Western Marxism on Subject Production and Its Theoretical Critique in the Age of Intelligent Media

With generative artificial intelligence (Generative AI) as the underlying technology, the mode of media content production in the age of intelligent media has become AIGC (Artificial Intelligence Generated Content). The shift from the “media” era to the “intelligent media” era means that the subjects in the media world are no longer composed solely of human subjects but will also include non-human participants. Marxism has previously identified that communication possesses an ideological character; does intelligent media, then, still possess an ideological character? The renowned French structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser, addressing the reproduction of bourgeois relations of production, listed eight categories of ideological state apparatuses — religion, education, the family, law, politics, trade unions, communications, and culture — and he identified that human subjectivity gradually diminishes in the process of being shaped by bourgeois ideology. Following the cultural and ideological turn of the 20th century, Western Marxist scholars delved deeply into media studies of mass culture, including literature, music, and television, critiquing bourgeois media ideology and the existential conditions of the subject from various angles.

以生成式人工智能（Generative AI）作为底层技术，智媒时代的媒介内容生产方式成为人工智能生成内容AIGC（Artificial Intelligence Generated Content）。“传媒”时代转为“智媒”时代，意味着媒介世界中的主体不仅由人类主体构成，还将有非人类主体参与。马克思主义曾指认传播存在意识形态属性，那么智媒是否依然存在意识形态属性？法国著名结构主义马克思主义者路易·阿尔都塞就资产阶级生产关系的再生产，列举八类意识形态国家机器——宗教、教育、家庭、法律、政治、工会、传播、文化，他指认人的主体性在被资产阶级意识形态塑造的过程中逐渐消退。西方马克思主义学者沿着20世纪的文化和意识形态转向深入大众文化的文学、音乐和电视等媒介研究，从不同角度对资产阶级媒介意识形态和主体生存境况展开批判。

This article proceeds along three threads of Western Marxist media ideology theory, discussing the alienation suffered by the subject in the contemporary techno-fetishism of the intelligent media age, the resistance struggles carried out by marginalized subjects, and the biopolitical risks of intelligent media domination after the dissolution of the subject, thereby exploring the production and new changes of the subject. Ultimately, it reflects from the perspective of historical materialism on the true way out for the production of the media subject.

本文从西方马克思主义媒介意识形态理论的三支脉络展开，论述智媒时代主体在当代技术拜物教中所遭受的异化，边缘主体所进行的抵抗斗争，主体消解后智媒统治的生命政治风险，探究主体的生产与新变化。最终，以历史唯物主义的视角反思媒介主体生产的真正出路。

I. The Humanist Thread of Subject Alienation: From Lukács to the Frankfurt School

一、主体异化的人道主义脉络：从卢卡奇到法兰克福学派

In the early 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 that mainly occurred in Western countries, and pondered how to continue the production and reproduction of the revolutionary subject under new capitalist social conditions. Extending Hegel’s dialectic of subject-object identity, György Lukács moved toward an ideological critique centered on the reification and alienation of the subject, an approach that laid the foundation for the Frankfurt School’s subsequent research on media ideology.

20世纪初，国际共产主义运动遭遇挫折，西方左翼理论家分析俄国革命成功经验，总结主要发生在西方国家工人革命的失败原因，思考如何在新的资本主义社会条件下继续革命主体的生产与再生产。延续黑格尔的主客体同一性辩证法，乔治·卢卡奇走向以主体物化和异化为核心的意识形态批判，这一思路为之后法兰克福学派对媒介意识形态的研究奠定了基础。

(1) Subject Alienation: Top-Down Oppression

（一）主体异化：自上而下的压迫

The reason European revolutions could not succeed, Lukács argued, lay in the consciousness of the workers; the proletariat could not transcend the suppression of bourgeois reified consciousness to achieve subjective self-awareness. Reification — that is, objects produced by humans come to dominate and rule over the laborers themselves — a top-down, omnipresent bourgeois reified structure dominates workers, making people unable to perceive their own oppressed “inhuman” condition. People never question the legitimacy and rationality of this structure in their consciousness. This is a new mode of ideological domination: not making people fear an external military-political violence, nor forcing them to submit due to economic poverty, but achieving rational identification by embedding itself into people’s cognitive and ideological structures. Faced with this comprehensive oppression, Lukács pointed out that the solution must be a total revolution. Inheriting Hegel’s dialectic of subject and object, Lukács believed that the proletariat could, through self-education, revitalize class consciousness from the inside out, transcend and overcome reification, and restore the distorted subjectivity.

欧洲革命之所以无法成功，卢卡奇认为问题在于工人的意识，无产阶级无法超越资产阶级物化意识的压制实现主体自觉。物化，即物被人生产出来后反倒支配和统治劳动者，自上而下、无处不在的资产阶级物化结构支配着工人，使人无从察觉自身处于受压迫的“非人”处境，人们从意识中从未质疑过这一结构的合法合理性。这就是意识形态新的统治方式，不是使人恐惧于一种外在的军事政治暴力，或者使人迫于一种经济贫困而不得不服从，而是通过嵌进人的思想认识结构实现理性认同。面对此种全面的压迫，卢卡奇指出，解决的办法必须是总体性革命。继承了黑格尔的主客体辩证法思想，卢卡奇认为，无产阶级可以通过自我教育从内而外地焕活阶级意识，扬弃与克服物化，恢复被扭曲了的主体性。

The first-generation Frankfurt School scholars Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno continued this humanist line of thought, while also acknowledging that the stability of bourgeois rule largely stems from reified ideology. “From Lukács to Horkheimer and Adorno, there occurred an important shift: from a dialectic of subject and object aimed at the revolutionary subject, toward the absolute identity compulsion of the principle of exchange and calculative rationality, and its philosophical framework also transformed into an absolute objectivity. In the end, with Adorno, only the absolute compulsion of the capital-subject and the ‘world of domination’ it shaped remained.” [1]1 Neil Postman, *Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology* (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), p. 119. Unlike Lukács, Horkheimer and Adorno, grounded in the social formation of late capitalism, particularly applied the dialectic of subject-object identity to the critique of mass media ideology dominated by capital. The Frankfurt School pointed out that the value-rationality of media culture — music, film, theater, novels, etc. — in modern society was disappearing, replaced by instrumental rationality conforming to the logic of capitalist industrial production. Culture had become a commodity, losing its original aura, and culture had fully entered the system of exchange of means of production.

