Viewing mass-culture audiences as passive dupes is unsocialist.

Evidence

Now, if the forms and relationships, on which participation in this sort of commercially provided “culture” depend, are purely manipulative and debased, then the people who consume and enjoy them must either be themselves debased by these activities or else living in a permanent state of “false consciousness.” They must be “cultural dopes” who can’t tell that what they are being fed is an updated form of the opium of the people. That judgment may make us feel right, decent, and self-satisfied about our denunciations of the agents of mass manipulation and deception—the capitalist cultural industries: but I don’t know that it is a view which can survive for long as an adequate ac count of cultural relationships; and even less as a socialist perspective on the culture and nature of the working class. Ultimately, the notion of the people as a purely passive , outline force is a deeply unsocialist perspective. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1004

Categorization

• XREF: Directly reverses the Frankfurt School’s ‘false consciousness’/manipulation reading of the culture industry recorded in The Frankfurt School; Hall’s anti-elitist correction of 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demanding audience participation, not pacification — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1763
• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘cultural dopes’ trope as shorthand for the passive-audience fallacy in cultural studies.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does Hall reconcile this anti-manipulation stance with his own political commitment to critique of commercial culture — where exactly does agency begin?