[FRA:] Culture Industry Reconsidered

[Ralph Dumain]

Theodor W. Adorno
Culture Industry Reconsidered [1967]
http://libcom.org/library/culture-industry-reconsidered-theodor-adorno?PHPSESSID=45aacf95a50970432873f30b7e030df9

This is a follow-up to the seminal work on the subject I cited previously:

Theodor W. Adorno / Max Horkheimer
Dialectic of Enlightenment
The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
http://libcom.org/library/dialectic-of-enlightenment-theodor-adorno-max-horkheimer?PHPSESSID=45aacf95a50970432873f30b7e030df9

There have been cultural revolutions and counter-revolutions since the 
1940s, and further discriminations to be made in analyzing the then and 
now, yet Adorno's essay is more timely than ever.  One only has to tweak it 
to take into account what has qualitatively changed.  Decisive changes can 
be summarized in these bullet points:

(1) the shift from Fordist production to flexible accumulation, 
outsourcing, the permanent risk society, etc.;
(2) the demise of Keynesian welfare statism, the decline of the Democratic 
Party and class-based social liberalism, surviving only in 
multiculturalism, or the diversification of elites and what is left of the 
middle class;
(3) the incorporation, domestication, and pulverization of the cultural 
revolution of the 1960s-70s, accompanied by greater attentiveness to the 
new consumer demands that grew out if it;
(4) the incorporation of social instability and declining _social_ 
expectations into the cultural system itself, culminating in . . .
(5) the culture of pseudo-interactivity: talk shows, reality TV, 
high-stakes game shows, extreme makeovers and corporate charity shows.

Adorno not only describes his own contemporary situation, but ours 
too.  The first paragraph summarizes the structure, motive, and ideological 
justification of the culture industry.  A qualitative shift in the 
commodification of experience and expression is already noted:

>The entire practice of the culture industry transfers the profit motive 
>naked onto cultural forms. Ever since these cultural forms first began to 
>earn a living for their creators as commodities in the market-place they 
>had already possessed something of this quality. But then they sought 
>after profit only indirectly, over and above their autonomous essence. New 
>on the part of the culture industry is the direct and undisguised primacy 
>of a precisely and thoroughly calculated efficacy in its most typical 
>products. The autonomy of works of art, which of course rarely ever 
>predominated in an entirely pure form, and was always permeated by a 
>constellation of effects, is tendentially eliminated by the culture 
>industry, with or without the conscious will of those in control.

Adorno and Horkheimer were already complaining about this in the 
1940s.  While they underestimated the individuality that occasionally 
survived in the cultural system, they were correct in analyzing its general 
tendencies.  Curiously, they assumed, as Adorno does here, that the process 
was already complete, whereas this proved not to be the case in the 
1950s-70s; with the tremendous explosion of creativity in popular music, 
for example.

To be sure, Adorno did recognize internal conflicts within the culture 
industry:

>Thus, the expression 'industry' is not to be taken too literally. It 
>refers to the standardization of the thing itself - such as that of the 
>Western, familiar to every movie-goer - and to the rationalization of 
>distribution techniques, but not strictly to the production process. 
>Although in film, the central sector of the culture industry, the 
>production process resembles technical modes of operation in the extensive 
>division of labor, the employment of machines and the separation of the 
>laborers from the means of production - expressed in the perennial 
>conflict between artists active in the culture industry and those who 
>control it - individual forms of production are nevertheless maintained. 
>Each product affects an individual air; individuality itself serves to 
>reinforce ideology, in so far as the illusion is conjured up that the 
>completely reified and mediated is a sanctuary from immediacy and life.

Putting these two cites together, we can admit a greater flexibility in 
interpretation than Adorno himself was able to muster.  The calculating and 
tailoring of the cultural product down to the last detail on the part of 
the culture industry moguls, while most advanced in Hollywood in the 1940s, 
cannot be said to apply uniformly throughout the culture industry, as again 
should be evident in popular music.  The discovery of a huge youth market 
for new forms of popular music in the 1950s changed everything, but even 
here, innovation as well as standardization sold.  The need for an Elvis 
Presley could be foreseen and even fostered, but an Elvis (I'm a fan) could 
not be artificially manufactured, nor could Bob Dylan, the Beatles, or 
other pop music icons-to-be (not all of them, at any rate).  The situation 
has changed dramatically, and since the late '70s with the dominance of 
disco and then the 1980s with the MTV generation and the permanent 
establishment of hiphop we see all of Adorno's prophecies fulfilled.

Processes already ensconced in Adorno's time . . .

>Culture, in the true sense, did not simply accommodate itself to human 
>beings; but it always simultaneously raised a protest against the 
>petrified relations under which they lived, thereby honoring them. In so 
>far as culture becomes wholly assimilated to and integrated in those 
>petrified relations, human beings are once more debased. Cultural entities 
>typical of the culture industry are no longer also commodities, they are 
>commodities through and through. This quantitative shift is so great that 
>it calls forth entirely new phenomena. Ultimately, the culture industry no 
>longer even needs to directly pursue everywhere the profit interests from 
>which it originated. These interests have become objectified in its 
>ideology and have even made themselves independent of the compulsion to 
>sell the cultural commodities which must be swallowed anyway. The culture 
>industry turns into public relations, the manufacturing of 'goodwill' per 
>se, without regard for particular firms or saleable objects. Brought to 
>bear is a general uncritical consensus, advertisements produced for the 
>world, so that each product of the culture industry becomes its own 
>advertisement.