法兰克福学派第一代学者马克斯·霍克海默和西奥多·阿多诺延续了这种人道主义思路，同时也承认资产阶级统治的稳固很大程度上来自物化的意识形态。“从卢卡奇到霍克海默和阿多诺发生了一次重要转变，即从一种以革命主体为旨归的主客体辩证法，走向了交换原则和计算理性的绝对同一性强制，其哲学构架也转变为一种绝对的客观性。最后，在阿多诺那里，只剩下了那个资本主体的绝对强制和它所塑造的‘统治的世界’。” 与卢卡奇不同的是，霍克海默和阿多诺立足晚期资本主义社会形态，将主客体同一性辩证法尤为突出地运用于资本主导的大众媒介意识形态批判。法兰克福学派指出，现代社会中的音乐、电影、戏剧、小说等媒介文化价值理性正在消失，取而代之的是符合资本主义工业生产逻辑的工具理性。文化业已成为商品，丢失其原有的灵性，文化完全地进入生产资料交换体系。

First, media commodities exhibit the homogenizing characteristics of industrialization. “Under monopoly, all mass culture is identical.” [2]2 Jacques Ellul, *The Technological System*, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Continuum, 1980), p. 125. Adorno took jazz as an example: jazz appears diverse, but its structure in melody, harmony, rhythm, and form is extremely simple; splitting and reassembling its parts yields an unlimited quantity of new music, even improvisational sections. “Those performances that seem spontaneous are actually executed with mechanical precision and careful pre-arrangement. And even where improvisation does exist — for example, in the performances of rebellious bands that perhaps still indulge in it purely for pleasure today — the only material left to them is popular songs. So-called improvisation has thus degenerated into a more or less rewriting of basic conventions, and standardized specifications flash through every moment of it. Even improvisation is merely a constant repetition following the benchmark.” [3]3 Antonio Gramsci, *Selections from the Prison Notebooks*, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 238. Adorno believed that culture and art should be highly individualistic expressions of the subject, but under capitalism, media culture has become standardized, homogeneous industrial products.

首先，媒介商品呈现出工业化的同一性特征。“在垄断下，所有大众文化都是一致的。” 阿多诺以爵士乐为例，爵士乐看起来多样，但在旋律、和声、节拍和曲式上的结构极其简单，各部分拆分重组即为无限量的新音乐，甚至是即兴演奏部分。“那些貌似处于自发性的演奏，实际上都是带着机械式的准确性、经过事前的细心安排的。而即便是在即兴演奏真实存在的场合——例如那些或许在今天仍旧纯粹为了乐趣而沉迷于此的反抗性乐团的演奏——留给他们的唯一素材也只有流行歌曲。所以所谓的即兴，实际上已经退化为仅仅是对基本的常规进行或多或少的改写，而标准化的规格就闪现在其中的每一个瞬间。就连即兴，也只是遵循着基准不断进行着的重复。” 阿多诺认为，文化艺术本应是极具个性色彩的主体表达，但在资本主义经济中，媒介文化却都成为标准同质的工业产品。

Second, standardized media culture can only produce homogenized subjects. According to the Frankfurt School’s view, humans as humans should possess the richness of subjectivity and distinct individuality proper to them, but the homogeneous media produced on an assembly line suppresses people’s aesthetic individuality. At the same time, the essence of entertainment under late capitalism remains an extension of labor, thus ironically giving rise to this scenario — “People pursue it to escape from mechanical labor, to conserve energy so as to plunge back into labor.” [4]4 Stuart Hall, "Encoding/Decoding," in *Culture, Media, Language*, ed. Stuart Hall et al. (London: Hutchinson, 1980), p. 128. Therefore, modern people’s entertainment habits are also shaped by the culture industry: after-dinner coffee, weekend movies, holiday exhibitions — even the post-activity reactions to each form of entertainment can be pre-regulated by product programs. In the culture industry, people need not think.

其次，标准化的媒介文化只能造就同质化的主体。依据法兰克福学派的观点，人作为人本应具有属于人的主体丰富性与鲜明个体性，但流水线生产的同质媒介压制了人的审美个性。同时，晚期资本主义的娱乐本质仍是劳动的延伸，因而戏谑地出现了这一场景——“人们追求它是为了从机械劳动中解脱出来，养精蓄锐以便再次投入劳动”。因此，现代人的娱乐习惯也被文化工业塑造，饭后咖啡、周末电影、假期看展，甚至是每项娱乐活动的观后反应都可以被产品程序预先规制。在文化工业中，人无需思考。

Finally, the entry of culture into the industrial production chain reflects the essence of capitalism: the consumption of material means of subsistence can no longer satisfy the expanding logic of capital; incorporating the cultural industry into the production link conforms to the inevitable logic of capital valorization. However, in this cultural environment, the Frankfurt School pointed out that society’s cultural rules are almost entirely set by the aristocracy and big capitalists; the lower classes have no way to express their own cultural demands, let alone legitimize their own music, novels, and cultural aesthetics. This “culture of the upper class built on inequality” [5]5 Stuart Hall et al., *Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order* (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 68. is an “affirmative culture,” [6]6 “Affirmative culture” is a concept from Herbert Marcuse’s 1937 essay “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” referring to bourgeois culture that affirms an idealized realm of spiritual values while accepting the existing social order, thereby reconciling individuals to their actual conditions of exploitation. a special culture of the bourgeois era. [7]7 Marcuse, *Negations*, p. 89. Bourgeois ideology, by means of the media apparatus, glosses over its own exploitative nature and achieves the alienated domination of humans.

