7. One
of Horkheimer and Adorno's newest insights was that this integrated system of
domination also infiltrated and relied upon the domain of consumption.
Previously Marxist theorists had paid little attention to consumption because
the workers were largely excluded from anything more than subsistence
consumption. However, in the newly emerging total system consumption begins to
play a vital pacifying role in keeping the masses "satisfied".
Horkheimer and Adorno speak of the "culture industry". Entertainment,
distraction, conspicuous consumption all plays their part in promoting a
popular perception of contentment. Individuals enjoy leisure, felt needs are
satisfied and the system appears to be generally supported by those it rules
over. However, the central contention is that this satisfaction is a surface
phenomena that obscures the deeper truth that this “satisfaction” is itself
product of the system which functions not just to satisfy “needs” but to
produce them. Thus comes the radical thesis that today the poverty of the
workers no longer consists in their exclusion from culture but from the fact
that they can no longer escape from it. The expression "culture
industry" was deliberately chosen to eliminate any positive overtones
arising from alternative expressions like "mass culture" or
"popular culture". They want to refute any idea that contemporary
mass culture-- film, radio, records, and popular literature-- was in any way a
spontaneous, popular creation of the masses. It is not an organic product of a
vibrant low culture reflecting the forms and activity of the masses, of their
own cultural creativity. Contemporary mass culture was in no way spontaneous
and had little to do with the genuine demands of the masses. Mass culture was a
commodity, deliberately produced for profit. It responded to demands that had
been systematically evoked and manipulated to ensure compliance to the existing
state of affairs even at the level of individual motivation. The modern culture
industry was also a creature of big business, molded to its requirements and
the necessity of quick return on investment
8. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the term "culture industry" does not
simply signify that cultural production has become industrial. They accept the
reproduction of individual works of art on a mass scale inevitably requires
industry. The important point encapsulated in the idea of the culture industry
is that contemporary culture is increasingly "standardised" and
repetitive with only "pseudo-individualisation" (marginal
differentiation) of cultural objects: "something for all so no one
escapes" (DEW123). This is wholly integrated with the commercialisation of
promotion and distribution techniques. Despite the ideology of individualism
that motivates much consumption in advertising and popular culture, the basic
tendency not only of the institutions of late capitalism but also its culture
is to eliminate all vestiges of individuality in favor of a predictable and
calculable standardisation and uniformity. Horkheimer makes the same point when
he says that the rhetoric of individualism impose collective patterns of
behavior which disavow the very principle invoked(R&D of I, P158/159). For
Horkheimer and Adorno, the leading characteristic of classical autonomous art
was its utopian “promise of happiness” with its inherent critical function and
enlightening potential. This potential now disappears with the "culture industry”
and its homogenization of all culture as mere pleasure or entertainment, as
respite from drudgery of work. The crisis of the function of culture was
symptomatic of the general tendency in the totally administered society to move
increasingly towards the institutionalisation of "wants" and
"needs" with the object of exercising tighter control. In this
context, it is only the genuinely authentic “autonomous works of Proust, Joyce,
Kafka, Beckett, Klee, Kandinsky and Schonberg that sustain the artistic vocation
by resolutely resisting commodification and disclosing the truth about the
world in their radical negation of it. In doing so they render aesthetically
manifest the total alienation of the world. But the artistic price of this is
high. They must abandon the classical unity of expression and meaning in favour
of expressing this alienation and embrace audience incomprehension and refusal
to communicate. To be genuine works of art, they must realize the
deconstruction of art (Entkunstung).
9. Mass culture not only undermines the validity of autonomous art; it also
destroys authentic popular folk culture. The former is achieved not merely by
the increasing subordination of art to the status of a mere commodity. What
follows from this is a widening of the distance between classical aesthetics
and those of the culture industry. The audience for authentic autonomous art
diminishes and this results in its cultural marginalisation. As suggested,
increasingly a mass public questions the intelligibility of autonomous art. As
regards popular culture, the culture industry triumphs through disembowelment.
