Mass Culture And Human Liberation In The Context Of Modernity Criticism

In terms of temporal condition, modernity is a concept that contrasts with tradition. It refers to the evolutionary process of rationalization and differentiation of economy and management in the society. It is in the process that modern industrialized countries come into being. Meanwhile, the process has reduced the human existence into a partite, short-lived and mix-up condition. The reflection and criticism on the condition, which was first developed in the aesthetic field, has been started in social studies. Therefore,"modernity criticism"has become another essential connotation of modernity. In other words, modernity is"self-contradictory"in nature.The mass culture inevitably became the contemporary mechanism of modernity when the historical change from the traditional art to the mass culture happened due to the technological development and the mass culture eventually dominated the human life. So the mass culture is also"self-contradictory"in nature, that is, it contains both positive and negative (or integrative and subversive) logic. In terms of positive logic, the technological, commercial and entertaining nature of the mass culture integrates the mass and deprives them of the revolutionary desire, and therefore the lawfulness of the bourgeois ruling is confirmed; while in terms of negative logic, the mass culture, which clears up hierarchy and hegemonism in the process of cultural acceptance, accelerates the democratic development of the culture, so it has the potentiality to invoke revolutions. The two aspects mentioned above appear contradictory. However, they co-exist in the mass culture. The study of the mass culture in the context of modernity criticism is of great significance for the debate on the issue in the analytical circle.The debate between Adorno and Benjamin demonstrates the dialectic nature of the mass culture. Adorno believed that the mass culture was not formed spontaneously among the mass, but was a kind of pseudo-culture imposed upon the mass by the ruling class through the cultural industry. The fetish of commodities is regarded as the ideology of the culture. It relies on symbolizing, pseudo-individual, conservative and cheating features to achieve its ultimate goal, that is, to integrate the mass. While in Benjamin's view, in the capitalist society, the mass should not be regarded as the object integrated through the cultural industry, but the revolutionary subject armed with the mass culture. The subversion of the capitalist system could be finally completed with the help of new forms and functions of the mass culture.Although difference exists between the views of Adorno and Benjamin, the essence of their theories is the same, namely fighting against totalitarianism and liberating human beings. Theoretically speaking, it is infeasible to hold the belief on either the positive or the negative logic of the mass culture in the real word; and in fact, the decline of the liberation politics has become an unchangeable tendency in the global capitalism. How to"liberate"human beings from the"non-human"state in the ruling of the mass culture? Karl Max once warned us that"liberation"(communism) should not be considered as an ideal the reality must be compatible with, but the real movement originated from history. It is the same case with the mass culture theories of both Adorno and Benjamin. They are not ideals, but need to combine with real movement. Actually, they both realized that the abstract historical development was not the requirement of the revolution, which was not the simple social reform according to people's imagination. However, the revolution requires that on the basis of huge material wealth created by industrial civilization the unreasonable way of human development so far should be completely changed, and that the productive force should be a material precondition but not a shackle for human development freely and consciously. In this sense, Adorno and Benjamin compromised with each other. Therefore, the duo-logic of the mass culture should be studied in a dialectic way, which is the real significance of our discussion on the debate between Adorno and Benjamin.The thesis does not purposely reduce the contradiction between the positive and negative logic of the mass culture with an intention to avoid theoretical difficulties, but intends to dig out the"self-contradictory"essence of the mass culture from the perspective of"modernity", and emphasize the fundamental compatibility of integration and subversion in the real world. Based on Max's analytical method of history, the thesis aims to overcome the defects of the mass culture theories and provide guidance for the understanding of"human liberation"in the history from the perspective reality.