Tuesday, February 22, 2005

mass culture as a tool of raising consciousness?

According to Cowie, commercial culture may enable classless working-class to integrate them, so that the working class may be able to obtain“the possibility of a positive social and political response to the problem of capital mobility.”He finds the role of mass culture as“a glimmer of hope.”For this, he adopts Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus by emphasizing“the improvisation and spontaneity within the inherited structure that remolds the past and so shapes the future.”He seems to believe that working class can overcome the limit of solidarity derived from the working class' perception of community by practicing, educating and experiencing a common class culture. However, I think that mass culture is so powerful to engulf even working-class culture into just commercialism in capitalist society that even the slightest possibility to become conscious can not be realized through the experience of mass culture. I accept the Frankfurt school's critic on mass culture in a sense.

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