DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT: THE CULTURE INDUSTRY

[Ralph Dumain]

Paradoxically, the greatness of this chapter, whose subject is generality, 
is in its own generality.  The general principles, whether or not they 
accurately encompass all the particulars of the 1940s, can easily be 
abstracted out of their original social context to be applied to the here 
and now, without anyone skipping a beat.  This chapter could just as well 
have been written the night before last while I was watching "Bernie 
Mac".  What matters most about the culture industry is its systematic 
method of mass production and relentless pursuit of total control.  An 
important nuance should not be lost: the manner in which individuality is 
absorbed into the cultural apparatus whose very design is to smooth out all 
individual characteristics that would jar the system.  Talent scouts and 
competitions feed prospective entertainers into the system whose individual 
characteristics meld with the what the system demands of them (Cummings, p. 
122).  But to elaborate:

  "In the culture industry the individual is an illusion not merely because 
of the standardization of the means of production. He is tolerated only so 
long as his complete identification with the generality is unquestioned. 
Pseudo individuality is rife: from the standardized jazz improvization to 
the exceptional film star whose hair curls over her eye to demonstrate her 
originality. What is individual is no more than the generality's power to 
stamp the accidental detail so firmly that it is accepted as such. The 
defiant reserve or elegant appearance of the individual on show is 
mass-produced like Yale locks, whose only difference can be measured in 
fractions of millimeters. The peculiarity of the self is a monopoly 
commodity determined by society; it is falsely represented as natural. It 
is no more than the moustache, the French accent, the deep voice of the 
woman of the world, the Lubitsch touch: finger prints on identity cards 
which are otherwise exactly the same, and into which the lives and faces of 
every single person are transformed by the power of the generality. Pseudo 
individuality is the prerequisite for comprehending tragedy and removing 
its poison: only because individuals have ceased to be themselves and are 
now merely centers where the general tendencies meet, is it possible to 
receive them again, whole and entire, into the generality. In this way mass 
culture discloses the fictitious character of the "individual" in the 
bourgeois era, and is merely unjust in boasting on account of this dreary 
harmony of general and particular." [p. 154-5]

We can see this operating on a number of levels.  The requisite for stardom 
is something distinctive about the individual--looks, personality, gesture, 
etc.  This becomes highlighted in the film industry, where distinctive 
individuals--Cary Grant, Bette Davis, etc.--parade across the screen, where 
their star quality is really the message, but not because of any distinct 
thoughts or values of their own but by their virtue of their seamless 
incorporation into an overall ideology and cultural system.  Hence 
generality stamping the accidental detail.  Secondly, as I have just 
mentioned, there is the incorporation of the individual into the 
totalitarian industrial system of culture manufacture stamped by the 
ideology that drives it.  To backtrack to talent scouts, etc., the very 
aspiration to stardom is to submit one's distinctive individual 
characteristics to whatever packaging it takes to sell oneself, 
disregarding anything autonomous about one's objective talent and 
distinctiveness.  This was bad back in the 1940s, but it is worse now, in 
popular music especially: just think of "American Idol" and shudder.

Thirdly, no individual viewpoint or critical thought must be permitted to 
be invoked in the audience.  With one or two exceptions, the modern sitcom 
is the exemplar of this.  Even with the contemporary cynical twist and loss 
of former taboos and sanitizations of reality, the sitcom almost invariably 
reinforces conventional morality and perception, neutralizing all the 
idiosyncrasy, mockery, anarchy, and parody of conventions it otherwise 
unleashes.  (The most significant partial exceptions were also the most 
successful, though: "The Simpsons" and Seinfeld.)  Comedy remains the one 
genre where imagination and critique sometimes enter, but subversive 
perceptions are usually smoothed back into conventional morality.   It is 
now just as bad for the movies, ruled by the blockbuster.  Even movies 
which unleash critique undermine it with the conventional ending: Good Will 
Hunting, Groundhog Day.  ("The Truman Show" skirts the very edge of the 
ambiguity of the performative contradiction that all establishment 
anti-establishment entertainment embodies.)   (See my analysis of 
"Groundhog Day": http://www.autodidactproject.org/my/groundhg.html.  My 
review of "What Dreams May Come" is also pertinent: 
http://www.autodidactproject.org/my/whatdrem.html)

Intermission: while I was out today reading close to the end of the chapter 
on anti-semitism, I somehow lost my entire week's worth of written notes on 
this book.  As I lack time to read it again, I will have to reconstruct the 
rest of my argument from memory.

