Hegemony and Mass Culture: A Semiotic Approach

The analysis of mass culture involves a three-way relationship among cultural objects, their industrial producers, and social groups of users (i.e., the mass audience). Approaches to mass culture neglect the interrelationships between these separate analytical levels. This article brings out his three-way relationship in its full dialectical complexity by applying a semiotic approach to meaning as it is created, communicated, and ideologically managed. The semiotic approach is contrasted with Marxian hegemony theory. Because cultural objects mean different things to different social groups, only semiotic analysis fully specifies the multiplicity of meanings involved in mass culture. The semiotic model views meaning as being exchanged in three separate and qualitatively different stages. Its application results in the proposal for a different kind of textual analysis than that used by contemporary mass culture analysts and in the observation that users of mass culture are more active and creative than previously supposed.