虚拟异托邦:论当代大众文化的受众快感机制及其接受效果

Virtual Heterotopia: The Mechanism of Pleasure and Reception of Contemporary Popular Culture

随着我国信息技术的不断发展和世俗化潮流的不断推进,大众文化正在越来越深地影响着当代人的价值观念、心理结构和情感模式。大众文化的核心特质是唤起、投合、满足受众的快感,这种快感主要体现在三个方面:其一,通过拟象技术建立“超真实”的文本世界,为受众提供“生活在别处”的体验;其二,通过“盗猎”暴露日常生活中的陈腐意识形态,使受众获得言说和宣泄的渠道;其三,通过“生产者式文本”调动受众重建文本世界,使受众从中获得自我疗愈。在接受效果方面,大众文化的沉迷者多为“投射与认同”式的消费者,他们从文本中寻求对心理匮乏的满足,这种心理匮乏与他们在现实生活中被剥夺、被压抑的生活体验有关。因此,大众文化在当代社会中扮演着一种“虚拟异托邦”的角色,这需要研究者建立新的研究范式,通过合理引导发挥其解放性潜能。

Thanks to China’s development of information technology and secularization, popular culture increasingly affects contemporary people’s values, psychological structure, and emotional mode. The core characteristic of popular culture is to arouse, engage, and satisfy the audience’s pleasure, which is realized through three approaches. First, popular culture establishes a textual world of “hyperreality” through simulation techniques and provides the audience with an experience of “living elsewhere.” Second, popular culture exposes the outmoded ideology in daily life through “poaching” and offers the audience a channel for self-expression. Third, it rebuilds the textual world through a “producerly text, ” so that the audience can attain the goal of self-healing. In terms of its reception, the addicts of popular culture are often consumers of “projection and identification.” They seek satisfaction from the text to compensate their psychological deficiency, which derives from their life experience of deprivation of suppression. Therefore, popular culture plays a role of “virtual heterotopia” in contemporary society, which necessitates researchers to establish a new research paradigm and to engage the liberating potential of popular culture through reasonable guidance.