The Mighty Media
But perhaps such a perspective is overly optimistic--Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman certainly think so. Their attitude, which I would place under the broad banner of
tends toward the belief that creative agency is in fact a myth constructed through propagandist media messages under the control of a socio-economic elite. This upper echelon, "drawn into a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of information by economic necessity and reciprocity of interest," governs the ways in which we think about ourselves in a world where individuality itself is called into question (Chomsky and Herman 292). By demonstrating a removal of the processes of self-invention and self-identification from within the individual--a loss that basically negates the existence of a unique interior--Chomsky and Herman relocate the forces that shape our lives outside ourselves.
Although this viewpoint, particularly as articulated in "A Propaganda Model," seems to point toward totalitarian oppression and the end of creativity at the hands of all-powerful media moguls, it's important to note that the postmodern self, by virtue of its constitution through ideology and propaganda, can also be seen as liberated. Just as countless novels and poems have been sparked by the apparent need to capture a particular moment or emotion as experienced and internalized--locked away in the modernist's interior treasure chest--by an individual, a rapidly increasing body of literature has been inspired by the exhilarating abdication of personal responsibility to the perceived laws of time, space, and textuality delineated under modernism. Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, for example, is a hypertext novel that allows the reader a large measure of freedom to
disrupt
and de-center the novel's main narratives. By doing so, it not only questions the notion of a unified narrative (much as it questions the notion of a unified--and modern--self), but also celebrates the fragmentation of identity as an innovatory, liberating force to be embraced and further explored.
Chomsky, Noam, and Edward Herman. "A Propaganda Model." Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. Ed. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 2002. 280-317.