Li Xinyue and Dai Xuehong: Western Marxist Subject Production in the Era of Intelligent Media and Its Theoretical Critique
Using generative artificial intelligence (Generative AI) as its underlying technology, the mode of media content production in the Intelligent Media Era has become AI-Generated Content (AIGC). The shift from the "mass media" era to the "intelligent media" era means that the subjects in the media world are no longer composed solely of human subjects; non-human subjects will also participate. Since Marxism has identified the existence of ideological attributes in communication, does intelligent media still possess these ideological attributes? Regarding the reproduction of bourgeois relations of production, the famous French structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser enumerated eight types of Ideological State Apparatuses—religion, education, the family, law, politics, trade unions, communication, and culture—and argued that human subjectivity gradually fades during the process of being shaped by bourgeois ideology. Following the "cultural and ideological turn" of the 20th century, Western Marxist scholars delved into media studies of popular culture, including literature, music, and television, launching critiques of bourgeois media ideology and the existential condition of the subject from various perspectives.
This article unfolds along three threads of Western Marxist media ideology theory to discuss the alienation suffered by the subject under contemporary technological fetishism in the Intelligent Media Era, the resistance struggles carried out by marginalized subjects, and the biopolitical risks of intelligent media rule after the dissolution of the subject, thereby exploring the production and new changes of the subject. Ultimately, it reflects on the true path forward for the production of media subjects from the perspective of historical materialism.
I. The Humanist Thread of Subject Alienation: From Lukács to the Frankfurt School
At the beginning of the 20th century, the international communist movement encountered setbacks. Western leftist theorists analyzed the successful experience of the Russian Revolution, summarized the reasons for the failure of workers' revolutions primarily in Western countries, and contemplated how to continue the production and reproduction of the revolutionary subject under new capitalist social conditions. Extending Hegel’s dialectic of the identity of subject and object, György Lukács moved toward an ideological critique centered on the reification and alienation of the subject. This line of thought laid the foundation for the Frankfurt School's subsequent research on media ideology.
(1) Subject Alienation: Top-Down Oppression
Lukács believed that the reason the European revolutions could not succeed lay in the consciousness of the workers; the proletariat was unable to transcend the suppression of bourgeois reified consciousness to achieve subjective self-awareness. Reification—the phenomenon where objects, after being produced by humans, conversely dominate and rule the laborers—is a top-down, ubiquitous bourgeois structure of reification that governs workers, making it impossible for them to perceive their own oppressed "inhuman" condition. People never questioned the legitimacy or rationality of this structure within their consciousness. This is a new mode of ideological rule: it does not force compliance through fear of external military or political violence, nor through the pressure of economic poverty, but achieves rational identification by embedding itself into the structures of human cognitive perception. Faced with such total oppression, Lukács pointed out that the solution must be a "total revolution" [1]. Inheriting Hegel's ideas on the dialectic of subject and object, Lukács believed that the proletariat could revitalize class consciousness from the inside out through self-education, sublate [2] and overcome reification, and restore their distorted subjectivity.
The first generation of Frankfurt School scholars, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, continued this humanist thread while also acknowledging that the stability of bourgeois rule largely derived from reified ideology. "An important shift occurred from Lukács to Horkheimer and Adorno: namely, a move from a dialectic of subject and object aimed at the revolutionary subject toward an absolute identity-based coercion of the principle of exchange and calculative reason; its philosophical framework also transformed into an absolute objectivity. Finally, in Adorno, there remained only the absolute coercion of the capital-subject and the 'administered world' it shaped."
Unlike Lukács, Horkheimer and Adorno grounded themselves in the social formation of late capitalism, applying the dialectic of the identity of subject and object with particular emphasis on the critique of capital-dominated mass media ideology. The Frankfurt School pointed out that in modern society, the value rationality of media culture—such as music, film, theater, and novels—was disappearing, replaced by a technical rationality [3] consistent with the logic of capitalist industrial production. Culture had become a commodity, losing its original "aura" [4] and fully entering the system of exchange for the means of production.