最后，文化进入工业生产链反映了资本主义的本质，物质生活资料的消费已不能满足扩大化的资本逻辑，将文化产业纳入生产环节符合资本增值的必然逻辑。但在这一文化环境中，法兰克福学派指出，社会的文化规则几乎完全由贵族与大资本家制定，底层工人无从表达自身文化诉求，更无从使自身的音乐、小说和文化审美合法化。这种“建立在不平等基础的上层阶级的文化” 是“肯定的文化”，是资产阶级时代的特殊文化[7]。资产阶级的意识形态借助媒介机器，矫饰自身剥削本质，实现了对人的异化统治。

(2) Critique of Techno-Fetishism in the Intelligent Media Age: Returning to Human Subjectivity

（二）智媒时代回归人的主体性的技术拜物教批判

In the age of intelligent media, AIGC has unleashed enormous productive forces in fields such as painting, video production, news writing, and scenario simulation, but the emergence of new technologies has not changed this top-down reality of domination. Artificial intelligence is gradually replacing simple human labor in tasks such as writing, drawing, and video production; machines generate and create more and better cultural works. This has led some to mistakenly believe that simply using new technology is equivalent to producing good works, resulting in a worship of technology itself and posing the ideological risk of technological fetishism. From clothing, food, housing, and transportation to social media, from digital exhibitions to smart cities, new technologies are enveloping every aspect of media life, giving rise to uniform smart cities or smart shopping malls. Media culture scholar Neil Postman once reiterated the metaphor of man as machine and castigated scientism. He pointed out: "Technopoly prefers precise knowledge to true knowledge; one could say that Technopoly wants to solve the dilemma of subjectivity once and for all. Because of the machine's impersonal character, because of its endless repeatable operations, it becomes a controlling metaphor and is regarded as an instrument of progress." [1]1 Neil Postman, *Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology* (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), p. 119. Technopoly may turn human beings themselves into cold objects, culture subordinated to technology, and people into isolated individuals with "dead thoughts."

智媒时代，AIGC在绘画、视频制作、新闻写作和场景模拟等领域爆发出极大生产力，但新技术的涌现并未改变这一自上而下的统治现实。人工智能在写作、绘图、视频等工作中逐渐取代简单人力，机器生成创作出更多更好的文化作品，这导致了一部分人误以为只要使用新技术就等同为创作好作品，致使对技术本身的崇拜，存在技术拜物教的意识形态风险。从衣食住行到社交媒体、从数字展览到智慧城市，新技术正笼罩在媒介生活的方方面面，出现了千篇一律的智能城市或智能商场。媒介文化学者尼尔·波兹曼（Neil Postman）曾重申人是机器的隐喻，挞伐唯科学主义。他指出：“技术垄断论比较喜欢精确的知识，而不是真实的知识；可以说技术垄断想要一劳永逸地解决主体性的两难问题。由于机器的非人个性，由于它无穷无尽的可重复运作，它就成了一种有控制力的暗喻，且被认为是进步的工具。” 技术垄断可能使人类本身成为冰冷的客体，文化臣服技术，人成为“思想死亡”的孤立个体。

With the acceleration of the neoliberal process and the increase in industrial capital exports, the development of new technologies is evolving into a new technopoly in the age of intelligent media. In the age of intelligent media, we must be more vigilant against the mechanical and quantitative technological fetishism of the media world, which suppresses subjects, invades people's privacy, and controls people's thinking and aesthetics in a top-down manner. French philosopher Jacques Ellul pointed out that in ideology, technology is always endowed with excessive autonomy, even ontology, but in fact, technological elements merely adapt to a certain technological system; the technological system is designed, made, and used by humans, and only the existence of human subjectivity has a fundamental impact on the effects of technology. [2]2 Jacques Ellul, *The Technological System*, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Continuum, 1980), p. 125. Technology-empowered media not only becomes an extension of the human body but is also replacing human thinking and minds. Therefore, how to return to human subjectivity and rethink the control of media's technological fetishism has become the prerequisite for reflecting on the media ideology of humans as subjects under new technological conditions.

随着新自由主义进程加快和产业资本输出增加，新技术的发展正在智能媒介时代衍化为新的技术垄断。智媒时代必须要更为警惕媒介世界机械化和量化的技术拜物教以自上而下的方式压制主体、侵犯人隐私、控制人思维审美。法国哲学家雅克·埃吕尔（Jacques Ellul）指出，在意识形态中技术总是被赋予了过多的自主性甚至是本体性，但是事实上，技术元素只是在适应某项技术系统，技术系统由人设计、制作和使用，只有人的主体性存在才对技术的效果产生根本影响。 技术赋能媒介不仅成为人身体的延伸，而且正在代替人的思维和头脑，因而如何回归人的主体性，重思媒介的技术拜物教控制，成为新技术条件下对人作为主体的媒介意识形态的反思前提。

II. The Cultural Hegemony Lineage of Subject Struggle: From Gramsci to the Birmingham School

二、主体斗争的文化领导权脉络：从葛兰西到伯明翰学派

Unlike the humanist lineage, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, through the concept of cultural hegemony, proposed that the audience of media is not merely destined to be oppressed; media recipients also engage in autonomous reading and resistance based on their own interests. The Birmingham School continued this line of thought, pointing out that in the process of watching television, different people, based on their own cultural positions, class will, and habits of growth, can produce ideological intentions different from those intended by the producers. Therefore, ideological analysis of media can adopt not only a top-down stance but also a bottom-up audience perspective.

