Michael Makropoulos
Mittelweg 36
Eurozine
Mittelweg 36
Aspects of mass-cultural societisation
Michael Makropoulos
The paper outlines a general theory of mass-culture, which aims at the decisive function of mass-culture for the constitution of modern societies. The theoretical approach is guided by three general assumptions: First, mass-culture is the functional medium for the social appropriation of artificial realities as they are effected by the technological development in modern times. Second, mass-culture is the functional medium for the evolution of a deliberate constructivist culture of contingency. Last, mass-culture is the functional medium for the social integration of this generalized "sense of possibility" (Robert Musil) via its communicative normalization as a universal matrix of specific modern experience.