First, media commodities exhibit the characteristics of industrial identity. "Under monopoly, all mass culture is identical." Adorno used jazz as an example: while jazz appears diverse, its structure in terms of melody, harmony, rhythm, and form is extremely simple. The dismantling and recombination of various parts results in an infinite amount of "new" music, even in the case of improvisational sections. "Those performances that seem to be spontaneous are, in fact, pre-arranged with mechanical precision and careful foresight. Even where improvisation truly exists—for example, in the performances of resistant bands that might still indulge in it today purely for pleasure—the only material left to them is the popular song. Thus, so-called improvisation has actually degenerated into a mere paraphrase of basic conventional progressions, and standardized specifications flash through every moment of it. Even improvisation merely follows the benchmarks in continuous repetition." Adorno believed that culture and art should be highly personalized expressions of the subject, but in the capitalist economy, media culture becomes standardized, homogeneous industrial products.
Second, standardized media culture can only create homogenized subjects. According to the view of the Frankfurt School, humans as human beings should possess a subjective richness and distinct individuality, but the homogeneous media produced by assembly lines suppresses aesthetic individuality. Simultaneously, the essence of entertainment in late capitalism remains an extension of labor; thus, a cynical scene emerges: "People pursue it in order to escape the mechanical labor process and recuperate their strength so they can return to labor once again." Therefore, the entertainment habits of modern people are also shaped by the culture industry—after-dinner coffee, weekend movies, holiday exhibitions—and even the post-viewing reactions to each entertainment activity can be pre-regulated by the product’s programming. In the culture industry, the human being does not need to think.
Finally, the entry of culture into the industrial production chain reflects the essence of capitalism. The consumption of the material means of subsistence can no longer satisfy the expanded logic of capital; incorporating the culture industry into the production cycle conforms to the necessary logic of capital valorization. However, in this cultural environment, the Frankfurt School pointed out that social cultural rules are almost entirely formulated by the aristocracy and big capitalists; the lower-class workers have no way to express their own cultural demands, let alone legitimize their own music, novels, and cultural aesthetics. This "culture of the upper classes built on a foundation of inequality" is an "affirmative culture," a special culture of the bourgeois era. Bourgeois ideology, with the help of the media apparatus, masks its own exploitative essence and achieves alienated rule over the human being.
(2) The Critique of Technological Fetishism: Returning to Human Subjectivity in the Intelligent Media Era
In the Intelligent Media Era, AIGC has demonstrated immense productive forces in fields such as painting, video production, news writing, and scene simulation. However, the emergence of new technologies has not changed this top-down reality of rule. Artificial intelligence is gradually replacing simple human labor in tasks like writing, drawing, and video production, with machines generating and creating more and better cultural works. This has led some people to mistakenly believe that using new technology is equivalent to creating good work, resulting in a worship of technology itself—an ideological risk of technological fetishism. From basic needs like clothing, food, housing, and transportation to social media, from digital exhibitions to smart cities, new technologies are enveloping every facet of media life, leading to the appearance of cookie-cutter smart cities or smart malls. The media culture scholar Neil Postman once reiterated that "man is a metaphor of the machine," attacking scientism. He pointed out: "Technopoly prefers precise knowledge to truthful knowledge; one might say Technopoly wants to solve the dilemma of subjectivity once and for all. Because of the machine’s inhuman personality and its endless repeatable operations, it becomes a controlling metaphor and is regarded as a tool of progress." Technopoly may turn human beings themselves into cold objects; culture surrenders to technology, and humans become isolated individuals whose "thought is dead."
As the process of neoliberalism accelerates and industrial capital output increases, the development of new technologies is evolving into a new technological monopoly in the era of intelligent media. In the Intelligent Media Era, one must be more vigilant against the technological fetishism of mechanization and quantification in the media world, which suppresses the subject, invades human privacy, and controls human thinking and aesthetics in a top-down manner. The French philosopher Jacques Ellul pointed out that in ideology, technology is always endowed with excessive autonomy or even onticity; however, in reality, technological elements are merely adapting to a certain technological system. Technological systems are designed, manufactured, and used by humans; only the existence of human subjectivity has a fundamental impact on the effects of technology. Technology-empowered media is not only becoming an extension of the human body [5] but is also replacing human thinking and brains. Therefore, how to return to human subjectivity and rethink the control of media technological fetishism has become the prerequisite for reflecting on media ideology regarding humans as subjects under new technological conditions.
