Democracy as mass communicative action: Listening among the herd

Alaga Rajan Thiruvengadam, Purdue University

Abstract

Within the general framework of the existentialist critique of mass democracy, in this dissertation an exploration of the significance of mass culture in contemporary society is cast in terms of a communication-theoretic approach to democracy. Drawing upon the work of Jurgen Habermas, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Theodor W. Adorno, David Ingram, and Walter Benjamin, it is argued that the traditional notion of formal majority-rule democracy must be supplemented by a concept of cultural democracy, producing a two-tiered model of democracy. While formal democracy takes place through familiar institutionalized forms of discourse, cultural democracy proceeds by means of a "cultural conversation" that takes place via mass communications media. The cultural concept of democracy is based not in the symmetrical ethics of Habermasian discourse ethics but in the asymmetrical ethical paradigm found in the work of Levinas. I argue that this "paradigm shift" implies that in cultural democracy there is an obligation that those who express the majority position listen communicatively to those expressing the minority position, and that legitimacy in cultural democracy is the collective analogue to the individualistic existentialist concept of authenticity. This way of viewing democracy must confront the common understanding of mass culture as ideologically distorted communication. In response to the ideological distortion of communication which occurs in mass culture it is argued that cultural democracy ought to involve a specific form of aesthetic participation in mass culture at the point of reception. This aesthetic participation is interpreted existentially and described as mass communicative action.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

McBridge, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Philosophy|Mass media|Political science

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