Certain elements, details and motifs are detached from their original organic
whole with no thought to the inner consistency and the teleologically directed
inner development of the work: instead they are reconstructed in commercial
packages that simply feed the craving for new fashions. This inevitably results
in the decontextualisation of the original meaning. The pride and resistance to
the forces of cultural domination are virtually liquidated in the process of
transformation into commodities. The outcome is simply a variation on the old
standard product, the “ever new return of the same” rather than a genuinely new
cultural work.
10. To fulfill its accommodating function mass culture has to tread a fine
line. It must be familiar but also attractive enough to gain the attention. At
the same time, it must induce in its receptors a compliant, passive and
uncritical attitude. To achieve this the products of the culture industry must
be carefully constructed and packaged. But this does not mean artistic forming
or immanent coherent meaning but a packaging for effect and emotional
satisfaction. Typically, this means products that neither challenge nor are
divorced from existing social conventions and reality. The aim is to reinforce
existing emotional expectations and affirm the reigning interpretations of late
bourgeois society. The plots and heroes of film and radio rarely suggest other
than identification with existing social roles and values. Popular works follow
standardised structures and formulae merely imitating previous commercial
successes. The contents of programs, songs, film plots are ceaselessly repeated
with only minor variations and interchangeable details. Yet, for the sake of
marketing, these products must have the appearance of novelty and originality.
The impression has to be maintained that this industry is all about the
satisfaction of customer choice and an open market. But as indicated, Adorno,
maintains this is a mere appearance. He believes that even the very function of
advertising has changed: it no longer fosters competition but serves as a
blocking device. With its excessive costs it retards competition and binds
consumers to the big brands. In any case, the ultimate result is for Adorno the
triumph of predictability. The outcome of a film can be guessed from its
opening scenes and characterisation is governed by tried and monotonous
conventions. Not only are products increasingly repetitive and standardised:
Adorno draws attention to the then novel built in cues for response, canned
laughter and continuous commentary elicit the “correct” responses from the
audience. Furthermore, the products of the culture industry also take advantage
of modern insight into the multi-dimensionality of the psyche. They address us
on various levels playing to our unconscious needs and identifications with the
aim of ensnaring the consumer as completely as possible.
11. The functionality which entertainment and distraction of the culture
industry serves is the need to reconcile the masses to the drudgery and
meaningless of everyday life in the totally administered society. As such it is
an index of the truth that people feel oppressed by the lack of control they have
over their own lives. The great economic crisis of the 20 's and 30 's created
the objective conditions for dependency, which rob individuals of their
independence and expose them to manipulation. The great uncertainties of this
epoch and its structural tendencies to undermine the economic and social
conditions of autonomous individuality have engendered a widespread fear and
anxiety about security and employment, which generates ego weakness and
neurosis. In these conditions of crisis, which systematically undermine real
individuality and make it difficult to cope, people take flight in
entertainment: it offers respite, relaxation, and relief from the pressures of
work with its effort and alienating demands. In this relaxed state, the
irrational susceptibilities of the audience are open to manipulation. Here the
cultural industry brings its full arsenal to bear to convince contemporary
individuals that its dream factory is delivering popular goods and satisfaction
when, in reality, everything has been preprogrammed and individuals are merely
been assigned their predetermined “needs” and slotted into their pre-assigned
places. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the illusion of escaping the everyday
world of prosaic life and its demands is, in any case, contradictory. New or
reflective experience cannot be derived from these standardized packages and
managed leisure. This is the basis of Adorno’s critique of pleasure:
To be pleased means being in agreement: not having to think about it, to forget
suffering, even where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It is really
flight, only not-- as it asserts—flight from wretched reality, but from the
last remaining thought of resistance. The liberation which amusement promises
is freedom from thought and negation. (D of E, p)
Mass culture merely reinforces the psychological attitudes that give rise to
dependence whereas only real critical reception and intellectual effort (like
that of genuine autonomous art) can lead beyond passive dependency and
attitudes of resignation. Instead, the culture industry counsels the individual
to adjust to the existing social arrangement. In other words, despite its
celebration of the individual, it implicitly discourages real difference or
resistance and instead counsels reconciliation with existing reality. At the
same time, its fake respite from the everyday merely functions to recharge the
individual's capacity for continued labor in the totally administered society.