不同于人道主义一脉，意大利马克思主义者安东尼奥·葛兰西以文化领导权思路提出媒介的受众并非只有被压迫的命运，媒介接收者也在依据自身利益进行自主阅读的抵抗。伯明翰学派延续此思路，指出人在观看电视的过程中，不同的人根据自身文化立场、阶级意志和成长习惯等可以产生不同于制作者预期的意识形态意图，因而对媒介的意识形态分析不仅可以有自上而下的立场，还可以有自下而上的受众视角。

(I) Subject Struggle: Bottom-Up Resistance

（一）主体斗争：自下而上的抵抗

Gramsci was one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party. Like Lukács, he also analyzed and summarized the revolutionary conditions of Eastern and Western societies after the October Revolution. Similarly, Gramsci noted the problem of revolutionary consciousness among Western European workers, but unlike Lukács, Gramsci proposed that ideology has materiality. Most importantly, ideology is not a "false consciousness," not a product of mere self-deception in ideas, but a material force; this is the foundation of Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony. Gramsci pointed out that in actual revolution, ideology acts as "social cement," mobilizing the collective cohesion of the unity of social contradictions, thereby facilitating the completion of revolution and domination. In particular, "in societies where civil society has achieved a relatively developed form, political coercion begins to weaken, and cultural and ideological hegemony becomes prominent." [3]3 Antonio Gramsci, *Selections from the Prison Notebooks*, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 238. Cultural hegemony is a non-violent form of leadership, carried through carriers such as newspapers and magazines. In civil society, through ideological forms, the proletariat realizes its struggle for state hegemony. This process differs from the stormy assault of the October Revolution's war of maneuver; rather, it is the proletariat gradually seizing important "nodes" such as education, media, and academia in the cultural field, progressively controlling cultural content, dominating cultural consensus, forming unified social opinion, and thereby achieving the goal of class domination. In this process, the masses are not passively subjected to uniform top-down oppression; on the contrary, hegemony must win the active acceptance of rule by the people. Gramsci opened up the possibility of the subject in ideological struggle, and this attention to the audience subject laid the foundation for the Birmingham School's study of media ideology.

葛兰西是意大利共产党创始人之一，与卢卡奇类似，他也分析总结十月革命后东西方社会的革命条件。同样地，葛兰西注意到西欧工人的革命意识问题，但与卢卡奇不同的是，葛兰西提出意识形态具有物质性。最重要的是意识形态不是一种“虚假的意识”，不是单纯观念中自我欺骗的产物，而是一种物质性力量，这是葛兰西文化领导权理论的基础。葛兰西指出，意识形态在现实革命中以“社会水泥”的形式调动社会矛盾统一体的集体凝聚力，从而促成革命和统治完成。尤其是“在市民社会取得相对发达形式的社会里，政治的强制性开始弱化，文化的和意识形态的领导权开始突出”[10]。文化领导权是一种非暴力的领导形式，以报纸杂志传播等为载体，在市民社会中，通过意识形态的形式实现无产阶级对国家领导权的争夺。这一过程不同于十月革命运动战的暴风骤雨，而是无产阶级在文化领域中逐步夺取教育、媒介、学术等重要“节点”，逐步控制文化内容，主宰文化共识，形成社会统一意见，从而达到阶级支配的目的。在这一过程中，民众也并非被动地受到自上而下的统一压迫，恰恰相反，领导权必须要争取民众主动地接受统治。葛兰西开拓了意识形态斗争中的主体可能性，这种对受众主体的关注为英国伯明翰学派对媒介意识形态研究奠定基础。

From the perspective of the Birmingham School, first, the reason media can constitute modern people's real life is that the meaning of culture is not given but produced and constructed. Through signifying practices, media "produce meaning, the product of practices that make things meaningful." [4]4 Stuart Hall, "Encoding/Decoding," in *Culture, Media, Language*, ed. Stuart Hall et al. (London: Hutchinson, 1980), p. 128. Things themselves have no meaning; they are endowed with meaning by people only in social life. A stone is just a stone, but in specific contexts, some stones become symbols of love, others become monuments. Media such as television, advertising, and film in daily life are leading a signifying practice, permeating bourgeois ideology and constructing unequal subject relations among people. Stuart Hall pointed out that British media linked crime with race issues; news reports on street robbery always biasedly targeted black youth groups, i.e., only reporting on black robbery incidents while ignoring reports on robbery cases involving other groups. However, statistics show that in cities without large black populations, street robbery rates were actually also high. In this signifying practice, media made street robbery and black crime synonymous. [5]5 Stuart Hall et al., *Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order* (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 68. Behind the collusion of mass media with official government, law, and other apparatuses, the state completes the reproduction of domination.

在伯明翰学派看来，首先，媒介之所以能构成现代人的现实生活，在于文化的意义不是被赋予，而是被生产与建构出来的。媒介通过意指实践，“生产意义、使事物具有意义的实践的产物”。事物本身没有意义，只有在社会生活中才被人们赋予了意义，石头只是一块石头，在特定生活中，有些石头成为爱情象征，有些石头成为纪念碑。生活中的电视、广告和电影等媒介正在主导一场意指实践，渗透资产阶级的意识形态，建构起人们之间不平等的主体关系。斯图亚特·霍尔（Stuart Hall）指出，英国媒体将犯罪与种族问题捆绑在一起，街头抢劫的新闻报道总是有偏见性地特指黑人青年群体，即只报道黑人抢劫事件，忽视对其他群体抢劫案件的报道。然而据统计，在没有大量黑人定居的城市，街头抢劫率也其实居高不下。在这场意指实践中，媒介使街头抢劫和黑人犯罪成为同义词 在大众媒介联合官方政府、法律等机器的共谋命令背后，国家完成统治的再生产。

Second, the final form of mass culture is, on one hand, an expression of the interests of the ruling class, and on the other hand, the final expression of multiple interest groups. Just as television programs include not only elite culture representing the interests of the big bourgeoisie but also entertainment programs reflecting the needs of the working class at the bottom, the final form presented in the cultural field does not have only one voice. The Birmingham School disagreed with the Frankfurt School's view of one-way ideological domination from the dimension of subject alienation; they proposed that the working class is not always oppressed, and marginalized subcultural groups also express resistance through autonomous "decoding."

