ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys theoretical precedents and provides examples that relate to a power theory of mass culture. However, a simplistic narrative positing mass culture as the child of artistic freedom born during the decline of European patronage in the eighteenth century will likely hide the key structural development of institutional power in advanced capitalism. “The triumph of the giant corporation over entrepreneurial initiative is celebrated by the culture industry as the perpetuity of entrepreneurial initiative”. Consequently, the properties of mass culture become resistant to criticism and the meaning of individual pleasure is satisfied through the closed language of modern consumerism. The history of creativity in mass culture, for example, appears to be ripe for a perspective that uses Schumpeter to theorize how creative destruction is a metaphor for beneficial economic dynamism. Much of mass culture can be described as productive labour in a more sociological sense: people make, shape, consume and circulate meaning through their ideological and material activities.
