ABSTRACT
The critical analysis of mass culture must encompass an inherent paradox: while every text pleases its audience with the familiar, affirming the status quo by asking only the questions it can answer, it may also uncover something new and provoke that same audience to experience emancipatory feelings and to ask questions about possibilities for change. Critics have tended to polarize these two characteristics, insisting on one or the other rather than allowing for a perspective which reveals that they are simultaneously operative. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argue that the very concept of a culture industry brings with it the impossibility of emancipation. Because ‘a technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself, there is no room for spontaneity among the producers of mass culture.1 Nor can there be a critical response from an audience that is ‘the object of calculation, an appendage of the machinery’.2 Walter Benjamin on the other hand attributes an emancipatory potential to the media, in particular to film, as its subject matter represents the interests of the masses and its technical apparatus speaks to their determination to see themselves as a force in history. Believing that the incidental sign and the peripheral space reveal particular meanings, Benjamin responds to the Utopian possibility that the media can disseminate such unseen and essential details to the masses, and with its mobile camera-eye can challenge the static social relationships that have long held élitist values in place.