其次，大众文化的最终形态一方面是统治阶级利益的表达，另一方面也是多重利益群体的最终表达。正如电视节目中不仅有代表大资产阶级利益的精英文化，也有反映底层工人需求的娱乐节目，文化领域的最终呈现形态不只有一种声音。伯明翰学派不赞同法兰克福学派从主体异化维度提出的意识形态单向统治观点，他们提出工人阶级并不总是被压迫着的，边缘亚文化群体也在通过自主“解码”表达抵抗。

Finally, the Birmingham School always focused on the disadvantaged groups at the bottom of society, especially the media and cultural situation of the working class. Represented by Hall, the Birmingham School, when discussing the encoding behavior of media texts, paid attention to the working class, youth, women, people of color, and homosexuals, highlighting from a micro perspective the diverse discourses of fundamentally different groups in daily life and exploring unequal ideological relations.

最后，伯明翰学派始终关注社会底层的弱势群体，尤其是工人阶级的媒介文化处境。以霍尔为代表，伯明翰学派探讨媒介文本编码行为时，关注工人阶级、青年、女性、有色人种及同性恋者，从微观视角凸显日常生活中具有根本差异群体的多元话语，探究不平等的意识形态关系。

(II) Critique of Cultural Inequality in Subjectivity Construction in the Age of Intelligent Media

（二）智媒时代主体性建构的文化不平等批判

The aim of the Birmingham School was to reveal how bourgeois media ideology constructs unequal cultural subjects in the media world. The world of intelligent media is likewise a field of cultural practice with a hierarchical order composed of the dominant and the marginalized.

伯明翰学派的目的就是要揭示，在传媒世界中资产阶级媒介意识形态如何建构不平等的文化主体。而智媒世界同样是一个由主导与边缘构成的有等级秩序的文化实践领域。

Cultural inequality in the age of intelligent media is first manifested in artificial intelligence widening the digital divide. Differences in institutional levels and uneven levels of productive forces exist between countries, and artificial intelligence technology suffers from severe global imbalance. Herbert Schiller pointed out that information and communication systems are always colluding with transnational capital; information technology can never be neutral, technology is a product of social construction, and thus media culture built on different technological levels has a clear direction of flow. Today’s media world of news, social media, film and television is dominated by a few authoritative media outlets, and the world’s media information is mainly disseminated outward from a few major developed countries. Transnational corporations are the main drivers of information content and industry. This system helps overcome the sustained accumulation crises of developed capitalism but is endangering the national and economic sovereignty of developing countries.[14] In other words, media expansion is the colonial expansion of the lifestyle, tastes, and ideology of developed countries. Information monopoly carries the risk of cultural dumping. The 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, and the effect produced in third-world countries is equivalent to the institutionalization of a development path.”[15]

智媒时代的文化不平等，首先体现为人工智能加大数字鸿沟。不同国家之间存在制度水平差异与生产力水平参差问题，人工智能技术就存在严重的全球不平衡。赫伯特·席勒指出，信息和传播系统总是与跨国资本勾结，信息技术从来不能中立，技术是社会构造的产物，因而建基于不同技术水平的媒介文化具有明确的流向性。现今的新闻、社交媒体、电影电视等媒体世界由少数几个权威媒体主导，世界的媒介信息也主要由几个主要发达国家向外扩散，跨国公司是信息内容和产业的主要推动者，这种系统有助于克服发达资本主义的持续积累性危机，却正在危及发展中国家的民族和经济主权。[14] 换言之，媒介扩张是发达国家的生活方式，品味习惯和意识形态的殖民扩张，信息垄断存在文化倾销风险，新自由主义的文化习惯正在构建多数民众对社会现实的认知，发展中国家的人们被迫“坚信整个资本主义世界体系的合理性，在第三世界国家所造就的效果等于是一种发展道路的制度化”[15]。

Secondly, cultural inequality in the age of intelligent media stems from the deepening fragmentation of information, which is also the fragmentation of the subject. Media culture researcher Nick Couldry proposed the practice paradigm. He points out that cultural hegemony is a clear practice paradigm orientation, which is “understanding media as a type of practice rather than as a text or production structure. It studies all open categories of practice behavior oriented toward and related to media, as well as the role media plays in organizing other social practice behaviors.”[16] The intelligent media practice, full of struggle, has not achieved the “equality for all” it promised; online equality by no means represents offline equality. 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 age of intelligent media, netizens who appear to be in the same space are actually in different social strata, with vastly different access to social resources. Heterogeneous subjects can only decode fragmented internet information based on their own interests. Thus, in the intelligent media world dominated by capital, everyone can log into the same website or use the same software, but the information different groups can receive and the real information networks they can form have substantial differences. Ultimately, the abundance of information and real-time connectivity has not made people more united; instead, it has aggravated class contradictions and intensified the fragmentation of the subject.

其次，智媒时代的文化不平等来自信息分众化加深，信息分众化也是主体的碎片化。媒介文化研究者尼克·库尔德利（Nick Couldry）提出实践范式。他指出，文化领导权就是一种明确的实践范式导向，是“把媒介理解为一种实践行为而不是理解为文本或生产结构，它研究的是以媒介为面向与媒介有关的所有开放的实践行为类别以及媒介在组织其他社会实践行为中所发挥的作用”[16]，充满斗争的智媒实践并没有实现它所承诺的“人人平等”，线上平等完全不代表线下平等。可以说，社交网络的开放反而使阶层差异得以更充分地暴露于公众。尤其是在智媒时代，看似处于同一空间的网民其实分处不同的社会阶层，所能获得的社会资源差异巨大，异质主体只能根据自身利益解码碎片化的互联网信息。那么，在由资本主导的智媒世界中，人人都可登陆同一网站或使用同一软件，但不同群体所能接受的信息以及能够形成的真正信息网络则具有实质性差别。最终，海量信息和实时互通的有无并未使人变得更团结，反而加重阶层矛盾，加剧主体碎片化。

Fundamentally, the participation of machines as media has not changed the fundamental relations of production. It appears that machines automatically generate content, but the ideology behind them originates from real capitalist relations of production. For example, Microsoft once released a social media artificial intelligence capable of real-time chat interaction with people, but within less than 24 hours of going online, this AI medium output content with racist overtones.