II. The Thread of Cultural Hegemony in Subject Struggle: From Gramsci to the Birmingham School
Different from the humanist thread, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, through the concept of cultural hegemony, proposed that media audiences are not destined only to be oppressed; media recipients can also engage in resistant, autonomous reading based on their own interests. The Birmingham School continued this line of thought, pointing out that in the process of watching television, different people can produce ideological intentions different from those intended by the producers—based on their own cultural positions, class will, and upbringing. Thus, the ideological analysis of media can have not only a top-down stance but also a bottom-up audience perspective.
(1) Subject Struggle: Bottom-Up Resistance
Gramsci was one of the founders of the Communist Party of Italy. Similar to Lukács, he analyzed and summarized the revolutionary conditions in Eastern and Western societies after the October Revolution. Likewise, Gramsci noticed the problem of the revolutionary consciousness of Western European workers, but unlike Lukács, Gramsci proposed that ideology possesses materiality. Most importantly, ideology is not a "false consciousness" or merely a product of self-deception in ideas; it is a material force. This is the foundation of Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony. Gramsci pointed out that in actual revolution, ideology moves the collective cohesion of the unity of social contradictions in the form of "social cement," thereby facilitating the completion of revolution and rule. Especially "in societies where civil society has achieved a relatively developed form, the coercive nature of politics begins to weaken, and cultural and ideological hegemony begins to stand out." Cultural hegemony is a non-violent form of leadership, using newspapers, magazines, and other media as carriers to realize the proletariat’s struggle for state leadership within civil society through ideological forms. This process differs from the "war of maneuver" [6] of the October Revolution; it is a "war of position" where the proletariat gradually captures important "nodes" such as education, media, and academia within the cultural sphere, gradually controlling cultural content and dominating cultural consensus to form a unified social opinion, thereby achieving the goal of class dominance. In this process, the masses are not passively subjected to unified top-down oppression; on the contrary, hegemony must win the active consent of the masses to be ruled. Gramsci opened up the possibility of the subject in ideological struggle, and this focus on the audience subject laid the foundation for the British Birmingham School’s research on media ideology.
In the view of the Birmingham School, first, the reason media can constitute the real life of modern people is that cultural meaning is not "given" but is produced and constructed. Media, through "signifying practices," is the "product of practices that produce meaning and make things signify." Things themselves have no meaning; they are only endowed with meaning by people within social life. A stone is just a stone; in specific contexts, some stones become symbols of love, and some become monuments. Media in daily life—such as television, advertisements, and movies—are dominating a signifying practice, permeating bourgeois ideology and constructing unequal subject relations between people. Stuart Hall pointed out that British media bundled crime and racial issues together, and news reports on street robberies...
...always bias certain groups, specifically Black youth. That is, they only report on Black robberies while ignoring robbery cases involving other groups. However, statistics show that in cities without significant Black populations, street robbery rates remain stubbornly high. In this semiotic practice, the media makes "street robbery" and "Black crime" synonymous. Behind this complicit command of the mass media joined with the official government, legal, and other apparatuses, the state completes the reproduction of its rule.
Secondly, the final form of mass culture is, on one hand, an expression of the interests of the ruling class, and on the other, the ultimate expression of multiple interest groups. Just as television programming contains not only elite culture representing the interests of the grand bourgeoisie but also entertainment programs reflecting the needs of the grassroots working class, the final manifestation of the cultural sphere is not limited to a single voice. The Birmingham School disagrees with the Frankfurt School's view of one-dimensional ideological rule proposed from the dimension of subject alienation; they argue that the working class is not always oppressed, and that marginal subcultural groups also express resistance through autonomous "decoding."
