ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

Culture understands human nature as being constantly made and remade through the active encounter with the outside world. By expressing their own sense of the world, human beings create their own selfhood and in this formative process one can enlarge one’s experience and deepen the insight into the world. This article explores the theoretical basis on which we understand how the mass encounters culture through cultural modernization, which means the commercialization of culture, by examining Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reroduction”; Stuart Hall’s “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’”; and Paul Willis’s Common Culture. The main thesis of this article is that commercial cultural commodities are the major resources of our daily act of symbolic production and consumption in contemporary society. Symbolic creativity is at the core of what we call cultural activity. It empowers the active sense of our vital capacities and enable people to intervene in the formation of their own subjectivities. It provides widened range of usable symbolic resources for the development and emancipation of everyday culture. The mass has been culturally emancipated, and market relations played a crucial role in the process of this emancipation.

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