从根本上说，机器的媒介参与并未改变根本的生产关系。看似机器自动生成内容，但背后的意识形态源自现实的资本主义生产关系。比如，微软曾发布一款社交媒体人工智能，可以与人进行实时聊天互动，可是在上线的不足24小时时间内，这一人工智能媒介就输出具有种族主义指向的内容。

III. The Thread of Subjectless Structuralism and Post-Structuralism: From Althusser to Foucault

三、无主体的结构主义和后结构主义脉络：从阿尔都塞到福柯

Althusser did not attribute ideology to the humanist logic of reification, nor did he oppose attributing ideology to generalized cultural hegemony. Based on new changes in the subject, combined with psychoanalytic theory, he opened up a new space for the materialist interpretation of ideology. Althusser pointed out that history is a subjectless process. The reproduction of society depends on the reproduction of social systems and material practices determined by the will of the state and the behavioral subjects. The production of the subject is no longer an epistemological issue. Althusser’s student Michel Foucault further proposed the decentralization of state power, providing a new way of thinking about the production of the subject through biopolitics.

阿尔都塞没有将意识形态归为人道主义的物化逻辑，也反对将意识形态归为泛化的文化领导权。他根据主体出现的新变化，结合精神分析理论，开创了意识形态唯物化阐释的新空间。阿尔都塞指出，历史是无主体的过程，社会的再生产依赖于行为主体及被国家意志所决定的社会制度和物质实践的再生产，主体的生产不再是一个认识论问题。阿尔都塞的学生米歇尔·福柯进一步提出国家权力的去中心化，以生命政治的方式为主体的生产提供了一种新的解题思路。

(A) Subjectless: A Centerless Network of Power

（一）无主体：无中心的权力网络

Althusser eliminated the subject at the methodological level, starting from the social object rather than from people, understanding ideology as a part of the social organism. If the first two threads both regard the objects of rule as rational subjects, then the third thread of structuralism and post-structuralism identifies a completely different mode of ideological domination. For the first two, elite culture disguises itself as a “common culture,” forcing the populace to identify with and accept certain ideas; marginal culture may become a popular culture through resistance struggle. But in any case, the way this media ideology takes effect is by making people believe in some “common culture” or common sense. That is, it subtly disseminates certain ideas by making people believe, identify with, and form cultural consensus, regardless of whether this common sense truly represents the real interests of the general populace. However, the third structuralist thread has nothing to do with the subject’s rationality or belief; it replaces the object of communication with a part of the 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.”[8]8 This is a quotation from Althusser’s work on ideology, referring to his concept that ideology is not merely a reflection of experience but its constitutive condition. According to Althusser’s analysis of social reproduction, the operating mechanism of ideology is to interpellate individuals as subjects, making people 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.”[9]9 This is a direct quotation from Louis Althusser’s essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970), outlining his theory of interpellation. Ideology is a self-summoning within the subjective; the subject appears to be self-choosing and self-asserting, but is actually a certain subject subordinated to the position arranged for it by ideology. For ideology, ideology can only assert itself through the subject; there is no ideology or ideological state apparatus 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.”[10]10 This paraphrases Althusser’s argument in the same essay that interpellation simultaneously constitutes the subject and the social order.

阿尔都塞从方法论层面取缔主体，从社会客体而不是从人出发，将意识形态理解为社会有机体中的一部分。如果说前两种脉络都是将统治对象视为理性主体，那么第三种结构主义和后结构主义脉络所指认的意识形态统治方式则完全不同。对于前两种，精英文化将自身伪饰为“共同文化”使民众不得不认同与接受某种观念，边缘文化可能通过抵抗斗争成为一种流行文化，但无论如何，这种媒介意识形态生效的方式都是通过使人信服某种“共同文化”或常识而生效。即通过使人信服、认同和形成文化共识的方式，潜移默化地传播某种观念，无论这种常识是否真实地代表了普遍民众的真实利益。但是第三种结构主义脉络则无关乎主体的理性或信仰，它将传播对象置换为整体中的部分、社会有机体中的部分。意识形态“不仅是活生生的经验的表现，而且是经验的前提条件，是意识与主体性的基础”。按照阿尔都塞对社会再生产的分析，意识形态的运行机制就是把个体质询为主体，使人成为特定位置上的某种“自由的主体”。“没有不借助于意识形态并在意识形态中存在的实践；没有不借助于主体并为了这些主体而存在的意识形态。” 意识形态是主观中的一种自我召唤，主体看似在自我选择和自我主张，但其实是一个臣服于意识形态为其安排好位置的某种主体；对意识形态而言，意识形态只有通过主体才能主张自己，没有不为了主体的意识形态和意识形态国家机器，“意识形态把个人质询为主体的过程，既是社会秩序的建构过程，也是主体的建构过程”。

Foucault continued the subjectless thread. Based on the dissolution of the subject, he proposed that the effectiveness of ideology lies not in making the subject internally identify with ideological content, but in obtaining control and governance over people from the level of individual life. For the individual, even if they do not identify with certain ideological content, out of consideration of interests, the individual will still practice a certain order in their actions, thereby indirectly completing the task of bourgeois rule. For social rule, the key point of the operation of the ideological state apparatus is not to strive for the result of the populace’s inner understanding or identification, but to discipline, supervise, and manage people from the level of life actions and governance procedures. Introducing power into the discussion of subject production is the greatest feature of Foucault’s theory of ideology. Foucault does not discuss state rule from the perspective of class, but analyzes the micro-physical structure of rule from the perspective of power. Power is ideological power that transcends political violence. Foucault is not concerned with where power comes from or who exercises it; in his view, only the operation of power and the mode of organization of power are the most realistic issues. The simple state violent control system has become ineffective; the basic bonds uniting community members have been overturned; social power requires reconfiguration. Specifically:

