced in commodity form. Ang’s argument is premised upon the
possibility of separating out the enjoyment of fictional forms from
their underlying commodity form. What she fails to address in her
claim that appreciating fictional forms is politically neutral is the
depth and complexity of the links between the culture industry’s
deliberate commodification of the fiction process itself. Thus, in
terms of celebrity culture:
The entertainment-celebrity model takes over because it is a
rational one, one that meets professional and commercial
needs. The blurring of fact and fiction is not a conspiracy but
a practicality; the uncoupling of merit and notoriety, hardly
new or complete but certainly very advanced, is the result of
the routine pursuit of profit.
(Gamson 1994: 191)
Against Ang, Part 2 of this book explores the political consequences
of this blurring of fact and fiction and we show that such pleasure in
fiction can indeed still be ideological because it serves to embed the
consumer further within the commodified matrix of celebrity pro-
duction.

3 The content of the frame is open to radical reinterpretation

central to the Post-structuralist approach is the notion that star
images are inflected and modified by the mass-media and the

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