Originally prepared as part of the "Foundations in Media Philosophy" course at the European Graduate School.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno. “The Culture Industry: Englightenment as Mass Deception.” In Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. pp. 94-136.
In this wide-ranging, insightful, and at times problematic (in my opinion) essay, Horkheimer & Adorno discuss the processes by which “culture” in modernity has become industrialized, and the effects thereof. Their argument seems based first on the Marxian notion of the relationship between base and superstructure; that is, the economic base – the systems of production that organize the material relations between individuals in a given society -- are in the first (and final?) instance determining of the superstructure – broadly speaking, the cultural and ideological (what Althusser would call “imaginary”) systems by which a society represents and understands itself. Given that their object of analysis is the culture of late industrial capitalism, the phenomenon that most concerns them is the subjection of artistic creation to the logic of industrialization and mass production.
As they incisively point out at the open of the essay (and reiterate at various points throughout), nostalgia for the cultural output of pre-capitalism is based on false assumptions. This nostalgia, they write, views the culture of modernity as both “chao[tic]” (94) and “exhaust[ed]” (100). The first assessment is based, it would seem, on the apparent lack of any sort of common culture, as attested to by the great diversity in cultural products on offer to modern consumers – raucous and nonsensical cartoons; big band jazz with its “standardized improvisations” (124); endless advertisements for a variety of consumer products; radio serials of all sorts; movies of all genres, including romantic comedies, banal tragedies, mysteries and suspenseful thrillers, etc. – as well as the speed by which these cultural products are replaced by the newest and greatest stars and products. In spite of what seems to be a lack of coherency among these cultural products (in terms, I suspect, of superficial content and form), they are unified on the level of their material production. As products of the consumer capitalist machine, these phenomena are radically identical: they all bare the marks of the “technical apparatus and its personnel” (96) that have produced them. Moreover, these products effect the processes of “classification, organization, and identification of consumers” (97). The differences between films or cars or radio serials are superficial and serve only to mark the individual consumer, who responds by occupying a particular “level” or space within the capitalist system. (Here would be an appropriate place to put H&A in dialogue with Althusser on the concept of interpellation.) The individualist mentality that informs this consumer market enables an ever more refined taxonomy of those who are subject to its operations, but the individualism that a consumer can achieve is only, according to this essay, a mask for the workings of capital, which become ever more efficient in withdrawing value from the human the more s/he lives according to the dictates of the system.
The second view, that modern culture lacks the “energy” it once possessed, similarly ignores the reality of capital’s effect on artistic production. In converting culture into a full-fledged industry (or series of industries), capitalism has infused Western culture with a “rigor” beyond any previous traditions: “Every phenomenon is by now so thoroughly imprinted by the schema that nothing can occur that does not bear in advance the trace of the jargon” (101). Thinking about the culture industry in comparison to a more traditional “base” industry, such as automobile manufacturing, is useful here; H&A seem to describe the production of cultural products as occurring in an assembly-line sort of manner. Just as in an automobile factory, the products of the cultural factories are rigidly structured according to a certain formula, and the operation is organized so as to extract the maximum efficiency and value from all resources, including human.
H&A may be accused of a bit of romanticizing nostalgia themselves at this point in the argument when they compare the monolithic “style” of modern culture to that of the past: as opposed to modern artists, who don’t really seem to deserve the title in H&A’s opinion because of their absolute submission to the demands of the consumer market machine, “[t]he great artists [of the past] were … those who adopted style as a rigor to set against the chaotic expression of suffering …. [and who] resist[ed] the style they incarnate[d]” (103). Here is, I think, a good place to tease out what I see as problems with H&A’s thesis. While extremely useful in examining the radical change that industrialization has effected on the artistic process, it seems to break down the more specific and focused one’s analysis becomes. That is to say, the base-superstructure relationship is too rigid and totalizing, and thus as the foundation of their argument it causes H&A to overlook the potential for the sorts of “tension” and ideological subversion that mark (in their view) the great works within the products of industrialized culture. This goes beyond the standard deconstructionist/post-structuralist approach to every text as being by nature incomplete and contradictory. The example that strikes me most powerfully is their approach to jazz, which they treat with what seems to be a great deal of disdain. I know that part of my resistance here is from my own great love of jazz, but as a musical style it has always been involved with subversive political and cultural impulses. H&A mention Benny Goodman at one point, and I imagine that when they talk about jazz they think primarily of white bandleaders and groups, as those are the artists that got regular radio play and were popular in the mass culture of their day. Certainly there’s an argument to be made that these artists were coopting African-American culture and profiting on it, but even still, artists like Goodman were active in pursuing (in limited form) desegregation and greater racial equality in a pre-Civil Rights era. And African-American jazz musicians were radical not only in their style but in their politics; H&A are writing at the dawn of the bebop era, a style that challenged traditional aesthetics in a number of ways and led eventually to further revolutions in jazz and popular music. That these styles have been appropriated by consumer capitalism is not, I think, a critique of their aesthetic value but rather a significant point about the power of capitalism to incorporate just about anything into its operations.
All this aside, however, the essay is powerful and insightful, and I was particularly interested in their discussion, later in the essay, of the psychic effects of industrialized culture on consumers and producers alike. There’s clearly a psychoanalytic inflection to their reading, as they propose, for example, that the reproduction in film of the quotidian suffering the audience itself experiences “fosters the resignation which seeks to forget itself in entertainment” (113) – a sort of traumatic repetition that allows the individual a neurotic “satisfaction” that takes the “hopeless situations which grind down filmgoers … [and] transform[s] … [them] into a promise that they may continue to exist” (123). This is another point at which I think a question may be raised regarding H&A’s thesis. Fundamental to their analysis, it seems to me, is the passivity of the consumer: “No mechanism of reply has been developed, and private transmissions are condemned to unfreedom” (96). The culture industry they describe is a highly hierarchical and autocratic one, in which a few technically and financially empowered owners govern the production of most culture. Certainly these industries have grown and globalized since then, but they have also fractured, and the technological revolutions of the last decades has created a huge space for “replies” by consumers, who now can be producers of highly sophisticated content in just about any media once dominated by these industries. In one sense, this fracturing can be seen as part of the continuing individualization and classification described above – everyone can have a web presence and communicate globally, but these are governed by certain forms and norms. However, the potential for radically democratic political and aesthetic movements has also been demonstrated: not only do we have the Arab Spring on Twitter and Facebook, but we have teenagers recording original music and distributing it to fans around the world without having to give 90% of their profits to a record label. The question now becomes, I think, about the tipping point between hierarchically governed culture and democratically produced and distributed culture; corporations are always trying to get ahead of the latest fad, but consumers are ever more effective at staying ahead and becoming independent producers governed by their own standards and disregarding the norms of “the culture industry” – or so I hope.
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