福柯延续了无主体的脉络，在主体消解的基础上提出意识形态的有效性不在于使主体内心产生对意识形态内容的认同，而在于从个体生命层面获取对人的管控治理。对个体而言，即便不认同某种意识形态内容，但出于利益的考量，个体也仍然会从行动中践行某种秩序，从而间接完成资产阶级统治的任务；对社会统治而言，意识形态国家机器的运行重点就不在于争取民众内心的理解或认同的结果，而在于从生命行动和治理程序层面，对人进行规约、监督和管理。以权力介入主体生产的讨论是福柯意识形态理论的最大特色。福柯不是从阶级角度讨论国家统治，而是从权力入手剖析统治的微观物理结构，权力是超越政治暴力的意识形态权力。福柯不关心权力从哪里来，权力由谁施加，在他看来，只有权力的运作和权力的组织方式才是最现实的问题。简单的国家暴力控制系统已失效，凝聚共同体成员的基础纽带被颠覆，社会权力要求重新配置。具体来说：

First, in Foucault’s view, the rule of power is distributed in a centerless, diffuse pattern. The issuer of power is not only the state; all cultural departments and cultural institutions independent of political institutions, such as schools, families, hospitals, and media communication institutions, can exercise power. These schools and media institutions appear to be disseminating knowledge, but they are also issuing power. In this regard, Foucault criticizes the bourgeois ideology hidden behind knowledge; the true political mission is to critique the silent power struggles within these seemingly neutral institutions.

其一，在福柯看来，权力的统治以无中心的弥散样态分布。权力发布者并不只有国家，所有独立于政治机构的文化部门和文化机构，比如学校、家庭、医院、媒介传播机构都可以实施权力。这些学校、媒介机构看似在传播知识，却也在发布权力。就此，福柯批判隐藏在知识背后的资产阶级意识形态，真正的政治使命就是要批判这些外表中立的机构中默无声息的权力斗争。

Second, the human being is produced in a disciplined form on the network of power. In the complex space of power, “on this ‘net,’ individuals not only circulate, but they are always simultaneously in a position of submission and exercising power” [21]. The exerciser of power is simultaneously the recipient of power. On a centerless network of power, the human being cannot see who is exercising power, nor can they see the direction of power—whether it is top-down or bottom-up. People cannot even touch the foundation of power when they wish to resist. Modern power disciplines human subjectivity through this network, distributing human bodies in a certain limited space to maximize efficiency, thereby bringing the development of the entire system of social reproduction under the rule of the state.

其二，人在权力之网上以被规训的形式生产出来。在复杂的权力空间中，“在这个“网”上，个人不仅在流动，而且他们总是既处于服从的地位又同时运用权力”[21]。权力的施加者同时是权力的接受者，在无中心的权力网络上，人看不到权力的施加者是谁，也看不到权力的方向，是否是自上而下或者是自下而上。人们甚至想要抵抗也无从触及权力根基。现代权力就通过这张网络将人的主体性规训出来，通过将人的身体分配在某种有限空间中发挥最大效能，整个社会再生产系统的发展就被纳入国家统治之下。

Third, Foucault holds that neoliberal governmentality is the rule over life power. “Life” and “living beings” become the stakes of new political struggles. Biopolitics manages the production and reproduction of the population through statistics and political economy. The rule of power becomes the implementation of micro-issues such as population, health, life, and security. Biopolitics dissolves human subjectivity; the operation of power is directed at the management of life. Power always deals with the human body and life, controlling life to steer it toward the economic interests of the bourgeoisie and to realize state governance.

其三，福柯认为新自由主义治理术即对生命权力的统治。“生命”和“生命体”成为新的政治斗争赌注，生命政治通过统计学和政治经济学管控人口的生产与再生产，权力的统治变为对人口、健康、生命和安全等微观议题的实施。生命政治消解了人的主体性，权力的运作针对生命管理而来，权力始终在与人身体和生命中打交道，通过控制生命，导向资产阶级的经济利益，实现国家治理。

(II) A Biopolitical Critique of the Dissolution of the Subject in the Age of Intelligent Media

（二）智媒时代主体消解的生命政治批判

If traditional media such as newspapers and television created the worship of and submission to a center by a minority, then in the age of intelligent media, although human spiritual life remains in unequal relations, the center of power has disappeared. The ideological critique theories of structuralism and post-structuralism remain valid in the age of intelligent media.

如果说报纸、电视等传统媒介造就了少数人对中心的崇拜服从，那么在智媒时代，尽管人的精神生活依旧处于不平等关系中，但是权力的中心已消失不见。结构主义与后结构主义的意识形态批判理论在智媒时代依然有效。

First, according to Foucault’s “game of truth” of the subject, human subjectivity is not manifested through restoration; rather, it is continuously produced in the practices of subjection and ethical freedom of power. Hospitals diagnose and produce mad patients, schools educate and produce disciplined students, and news publishing institutions write about abnormal social individuals. In this game of subject production and truth, whether the patient is truly ill is unimportant, and what the criteria for a normal person are is also unimportant. What matters is the final governance outcome and governance procedure. In reality, AIGC directly cancels human subject participation; non-human subjects can equally generate media content. In the age of intelligent media, poems created by AIGC receive unanimous praise, and “virtual boyfriends” replace human subjects as perfect companion roles. Whether the boyfriend is a real boyfriend is no longer important; truth is no longer important. Just as celebrities are keen to fabricate gimmicks and create news, even if they know the negative news they fabricate is untrue, they refuse to defend themselves. Click-through rates and forwarding rates replace truth; “black is also red.” [11]11 “Black is also red” (黑红也是红) is a Chinese internet slang phrase meaning that negative fame (being “blackened”) is still fame (being “red,” i.e., popular), reflecting a logic where any attention, even scandalous, is preferable to obscurity.

