[FRA:] Re: [nycafephilo] Culture Industry Reconsidered

[Ralph Dumain]

"Generosity" is a generous euphemism, but I'm glad you appreciate my 
remarks.  The main point of adducing Adorno (a figure who gets left out of 
Cafe Philo conversations, whether people with philosophical background have 
"analytical" or "continental"--itself a fraudulent 
distinction--backgrounds) is to understand the structure of social 
conditioning and the type of discourse associated with it.  Russell Baker 
has nothing to offer but an itemized list of factors manifesting themselves 
in the loss of conversation compared to the times he sat down to dinner 
with his family during the Great Depression and they could actually hold a 
serious conversation.  He is clearly pointing to something commonly 
experienced, but doing this in a context of a review of Miller's book 
allows him to show a little erudition without backing it up with real 
substance itself transcending the canned ideas and fragmentation endemic to 
society as it is structured and the culture industry that shapes patterns 
of thought and behavior.  The technology, residential patterns, lifestyle, 
etc. now in place are not the same as what the culture industry was like in 
Baker's childhood--the movies, the radio, and the press--and so it is 
necessary to understand the structural changes as well as the continuities 
between then and now.

It is also necessary to examine Adorno's limitations, as I've done 
elsewhere at greater length though not in this series of posts, and to 
tweak its assumptions based on the context in which it was generated to 
take into account what it is or should be much easier to see now, both 
retrospectively and contemporarily.  The intensification of media 
saturation is one factor, along with greater geographical mobility, the 
rapidity of social and hence generational change, the rising demands of the 
populace since World War II and the necessity to coopt and tame them, the 
management of declining expectations, the changing needs of social control 
as well as holding up the media marketplace as either an idealized or 
cynical image of society or both.

Adorno has been criticized as a European high culture snob, which may well 
be the case, but he and his colleagues also began to dissect the anatomy of 
a civilization in crisis--the death throes of the Weimar Republic--and had 
to lay bare all of the social and cultural assumptions of a dying 
culture.  Hence they could not take Culture for granted.  Adorno in 
particular, the most cultural of the theoreticians of the Frankfurt 
School,  was keenly aware of the social forces at work behind all cultural 
manifestations including those he was reared on. Adapting to American 
society was difficult for him as it was for other emigres, and clearly he 
lacked the flexibility to properly assess jazz, for instance; nevertheless, 
in spite of the gloomy picture of totalitarianism he paints of an 
ostensibly democratic society, he correctly identifies the forces at work, 
even if he overestimates the degree to which the logic of their operation 
has worked to its logical conclusion.

And yet how much more media-saturated has the social environment and 
conditioning from the very cradle become since then.  Even those of us who 
are baby boomers growing up in the postwar period on television, along with 
other media to be sure, though products of different social assumptions 
from the Depression generation, still belong to the horse-and-buggy days 
compared to kids growing up in the 1980s and after.  This doesn't mean that 
things were once okey-dokey and they have unilinearly declined, but rather 
the cultural order has become altered, also in some very perverse ways, 
beyond what could only be glimpsed, dimly, a half century ago.  And 
technology and bare economics accounted for, the change cannot be 
understood--not at all--without grasping both the achievements and 
pulverization of liberalism at the end of the 1970s--the growing acceptance 
and cooptation of new cultural forces and excluded social groups into the 
mainstream and then into the limelight, coupled with the brutal suppression 
of the have-nots and the squelching of their collective opportunities even 
as individual opportunities open up, meaning that many advance beyond their 
parent's situations, while many more seek deeper and deeper, and the 
prison-industrial complex eagerly gobbles up as many of the latter as possible.

Furthermore, one must look at what has become of the literate class, from 
the yuppification of the New Left to the consequences of liberal 
professionals being reduced to whoring for the Democratic Party, to the 
simultaneous expansion and contraction (multicultural but not class-based 
liberalism) of social vision, to the paralysis of mind as an inevitable 
correlate of the paralysis of political culture to the middlebrow spectrum 
of the culture industry--from NPR to PBS to the New York Times and all the 
rest of this self-deluding mediocre trash that passes for literacy and 
sophistication.  All of the philosophy cafes, popular philosophy and 
science books, all of the highfalutin bookstores and C-SPAN broadcasts--all 
of it, all of it--are subject to these powerful social forces.  It takes an 
exceptionally perspicacious and dedicated person to transcend the limits of 
conceptual discourse this society makes available.  For lack of a social 
infrastructure enabling meaningful discourse, those who hunger for it exude 
excessive gratitude for the intellectual table scraps they are thrown, 
unable to rise imaginatively above the general banality and view society 
and the ideas circulating in it from a perspective not bound to its 
limitations.

(A sad example of a failed attempt is Curtis White's THE MIDDLE MIND, which 
is even more mediocre than the middlebrow culture it criticizes.  As his 
subsequent article appear in publications like HARPER'S, the man's 
confusion and mediocrity  become more and more manifest.  Deprived of 
stimulation, the brain grinds slowly to a halt, unaware that it is doing so.)

What can be advocated concerning conversation under circumstances like 
these?  Baker's conception of conversation, almost as much as Miller's, 
fails to address a solution because it fails to attain a systematic grasp 
of the problem.  But then what is the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS and what is 
the tacit basis of its appeal? Or, if you're interested in philosophy 
proper for the masses, what do gloosy mags like PHILOSOPHY NOW or THE 
PHILOSOPHER'S MAGAZINE have to offer.  They can only reproduce bits and 
scraps of the limited fare generally offered, to a niche market, more 
intelligent than the average, more complex perhaps, but not really 
insightful, not profound, not going the extra mile.

You know, maybe "generosity" is not such a bad way to put it after all.  It 
is generosity in a way to give profusely and energetically what is almost 
guaranteed not to be appreciated.

At 06:11 PM 4/28/2006 -0400, ron at ronaldgross.com wrote:
>I am profiting from your comments and leads re: Conversation.  THANKS for
>your generosity,   Ralph.
>
>RON