Mass cultural manipulation depends on genuine Utopian longings

Evidence

We will say that such incentives, as wؾll as the impulses to be managed by the mass cultural text, are necessarily Utopian in nature. Ernst Bloch’s luminous recovery of the Utopian impulses at work in that most degraded of all mass cultural texts, advertising slogans­ visions of external life, of the transfigured body, of preternatural sexual gratification-may serve as the IUOdel for an analysis of the depend­ ence of the crudest fox:ms of manipulation on the oldest Utopian longings of humankind. — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 6911

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s work on ritual sacrifice and ideology — manipulation and coercion both succeed by tapping authentic human desire rather than by mere imposition. — connects to: Affirmative culture redirects longing for change into inner affirmation — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 2153; Modernist art redeems reification’s fragments as Utopian compensation — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 5942; Utopian desire can invest a comic grotesque body without ironic distance — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 3734 (+8 more)
• SEED: Article angle: advertising’s power rests on its honesty about human longing — a reading of commercial persuasion as parasitic on genuine Utopian desire.
• ADDENDUM: Parallels the ‘On Sacrifice’ thesis that even the most coercive institutions harness authentic love and grief rather than simply dominating their subjects.

Broader Connections

• Mass culture creates the very needs it then claims to satisfy #corroborates (0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 113
• Modern mass culture’s out-of-phase ideology creates a split between its overt and hidden messages #expands (0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 220
• Mass culture must pose as realistic while steadily lowering its intellectual demands #qualifies (0.72) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 218
• Neoliberalism reshapes cultural incentives by prioritizing extreme profit seeking #contradicts (0.72)