首先，依照福柯所说的主体“真相游戏”，人的主体性并非因恢复而彰显，人的主体性在权力的屈从性实践和伦理性自由中被不断生产出来。医院诊治出癫狂的病人，学校教育出规范的学生，新闻出版机构撰写出非正常的社会人。在这场主体生产和真相的游戏中，病人是否是真的病人并不重要，何为正常人的评判标准也不重要，重要的是最终的治理结果与治理程序。现实中的AIGC直接取消人的主体参与性，非人类主体同样可以生成媒介的内容，智媒时代的AIGC创作的诗歌获得一致好评，“虚拟男友”取代人类主体成为完美的伴侣角色，男友是否是真的男友不再重要，真相已经不再重要。正如明星热衷于炮制噱头、制造新闻，即便其明白所制造出的负面新闻并非真实也拒不辩解，点击率和转发率取代了真实，“黑红也是红”。

Second, neoliberal governmentality abstracts the human being into population. From a cost perspective, it achieves maximum governance effects with minimal economic and political costs, but it also means that it no longer pays attention to the human being’s faith and soul, reducing the human being to a mere “weight” for expanding interests. “‘Technological disempowerment’ represents the decision of negative biopower, while ‘multi-dimensional surveillance’ represents the exercise of positive biopower. The two complement each other and together constitute the biopolitical landscape of the intelligent age.” [22] Click-through rates and forwarding rates on social media, and transaction rates in e-commerce, all mean that regardless of whether the subject is convinced by a certain system of ideas, the social rule of ideological transmission remains effective.

其次，新自由主义治理术将人抽象化为人口。从成本角度来看，实现了以最小的经济和政治成本获得最大的治理效果，但也意味着不再关注人的信仰灵魂，将人简单作为扩大利益的“砝码”。“‘技术去能’代表着否定性生命权力的决断，‘多维透视’则代表着肯定性生命权力的施展。二者互为增补，合力构成智能时代的生命政治图景。”[22] 社交媒体中的点击率、转发率和电子购物中的成交率，都意味着无论主体是否信服某种观念系统，意识形态传播的社会统治仍然生效。

Finally, virtual reality combined with anonymous media causes human self-identity to depend on social relations in virtual time and space. For example, Woz and his friends in the film *Ready Player One*, and Barbie and her boyfriends in the film *Barbie*: non-human subjects in virtual reality confirm their self-identity through kinship, friendship, and workplace relations. The German philosopher Byung-Chul Han proposes: “Transparent communication can only be machine-like communication; humans cannot achieve it. Forcing people to be completely transparent equates humans with a functional element in the system. This is the violence of transparency.” The world of intelligent media turns humans into empty symbolic elements, while weaving a so-called world of equality and freedom with the modern ideology of the bourgeoisie, using transparent machines to stifle human criticality and creativity, and cloaking exploitation in a rational guise. This social connection is not determined by specific material production but is actively endowed by the human subject. Therefore, no matter how technology develops, intelligent media remains a tool of humanity. Then, more information does not make people smarter, and more knowledge does not make people happier. If the development of intelligent media is not for the sake of humanity itself, but only for the needs of capital production, then the subject produced in such a process is a subject forced to maintain the rule of capital.

最后，虚拟现实联合匿名媒介使人的自我认同依赖虚拟时空的社会关系。如电影《头号玩家》中的沃兹和他的朋友们，电影《芭比》中芭比和她的男友们，虚拟现实中的非人类主体依赖亲情、友情和职场关系确证自我身份。德国哲学家韩炳哲（Byung-Chul Han）提出：“透明的交流只可能是机器式的交流，人类无法做到。强迫人们做到完全透明，让人类自身与系统中的一个功能性元素画等号，这就是透明性的暴力所在。” 智媒世界让人变为空洞的符号元素，又以资产阶级的现代意识形态编织了一个所谓平等自由的世界，以透明的机器扼杀人的批判性和创造性，为剥削披上一层理性外衣。这种社会联系并非由特定物质生产而决定，而是由人类主体主动赋予，因此无论技术如何发展，智媒都仍是人类的工具。那么，更多的信息也并不能使人变得聪明，更多的知识也不能使人变得幸福，智媒的发展如果不是为了人本身，只是为了资本的生产所需，在这样的程序中生产出来的主体，就是被迫维护资本统治的主体。

In summary, whether it is the “uniformity” of humanism, the empirical positivism of cultural materialism, or the pluralistic differences of post-structuralism, these three threads are still visible in today’s age of intelligent media. Intelligent media remains a modern ideological state apparatus. From the perspective of historical materialism, although the ideological critique proposed by Western leftist theorists such as Lukács has a certain validity, the subject liberation they advocate has insurmountable class limitations. Humanism replaces the historical standpoint with a monist standpoint; the subject resistance strategy of cultural hegemony easily falls into the risk of capitalist co-optation; and structuralism’s de-subjectifying disciplinary governance turns humans into undifferentiated elements in the capital market. True human liberation must be the free and comprehensive development of each individual. Only by transcending the limitations of the necessary alienation of humanity under capitalist society, transcending the limited division of labor in society, and enabling humanity to fully and comprehensively possess its products through the transformation of relations of production, can genuine subject liberation be achieved.

综上所述，无论是人道主义的“整体划一”，还是文化唯物主义的经验实证，抑或是后结构主义的多元差异，这三重脉络在今日智能媒体时代仍可见踪迹。智媒仍是一项现代意识形态国家机器。在历史唯物主义看来，卢卡奇等西方左翼理论家所提出的意识形态批判尽管具有一定有效性，但其提出的主体解放主张具有无可克服的阶级局限性。人道主义以一元论立场置换历史立场，文化领导权的主体抵抗策略极易陷落资本主义收编风险，结构主义祛主体的规训治理则是将人变为资本市场中无差别的元素。人的真正解放必定是每个人自由而全面的发展，只有超越资本主义社会对人的必然性异化的限制，超越社会有限的分工，以生产关系的变革使人充分全面地占有人的产品，才可能实现真正的主体解放。

Online Editor: Paul

网络编辑：保罗