Empire of Mind - Overview

Overview

According to Strangelove, the economic system known as capitalism promotes unequal class, race and gender relations. Thus capitalism invariably produces resistance. This resistance takes the form of a contest over the meaning of things and events. Structural changes in the architecture of communication lead to new forms and strategies of resistance. The Empire of Mind identifies characteristics of these structural changes and outlines their implications for resistance to capitalism’s definitional control over meaning.

The Empire of Mind describes a theory of cultural transmission that takes into account a new structure of communication that is not found in the corporate (commercial) media systems of the pre-Internet era. Within this theory of cultural transmission the notion of an empire of mind is used to describe how capitalism operates as 'a violent and controlling system' (p. 10) that "tends toward totalization, embracing all before it within its homogenizing logic of social organization" (p. 12). While Strangelove describes capitalism as having a tendency towards totalization he also argues that such forces as consumer resistance and competition between corporations has ensured that capitalism has never achieved total control over individuals.

The Empire of Mind includes an analysis of culture jamming which provides an example of how Internet-based cultural production subverts dominant symbolic economies and ideologies and paves the way for the emergence of new symbolic economies (belief systems). Culture jamming is presented as one example of the Internet audience's tendency to subvert privately owned meanings. Strangelove makes no claims about the overall potency or potential of culture jamming. Neither does he claim that the Internet heralds the envitable destruction of capitalism. While Strangelove does argue that the Internet is part of a new symbolic economy he makes no predictions as to the future state (dystopic or utopic) of capitalism's belief system.

Strangelove provides a scholarly definition of the term empire of mind and applies it within an analysis of new and old media. Given the premise that capitalism operates as a meaning-production system that exercises substantial control over our cultures and minds—an empire of mind --- the Internet is seen as subverting the dominant flow of meaning within capitalism's symbolic empire.