. . . now attain apotheosis:


>Now, as ever, the culture industry exists in the 'service' of third 
>persons, maintaining its affinity to the declining circulation process of 
>capital, to the commerce from which it came into being. Its ideology above 
>all makes use of the star system, borrowed from individualistic art and 
>its commercial exploitation. The more dehumanized its methods of operation 
>and content, the more diligently and successfully the culture industry 
>propagates supposedly great personalities and operates with heart-throbs. 
>It is industrial more in a sociological sense, in the incorporation of 
>industrial forms of organization even when nothing is manufactured - as in 
>the rationalization of office work - rather than in the sense of anything 
>really and actually produced by technological rationality. Accordingly, 
>the misinvestments of the culture industry are considerable, throwing 
>those branches rendered obsolete by new techniques into crises, which 
>seldom lead to changes for the better.

Whereas Adorno in some respects overestimated the totalitarianism achieved 
in the culture industry, he describes to a "T" the condition we've faced 
since the 1980s, the decade of the Reagan counter-revolution, with the 
following caveat. Adorno tacitly assumes, as did Marcuse, the stability of 
the western democratic social order that seemed rock solid from the '50s to 
the mid-60s.  Neither lived to see the collapse of the social democratic 
(social liberal) cultural order in several western nations, primarily the 
USA, cemented in the '80s.  Here is where the incorporation of social chaos 
into the culture industry introduces a dramatic shift in the presentation 
of society as a smoothly functioning machine with allowances for its 
problems, conflicts, crime, violence, and other externalities, to the freak 
show we witness today.  What Adorno could not foresee was the post-Fordist 
culture of interactivity.

Such potentials were seen by others.  Ray Bradbury already predicted the 
repressive culture of interactivity in his novel FAHRENHEIT 451 (1951?), 
though in a form more befitting the 1950s than today's freak show.

Knowing the tendency of intellectuals to capitulate to naked power, Adorno 
was wary of another tendency which has since flourished:

>It has recently become customary among cultural officials as well as 
>sociologists to warn against underestimating the culture industry while 
>pointing to its great importance for the development of the consciousness 
>of its consumers. It is to be taken seriously, without cultured snobbism. 
>In actuality the culture industry is important as a moment of the spirit 
>which dominates today. Whoever ignores its influence out of skepticism for 
>what it stuffs into people would be naive. Yet there is a deceptive 
>glitter about the admonition to take it seriously. Because of its social 
>role, disturbing questions about its quality, about truth or untruth, and 
>about the aesthetic niveau of the culture industry's emissions are 
>repressed, or at least excluded from the so-called sociology of 
>communications. The critic is accused of taking refuge in arrogant 
>esoterica. It would be advisable first to indicate the double meaning of 
>importance that slowly worms its way in unnoticed. Even if it touches the 
>lives of innumerable people, the function of something is no guarantee of 
>its particular quality. The blending of aesthetics with its residual 
>communicative aspects leads art, as a social phenomenon, not to its 
>rightful position in opposition to alleged artistic snobbism, but rather 
>in a variety of ways to the defense of its baneful social consequences. 
>The importance of the culture industry in the spiritual constitution of 
>the masses is no dispensation for reflection on its objective 
>legitimation, its essential being, least of all by a science which thinks 
>itself pragmatic. On the contrary: such reflection becomes necessary 
>precisely for this reason. To take the culture industry as seriously as 
>its unquestioned role demands, means to take it seriously critically, and 
>not to cower in the face of its monopolistic character.

Adorno, though he didn't account for the coming culture of interactivity, 
did foresee the pop culture slumming that would overtake left/liberal 
intellectuals, and the culture of cynicism that has overtaken the whole 
society:

>Among those intellectuals anxious to reconcile themselves with the 
>phenomenon and eager to find a common formula to express both their 
>reservations against it and their respect for its power, a tone of ironic 
>toleration prevails unless they have already created a new mythos of the 
>twentieth century from the imposed regression. After all, those 
>intellectuals maintain, everyone knows what pocket novels, films off the 
>rack, family television shows rolled out into serials and hit parades, 
>advice to the lovelorn and horoscope columns are all about. All of this, 
>however, is harmless and, according to them, even democratic since it 
>responds to a demand, albeit a stimulated one. It also bestows all kinds 
>of blessings, they point out, for example, through the dissemination of 
>information, advice and stress reducing patterns of behavior. Of course, 
>as every sociological study measuring something as elementary as how 
>politically informed the public is has proven, the information is meager 
>or indifferent. Moreover, the advice to be gained from manifestations of 
>the culture industry is vacuous, banal or worse, and the behavior patterns 
>are shamelessly conformist.
>
>The two-faced irony in the relationship of servile intellectuals to the 
>culture industry is not restricted to them alone. It may also be supposed 
>that the consciousness of the consumers themselves is split between the 
>prescribed fun which is supplied to them by the culture industry and a not 
>particularly well- hidden doubt about its blessings. The phrase, the world 
>wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended. People 
>are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it 
>guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a 
>deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their eyes 
>shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out 
>to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without 
>admitting it they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable 
>as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all.

This could have been written this morning.