Another ideological feature of the culture industry named by A & H--which 
(I think) since the 1980s is even more extreme 980s than 60 years ago--is 
the obsession with style, with maintaining the supremacy of a style above 
all individuated content.

Another passing observation they make which is even more true to today: 
that stupidity is stepped up to keep pace with the increase in intelligence.

A & H argue that the culture industry work is organized along the lines of 
an industrial system, leaving no detail out of account or to chance, 
calculating all effects down to the minutest degree.  (Note: A fascinating 
article appeared in THE NEW YORK YORK TIMES as Jay Leno was about to assume 
permanent custodianship of The Tonight Show, which described how each joke 
in each of Jay's monologues was tested and organized down to the smallest 
detail on an assembly line basis, with alternative comebacks planned in 
advance of each possible audience reaction.  While individual stand-up 
comics have to do this sort of thing on their own, the fact that Leno's 
jokes are processed by a highly organized team in this manner is not only 
the result of the talk show format and the ratings game, but registers also 
the hegemonic ideological location that this middle-of-the-road consensus 
brand of comedy as well as its social location in the political & economic 
organization of Hollywood.)  No nook and cranny of stylistic organization 
or audience response is left to itself.

This I think is a central aspect of the analysis of the cultural industry, 
as it operates from the top down in its endeavor to appropriate all the 
concrete details of experience.  As a _tendency_, this is described quite 
effectively by A & H.  However, their argument that this tendency is not 
merely a partially or even mostly instantiated tendency but is completely 
realized in each and every product of popular culture, is an implausible, 
untenable,  and even preposterous claim.  It reflects I think their 
frightened response as European intellectuals to the alien atmosphere of 
American gigantism.  To be fair, H & A are hardly complacent about the 
tradition of European high culture they inherited: they subject it to 
social criticism as well and even suggest, contrary to the accepted wisdom 
that American lags behind Europe, that Europe's cultural institutions 
in  modern capitalist society are archaic compared to the United States.

So while the general mechanisms described in this book are important to 
understand, the book totally fails to convince me once it enters into the 
particulars of its time.  The authors' specific judgements are preemptory 
and off-base: I am unconvinced by a single remark of theirs on Donald Duck, 
Benny Goodman, or a host of other specific examples.  Ultimately, there is 
no accountability for assertions about specific cultural products or the 
general assertion that the general mechanisms of cooptation and control are 
100% efficacious.  This deficiency of their argument is enabled by a lack 
of empirical specificity on their part.

This is not to reject their negative view of the products of the culture 
industry with the opportunistic celebration of popular culture now in 
vogue.  (This opportunism shows itself, for example, in the simultaneous 
snobbish embrace of European cultural theory and the gullible and racially 
mystified acceptance of the demonstrably degenerate culture of 
hiphop.)  Rather, their methods are useful as a guide to the pernicious 
mechanisms at work now as then, with the twist that the culture industry no 
longer presents its conformist world view by means of the laundering of 
brutal social realities as it did in the 1940s but has successfully 
sublated all the countercultural and protest impulses of the 1960s and '70s 
and has made them part and parcel of the system, to a degree unimaginable a 
quarter century ago.  The repression of individuality, even with the 
breaking of old taboos and the untrammeled display of freakish behavior 
that once was never tolerated, is more extreme now than it ever was, the 
more so because of its cynical premises.

Now back to a general problem with this book, especially the chapters on 
the culture industry and anti-semitism: the attempts to tie all these 
otherwise valuable analyses to the Enlightenment do not work, except under 
the strained analogy with positivism that surfaces here and there.  And as 
usual, the stray remarks on science and mathematics are all wrong.

The most general inadequacy of the book is indicated in its title.  The 
title is incomplete, for the dialectic as I see it is the dialectic of 
enlightenment and something else.  Or perhaps the dialectic of the hidden 
contradictions in Enlightenment thinkers.  But I don't see a true 
dialectical understanding of Enlightenment here.  As I've said, in other 
works A & H show great perspicacity in their grasp of the 
positivism-lebensphilosophie dichotomy.  As I understand D of E so far, I 
believe they got it wrong.  Irrationalism is blamed on the dark side of the 
Enlightenment, but I see it differently: rationalism and irrationalism 
coexist in a contradictory ideological and social totality. Enlightenment 
is only one half of the equation, not an appropriate label for the 
ideological dynamic as a whole.