Summary - Lecture 19 - Theory Of Adorno\'s Cultural Industry PDF

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THeory of Adorno's cultural industry...

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Adorno: Rationalization, Reification and the Culture Industry

Principal Books: Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) (with Max Horkheimer) Minima Moralia (1955) The Culture Industry (1956) Negative Dialectics (1966) The lecture will concentrate on the concepts of rationalization, reification, and the culture industry that Horkheimer and Adorno present in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Life: Taught at University of Frankfurt (part of the Frankfurt School of Critical Marxism). 1933: Hitler bans Jewish academics from teaching in German Universities. Adorno flees Germany. Adorno is briefly resident at Oxford University. Adorno joins Horkheimer in New York - foundation of the New School for Social Research. Horkheimer and Adorno’s experience of Hollywood films, Broadway musicals, Rag Time jazz etc important in the formation of their culture industry thesis.

Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944): The principle themes I want to examine are those of Rationalization, Reification, and the Culture Industry.

1. Rationalization and Reification: These themes are treated in chapter one: ‘The Concept of Enlightenment’. 

‘Enlightenment’ begins as the revolt of the human spirit against its domination by the external forces of nature (shamanic magic etc)

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Human history is the development of ‘reason’ as an increasingly power instrument through which the will is able to exert control over its external circumstances

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Reason becomes increasing differentiated: different branches of science emerge: mathematics, physics, chemistry, mechanics, psychology etc

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Reason is identified with the disclosure of truth, and truth with the realization of freedom: see Kant’s account of Enlightenment as the principle ‘dare to know’ (‘What is Enlightenment?’)

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According to H and A however, ‘Enlightenment is in principle totalitarian’: reason, which began as the way to freedom, become a regime of control

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Social relations loose all symbolic value: they are subjected to mathematical and scientific principles conceive individuals simply as examples of particular ‘types’, ‘categories’, or ‘classes’ (see, for example, racial anthropologies of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries)

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The aim of this regime is to maximize the productivity of the social totality: to maximize its biological, economic, and cultural output

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Thus, human relations become reified: it is output and efficiency that become paramount, and human beings are forced to inhabit homogenous, ‘thinglike’ relations that have no humanity in them (the ‘regular guy’ and the ‘girl next door’)

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For H and A ‘modern’ or ‘late’ capitalism is impossible without these rationalized/reified relations. For without this regime, the system of mass commodified production and exchange would be impossible

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So, what is the significance of this concept of rational capitalism for Marxism - or, more specifically, for Marx’s account of class conflict and revolution?

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2. Late Capitalism and the Culture Industry: These themes are treated in chapter three: ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’. 

Marx on the over production and under consumption of commodities (Capital Volume 2). Late capitalism, as H and A conceive it, goes some way to solving this problem.

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H and A maintain that scientific and technological innovation raises wages, productivity, and consumption. Also, the state is able to introduce a level of welfare at the lowest levels (see Roosevelt’s `New Deal’)

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The culture industry emerges as the network of media technologies that seek to homogenize mass desire in order to maintain mass patterns of consumption

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It ensures that each individual will seek to express his or her individuality through the mass aesthetics of consumption: the desire to achieve the ideals of masculinity or femininity exemplified by certain movie stars, the desire for a certain kind of romantic love exemplified in Broadway musicals etc (see also ‘product placement’)

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The culture industry is designed to produce conformity; it is what A calls the ‘froth on the process of commodification’.

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The culture industry therefore, is not ‘popular culture’: it does not come from the bottom up; it is not the spontaneous expression of resistance to mass conformity, but rather the very form of that conformity

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The culture industry cannot be art, in Adorno’s sense of the term. Art is capable of provoking questions about mortality, conformity, love, responsibility etc. It is capable of questioning the limits of its own generic forms. The culture industry cannot do this; it is utterly formulaic.

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Film cannot be an art form: it lacks the sophistication or complexity to be anything other than an ideological distraction (contra Benjamin)

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The purpose of the culture industry, in other words, is reproduce consumption without guilt, conformity without reflection: ‘No independent thought must be expected on the part of the audience’

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Classes, in Marx’s sense, disappear as foci of political action: there are only ‘the masses’ who avidly consume the products produced by large industrial corporations

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The political dialectic of Marxism loses both its object and its subject: ‘the proletariat’

3. Concluding Remarks: This constitutes a radical transformation of Marxism, and one that remains controversial. The notion of social critique that emerges from Dialectic of Enlightenment is no longer concerned with identifying the movement of capital towards the final conflict of proletariat and bourgeoisie. Rather, its primary concern is to identify the ways in which the homogenizing forms of happiness, love, sex, pleasure etc that are presented by the culture industry are always complicit with the violence of exclusion, egoism, and hatred of the other (see the concept of Kitsch Art in Minima Moralia) For H and A there is no possibility of a revolutionary overcoming - of the formation of a self-conscious proletariat. For the dynamics of representation and commodification that late capitalism puts into play constantly postpone such a possibility. ‘Capitalism is potentially immortal’. Horkheimer and Adorno’s culture industry thesis is immensely important in the sense that even if one disagrees with it, the consistency with which it is developed, and its analyses of the political effects of technological representation, cannot simply be discounted. Any practical or theoretical commitment to Marxism has to deal with its account of the transformation of the dynamics of identity formation, mass consumption, and the constitution of class relations in capitalist societies. There is however, a rather different account of the dynamics of technological representation that comes from within the Frankfurt School - Walter Benjamin’s account of post-auratic art. We will look at this next week.

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