Finally, the Birmingham School consistently focuses on vulnerable groups at the bottom of society, especially the media-cultural situation of the working class. Represented by Hall, the Birmingham School, when exploring the encoding of media texts, pays attention to the working class, youth, women, people of color, and queer individuals. From a micro-perspective, they highlight the pluralistic discourses of groups with radical differences in everyday life, investigating unequal ideological relations.
(2) A Critique of Cultural Inequality in the Construction of Subjectivity in the Intelligent Media Era
The goal of the Birmingham School is to reveal how bourgeois media ideology constructs unequal cultural subjects within the world of mass media. The world of intelligent media is likewise a field of cultural practice constituted by a hierarchical order of dominant and marginal elements.
Cultural inequality in the intelligent media era is first manifested in the way Artificial Intelligence (AI) widens the digital divide. Differences in institutional levels and varying levels of productive forces exist between different countries; thus, AI technology suffers from severe global imbalances. Herbert Schiller pointed out that information and communication systems are always in collusion with transnational capital. Information technology can never be neutral; technology is a product of social construction. Consequently, media culture built upon different technological levels has a clear directional flow. Today's media world—news, social media, film, and television—is dominated by a few authoritative outlets, and global media information primarily diffuses outward from a few major developed countries. Transnational corporations are the primary drivers of information content and industry. This system helps overcome the permanent accumulation crises of developed capitalism, but it is endangering the national and economic sovereignty of developing countries. [20]
In other words, media expansion is the colonial expansion of the lifestyles, tastes, habits, and ideologies of developed countries. Information monopolies carry the risk of cultural dumping. Neoliberal cultural habits are constructing the perception of social reality for the majority of the populace. People in developing countries are forced to "firmly believe in the rationality of the entire capitalist world system; the effect created in Third World countries is equivalent to the institutionalization of a certain developmental path." [21]
Secondly, cultural inequality in the intelligent media era arises from the deepening of information segmentation (narrowcasting), which is also the fragmentation of the subject. Media culture researcher Nick Couldry proposed a "practice paradigm." He notes that cultural hegemony is a clear orientation of the practice paradigm: "understanding media as a practical act rather than a text or production structure... it studies all open categories of practical behavior oriented toward or related to media, and the role media plays in organizing other social practices." [22] The intelligent media practice, though fraught with struggle, has not achieved its promised "equality for all." Online equality does not represent offline equality at all. It can be said that the openness of social networks has instead allowed class differences to be more fully exposed to the public. Especially in the intelligent media era, netizens who seemingly occupy the same space actually belong to different social strata and possess vastly different social resources. Heterogeneous subjects can only decode fragmented internet information based on their own interests. Thus, in an intelligent media world dominated by capital, everyone can log into the same website or use the same software, but there are substantive differences in the information different groups can receive and the genuine information networks they can form. ultimately, the availability of massive information and real-time interconnection has not made people more united; instead, it has aggravated class contradictions and intensified subject fragmentation.
Fundamentally, the participation of machines in media hasn't changed the underlying relations of production. While content appears to be automatically generated by machines, the ideology behind it originates from actual capitalist relations of production. For example, Microsoft once released a social media AI that could interact with people in real-time chat, yet in less than 24 hours of being online, this intelligent media outputted content with racist leanings.
III. The Context of Subjectless Structuralism and Post-structuralism: From Althusser to Foucault
Althusser did not attribute ideology to the logic of humanist reification, nor did he endorse the reduction of ideology to generalized cultural hegemony. Based on new changes in the emergence of the subject and combined with psychoanalytic theory, he opened a new space for the materialist interpretation of ideology. Althusser pointed out that history is a "process without a subject," and social reproduction depends on the reproduction of social systems and material practices determined by the will of the state and the acting subjects. The production of the subject is no longer an epistemological question. Althusser's student, Michel Foucault, further proposed the decentralization of state power, providing a new approach to the production of the subject through "biopolitics."
