The plebiscite of the consumers : Hans Magnus Enzenberger and cultural populism

Abstract

Enzensberger's works have been, for more than forty years, a provocative commentary on and of the post-war period. This thesis uses an interdisciplinary framework drawn from Germanistik and British cultural studies to present a critical, historical account of Enzensberger's cultural politics, particularly concerning popular culture and the role of the critical intellectual in the maintenance of democracy. It argues that much of Enzensberger's writing, particularly his critical essays but also his poetry and his practices as an editor, analyses and, on occasion, intervenes to alter, the shifting relationship between economic and political structures in the Federal Republic and the operations of the 'cultural economy', the processes of making meaning and constructing social identities. What informs his writing throughout is his enduring commitment to the promotion of a democratic political culture. Although he starts from a position influenced by Adorno, where the masses are seen to be victims of the nexus of the culture industries and the political conservatism prevalent in the 1950s, there are also hints in his work of a more populist approach to the politics of popular culture. After formulating an emancipatory theory of the media based on their interactive capacity in 1970, his work assumes that the cultural practices and symbolic exchanges of ordinary people are able to challenge in productive ways the attempts of the culture industries and the political elites in Germany to incorporate them into a repressive version of capitalism. Enzensberger's increasingly populist cultural politics become explicit in his later essays with his advocacy of limited strategic political interventions by ordinary people rather than by intellectuals, Enzensberger's populism culminates in his controversial defence of the thriving, democratic political culture in the Federal Republic created by the affluent Kleinbürger.

More information

Identifiers

Catalogue record

Export record

ASCII CitationAtomBibTeXData Cite XMLDublin CoreDublin CoreEP3 XMLEndNoteHTML CitationHTML CitationHTML ListJSONMETSMODSMPEG-21 DIDLOpenURL ContextObjectOpenURL ContextObject in SpanRDF+N-TriplesRDF+N3RDF+XMLRIOXX2 XMLReferReference ManagerSimple Metadata