Commercial culture shapes perceptions without simply duping an audience

Evidence

Since ordinary people are not cultural dopes, they are perfectly capable of recognizing the way the realities of working-class life are reorganized, reconstructed, and reshaped by the way they are represented (i.e., re-presented) in, say, Coronation Street . The cultural industries do have the power constantly to rework and reshape what they represent; and, by repetition and selection, to impose and implant such definitions of ourselves as fit more easily the descriptions of the dominant or preferred culture. That is what the concentration of cultural power—the means of culture-making in the heads of the few—actually means. These definitions don’t have the power to occupy our minds; they don’t function on us as if we are blank screens. But they do occupy and rework the interior contradictions of feeling and perception in the dominated classes; they do find or clear a space of recognition in those who respond to them. Cultural domination has real effects, even if these are neither all-powerful nor all-inclusive. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1006

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the middle course between cultural autonomy and total encapsulation: cultural domination with real but non-total effects.
• XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s hegemony and the reader’s existing interest in how ideas exert influence; echoes the culture industry debate from Adorno. — connects to: Capitalism neutralised boredom by demanding audience participation, not pacification — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1763; Brand interaction demands participation where spectacle only demanded viewing — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1767