(1) Subjectless: A Decentered Network of Power
Althusser abolished the subject at the methodological level, starting from the social object rather than the person, and understood ideology as part of the social organism. If the first two lineages [7] both view the objects of rule as rational subjects, the mode of ideological rule identified by the third lineage—structuralism and post-structuralism—is entirely different. For the former two, elite culture masks itself as a "common culture," forcing the populace to identify with and accept certain concepts. Marginal cultures may become popular culture through resistance and struggle, but in any case, the way this media ideology takes effect is by convincing people of a certain "common culture" or common sense. That is, it spreads certain ideas subtly by making people believe, identify, and form a cultural consensus, regardless of whether this common sense truly represents the real interests of the general populace. However, the third structuralist lineage is unrelated to the subject's rationality or belief; it replaces the object of communication with a part of a whole, a part of the social organism. Ideology is "not only the expression of lived experience but also the precondition of experience, the foundation of consciousness and subjectivity."
According to Althusser's analysis of social reproduction, the operational mechanism of ideology is the "interpellation" [8] of individuals as subjects, making humans into a certain "free subject" in a specific position. "There is no practice except by and in an ideology; there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects." Ideology is a kind of "self-hailing" within the subjective. The subject appears to be self-selecting and self-asserting, but is in fact a subject submissive to a position pre-arranged by ideology. For ideology, it can only assert itself through the subject; there is no ideology or Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) that is not for the subject. "The process by which ideology interpellates individuals as subjects is both the process of constructing social order and the process of constructing the subject."
Foucault continued the subjectless lineage. On the basis of the dissolution of the subject, he proposed that the effectiveness of ideology lies not in producing internal identification with ideological content, but in obtaining the control and governance of people at the level of individual life. For the individual, even if they do not identify with certain ideological content, they will still practice a certain order through their actions out of consideration for their own interests, thereby indirectly completing the tasks of bourgeois rule. For social rule, the focus of the Ideological State Apparatus's operation is not on achieving the result of internal understanding or identification from the masses, but on regulating, supervising, and managing people at the level of life actions and governance procedures. The discussion of power's intervention in the production of the subject is the greatest characteristic of Foucault's theory of ideology. Foucault did not discuss state rule from a class perspective, but used power to analyze the micro-physical structure of rule. Power is an ideological power that transcends political violence. Foucault was not concerned with where power comes from or who wields it; in his view, the operation and organization of power are the most real issues. Simple systems of state violent control have failed, the fundamental ties condensing community members have been subverted, and social power demands reconfiguration. Specifically:
First, in Foucault's view, the rule of power is distributed in a decentered, diffuse state. The issuer of power is not only the state; all cultural sectors and institutions independent of political bodies—such as schools, families, hospitals, and media communication agencies—can exercise power. These schools and media agencies seem to be disseminating knowledge, yet they are also issuing power. In this regard, Foucault criticized the bourgeois ideology hidden behind knowledge; his true political mission was to criticize the silent power struggles within these ostensibly neutral institutions.
Second, human beings are produced in the "web of power" in a disciplined form. In complex power spaces, "in this 'web,' individuals not only circulate, but they are always in the position of both submitting to and simultaneously exercising power." [27] The exercisers of power are simultaneously the recipients of power. In a decentered network of power, people cannot see who is wielding power, nor can they see the direction of power—whether it is top-down or bottom-up. Even if people want to resist, they have no way of touching the roots of power. Modern power uses this network to discipline human subjectivity. By distributing human bodies in certain limited spaces to exert maximum efficiency, the development of the entire social reproduction system is brought under the rule of the state.
Third, Foucault believed that neoliberal governmentality is the rule over "biopower." "Life" and "living beings" became the stakes of new political struggles. Biopolitics controls the production and reproduction of populations through statistics and political economy. The rule of power shifts to the implementation of micro-issues such as population, health, life, and security. Biopolitics dissolves human subjectivity; the operation of power is directed at life management. Power is always dealing with the human body and life, directing toward bourgeois economic interests and achieving national governance through the control of life.