Thus, the culture industry not only exploits the passivity arising from the
workers objective circumstances but advances this incapacity by creating the
particular frame of mind that reinforces the conformism of the mass individual.
12. As mentioned at the outset, Horkheimer and Adorno locate this very critical
and negative assessment of modernity as the totally administered society within
an even more encompassing critique of historical progress and civilisatory
rationality they call the critique of instrumental reason. The central thesis
of this cultural critique is a repudiation of the idea of objective progress
through a Nietzschean inspired genealogical analysis and demasking of the
bourgeois concept of reason. The classical Marxist view that assumed man's
relation to nature in history unfolded in an emancipatory dynamic creating and
liberating human powers and possibilities in the shape of growing social
rationality is inverted in favour of a theory of increasing social domination.
This finds its roots in the identity logic of instrumental reason--that of
subsuming the particular to the general—a rationality synonymous with
humanity's increasing domination of nature. This once emancipatorally conceived
domination is now conceived repressively as the original model of domination
from which all later forms are merely derivative. Our authors contend that the
project to bring nature conceived as fate under control may yet sacrifice
nature as freedom. Instead of registering the progressive self-humanisation of
the species, social labour signifies the increasing civilisatory need for
instinctual sublimation and repression. The original fear of nature over time
has been transformed into a historically and juridically mediated
socio-economic and political fear. Man has gained a mastery of nature but this
has not been accompanied by a decline in social domination; on the contrary,
the latter is only a species of the former. The more complete and rationalised
is the contemporary domination of nature, the harder to recognise and the more
sophisticated is social domination. Social mastery and repression need not be
brutal and can be enticingly subtle as revealed by the culture industry's
careful co-option and seduction of the mass individual. In the most provocative
terms Horkheimer and Adorno construct a definite nexus between the development
of civilisatory rationality and the barbaric domination both of self, others
and nature. Whereas Marx wanted to find a specific historical explanation of
domination through a structural analysis of the dynamics of bourgeois society
using the category of alienated labour, Adorno and Horkheimer view commodity
exchange itself as a mere social medium. This extends throughout society a
deeper mode of reified rationality that already shapes the original human
project to master nature through its alienation. Subjectivity itself is reduced
to a strategy of self-preservation, whereas objectivity is nothing more than a
subjective objectification of nature as utilisable object. Thus in the
perspective presented in Dialectic of
Enlightenment, class conflict is merely a subordinate mode of human
domination of nature. In this perspective, the process of humanity's separation
from nature and its conquest of nature as a mere object of domination signifies
two things: firstly a distortion of human cognitive interests and secondly a
repression of the natural in man. The human species only overcomes the
threatening natural environment by abandoning the limits of a merely passive
resistance to natural dangers and transforming mimetic reactions into
instrumental acts of control. However, in this historical transformation born
by the agency of social labour, the natural environment is increasingly
objectified and deprived of its sensory richness by an increasingly exclusive
cognitive and instrumental appropriation. At the same time, humans must
forcibly constrict their sensory experience and discipline their original
organic instinctual potential. This is the paradox of the civilisatory process.
In order to free ourselves from the domination of nature, we enchain ourselves
to a process of increasingly sophisticated social domination and alienation
from nature. In this process, the subject and the ultimate fruit of the
process--humanity -- is deformed, restricted and subordinated into a means.
Ultimately it is dominated, repressed, contorted and even destroyed by the very
instrument--reason--that was supposed to be its means of its liberation. Of
course, our authors are not the first to offer the concept of alienated nature
as a critical concept. However, what separates them from romantic ideas of
natural origins or liberal notions of natural right is a consistent emphasis on
the historicity of the changing forms of human alienation from nature. Thereby
the emphasis of the idea of reification shifts to forgetting certain histories.
From this perspective, memory recovers and reclaims that which is real (certain
historical potentials) the progressive visions of history have pronounced as
obsolete.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment