Cultural change works by inflecting existing attitudes, not by assaulting them

Evidence

If the “older” popular culture, however commercially organized and crude in its appeals, seemed less of an “assault from the outside,” this was not because it was an authentic product of that culture, but because it was closer to—mirrored more faithfully or, better, worked more “authentically” along the groove of—the habits, attitudes, and unspoken assumptions of its working-class audience, and had more fully “indigenized” itself, by long cohabitation, as it were, within the complex history of the formations of an urban-industrial corporate class. If the new forms of mass culture were effecting change, it could only be because they too addressed themselves to the lived textures and complex attitudes of the culture in which they sought to embed themselves, working along its grooves, while at the same time inflecting and disconnecting them, dislodging them from within and attaching them to new modes of feeling, habits, and judgments—“unbending the springs of action.” — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 149

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The ‘working along the grooves’ mechanism parallels how the tree essay treats grafting as a metaphor for change that works within existing structures rather than replacing them.
• XREF: Predicts Gramscian hegemony-as-wining-of-consent, which Hall names a few paragraphs later as the fuller model this anticipates. — connects to: Crises trigger change only through ideas already available in the culture — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 276; Art changes the world by puncturing everyday ideological reality, not by winning battles; Cultural change follows patterned diffusion from small groups outward, implying universal principles (+1 more)