(2) A Biopolitical Critique of the Dissolution of the Subject in the Intelligent Media Era
If traditional media such as newspapers and television created a worshipful obedience to the center by the few, then in the intelligent media era, although people's spiritual lives remain in unequal relationships, the center of power has vanished. The ideological critique theories of structuralism and post-structuralism remain effective in the intelligent media era.
First, according to Foucault's "games of truth" involving the subject, human subjectivity is not manifested through restoration; rather, it is continuously produced through the submissive practices of power and ethical freedom. Hospitals diagnose "mad" patients, schools educate "standardized" students, and news organizations write "abnormal" social persons. In this game of subject production and truth, whether the patient is truly a patient is not important, nor is the standard for what constitutes a "normal person"; what matters is the final result and procedure of governance. AIGC (AI-Generated Content) in reality directly eliminates human subjective participation. Non-human subjects can likewise generate media content. Poems created by AIGC in the intelligent media era receive unanimous praise, and "virtual boyfriends" replace human subjects as perfect partners. Whether the boyfriend is "real" no longer matters; truth is no longer important. Just as celebrities are keen to concoct gimmicks and manufacture news, even if they understand that the negative news generated is not true, they refuse to explain; click-through rates and repost rates have replaced truth—"black-fame is still fame" (negative attention is still attention).
Second, neoliberal governmentality abstracts humans into "populations." From a cost perspective, it achieves maximum governance effects with minimum economic and political costs. However, this also means it no longer cares about the faith or soul of the human being, simply treating people as "weights" to expand interests. "'Technological deskilling' represents the decision of negative biopower, while 'multidimensional perspective' represents the exercise of affirmative biopower. The two supplement each other, together constituting the biopolitical landscape of the intelligent era." [28]
Click-through rates and repost rates in social media, alongside transaction rates in e-commerce, all signify that regardless of whether the subject is convinced by a particular ideological system, the social domination exerted through ideological dissemination remains effective.
Finally, virtual reality combined with anonymous media causes human self-identity to depend on social relations within virtual space-time. As seen with Wade Watts and his friends in the film Ready Player One, or Barbie and her boyfriends in the film Barbie, non-human subjects in virtual reality rely on kinship, friendship, and workplace relations to confirm their self-identity. The German philosopher Byung-Chul Han [9] has proposed: "Transparent communication is only possible as machine-like communication, which humans are incapable of. Forcing people to be completely transparent, equating the human being with a functional element in a system—this is where the violence of transparency lies." The world of intelligent media transforms people into hollow symbolic elements, while weaving a so-called world of equality and freedom using modern bourgeois ideology. It uses transparent machines to stifle human criticality and creativity, draping a cloak of rationality over exploitation. Such social connections are not determined by specific material production, but are actively endowed by human subjects; therefore, no matter how technology develops, intelligent media remains a tool of humanity. Consequently, more information does not necessarily make people smarter, nor does more knowledge necessarily make them happier. If the development of intelligent media is not for the sake of humanity itself but merely for the productive requirements of capital, then the subjects produced within such programs are subjects forced to maintain the rule of capital.
In summary, whether it is the "monolithic uniformity" of humanism, the empirical positivism of cultural materialism, or the pluralistic difference of post-structuralism, traces of these three theoretical threads remain visible in today’s era of intelligent media. Intelligent media remains a modern ideological state apparatus [10]. From the perspective of historical materialism, although the ideological critiques proposed by Western leftist theorists such as Lukács possess a certain degree of validity, the propositions for sovereign liberation they put forward contain insurmountable class limitations. Humanism replaces a historical standpoint with a monist position; the strategy of subjective resistance through cultural hegemony [11] easily falls into the risk of capitalist recuperation; and the disciplinary governance of structuralist de-subjectification transforms humans into undifferentiated elements within the capital market. The genuine liberation of humanity must be the free and comprehensive development of every individual [12]. Only by transcending the restrictions of the necessary alienation of man in capitalist society, transcending the limited social division of labor, and enabling humans to fully and comprehensively appropriate the products of their labor through the transformation of the relations of production, can true subjective liberation be realized.