Page 103 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

86 David Chidester

as “Donald Duck in the cartoons…gets his beating so that the viewers can
get used to the same treatment” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1973: 137–8).
On the consumption side, the popular reception of cultural forms, styles,
and content calls attention to the many different ways people actually find
to make mass-produced culture their own. Following the critical theorist
Walter Benjamin, many cultural analysts argue that the reception of popular
culture involves not passive submission but creative activity. Recognizing
the capitalist control of mass-produced culture, Benjamin nevertheless found
that people develop new perceptual and interpretive capacities that enable
them to transform private hopes and fears into “figures of the collective
dream such as the globe-orbiting Mickey Mouse” (Benjamin 1972–89, 7:
377; Hansen 1993: 31). Where Adorno insisted that the productions of the
culture industry were oppressive, Benjamin looked for the therapeutic effects,
such as the healing potential of collective laughter, and even the redemptive
possibilities in the reception of popular culture. In the case of Mickey Mouse,
for example, Benjamin suggested that audiences were able to think through
basic cultural categories—machines, animals, and humans—by participating
in a popular form of entertainment that scrambles them up. As Benjamin
observed, Mickey Mouse cartoons are “full of miracles that not only surpass
those of technology but make fun of them.” For an audience “grown tired
of the endless complications of the everyday,” Benjamin concluded, these
“miracles” promise a kind of “redemption” in an extraordinary world
(Benjamin 1972–89, 2: 218; Hansen 1993: 41–2).
Between cultural production and consumption, the space of media and
popular culture is a contested terrain. Popular culture is a landscape in
which people occupy vastly different and often multiple subject positions,
subjectivities grounded in race, ethnicity, social class, occupation, region,
gender, sexual orientation, and so on. As the cultural theorist Stuart Hall has
established, popular culture is a site of struggle in which various alternative
cultural projects contend against the hegemony of the dominant culture.
Though subcultures develop oppositional positions, perhaps even methods
of “cultural resistance,” social elites work to appropriate and assimilate
the creativity of alternative cultural formations within the larger society.
Not a stable system of production and consumption, popular culture is a
battlefield of contending strategies, tactics, and maneuvers in struggles over
the legitimate ownership of highly-charged cultural symbols of meaning and
power (Hall 1980a; 1981).
These struggles over interpreting and appropriating highly charged,
perhaps even sacred symbols look a lot like religion. In trying to understand
the expanding economy, many analysts have found that religion has reentered
the picture, not merely in relation to economic activity, such as the “elective
affinity” Max Weber traced between Calvinism and the rise of capitalism