Critical Theory and Society

“Not only are the hit songs, stars and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariant types, but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details

are interchangeable”Adorno and Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry,” (125)

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The Culture Industry

Themes in “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”:

1. Individuality

2. Homogeneity of Cultural products

3. Culture Industry as Ideology

4. Relation between leisure/amusement and work

5. The trajectory of Culture Industry as Commodity

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The Culture Industry

Recall Marcuse’s discussion of the media: “To take an (unfortunately fantastic) example: the mere absence of all advertising and of all indoctrinating media of information and entertainment would plunge the individual into a traumatic void where he would have the chance … to think, to know himself … and his society. Deprived of his false fathers … he would have to learn his ABC’s again … [The] non-function of television and allied media might thus begin to achieve what the inherent contradictions of capitalism did not achieve—the disintegration of the system” (114-115).

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Culture Industry and Individuality

Adorno and Horkheimer’s claim: culture industry domesticates individuals in contemporary capitalist society.

Contrary to what pundits say about the chaos that comes with the waning of tradition, Adorno and Horkheimer claim that there is more UNIFORMITY now than ever.

Films, music, magazines, architecture, fashion “impress the same stamp on everything” (120)

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Culture Industry and Individuality

There is “a striking unity of microcosm and macrocosm” in today’s culture (120). But it is a “false identification of the general with the particular” (ibid).

But isn’t this what consumers want? The ‘needs’ are calculated. “The effrontery of the

rhetorical question, ‘what do people want?’, lies in the fact that it is addressed … to those very people who are deliberately to be deprived of this individuality. … Now any person signifies only those attributes by which he can replace everybody else: he is interchangeable, a copy. As an individual, he is completely expendable and utterly insignificant” (145-146).

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Culture Industry and Individuality

A&H suggest that the ‘individual’ is a product of culture industry.

How can this be done? The ‘individual’ is constructed by knowledge—

knowing what people ‘want’ through various market research techniques.

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Culture Industry and Individuality

“Consumers appear as statistics on research organization charts, and are divided by income groups into red, green and blue areas; the technique is that used for any type of propaganda” (123). What are the implications of such knowledge?

This body of knowledge also allows for the ‘schematization’ of the cultural landscape. The categories of thought (and taste) is provided by the culture industry (124). Nothing is left for the consumer to classify (125).

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Culture Industry and Individuality

“Life in the late capitalist era is a constant initiation rite. Everyone must show that he wholly identifies with the power which is belabouring him. … The eunuch-like voice of the crooner on the radio, the heiress’ smooth suitor … are models for those who must become whatever the system wants. … [Everyone] can be happy if only he would capitulate fully …” (153).

“The individual is an illusion … He is tolerated only as long as his complete identification with the generality is unquestioned” (154).

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Culture Industry and Individuality

“Pseudo-individuality is rife … The peculiarity of the self is a monopoly commodity was always full of contradiction. Individuation has never really been achieved. … The individual who supported society bore its disfiguring mark; seemingly free, he was actually the product of its economic and social apparatus” (155).

Question: are we only ‘seemingly’ free?

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Culture Industry and Individuality

“Everybody is guaranteed formal freedom … Instead everyone is enclosed at an early age in a system of churches, clubs, professional associations, and other such concerns, which constitute the most sensitive instrument of social control. Anyone who wants to avoid ruin must see that he is not found wanting when weighed in the scales of this apparatus” (149-150).

Objection: Isn’t this just socialization?

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Culture Industry and Individuality

Perhaps A&H’s point is that the emphasis on the individual is a by-product of the ideology of individualism required in the capitalist mode of production.

How do individuals distinguish themselves from one another?

A&H: (a) the various options available are pre-fabricated (125), or (b) if slightly different, it will be absorbed into the system and spat out as another model (132).

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Individuality and Homogeneity

Why is uniformity desirable? Do we want to stand out?

What is the relation between ‘standing out’ and ‘normalcy’?

The disciplinary effect of the ‘norm’ or ‘rule’: standing out, i.e. deviation from the rule, implies the effect is atypical, not normally expected. Is being seen as ‘abnormal’ desirable? What does ‘abnormal’ imply?

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Individuality and Homogeneity

The price to pay for standing out: “Not to conform means to be rendered powerless economically and therefore spiritually” (133).

The person is an outsider, “a stranger among us” (ibid).

What is the price to pay for conforming? A&H: Subservient to the power of capitalism.

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Culture Industry and homogeneity

We have the SAME television shows, the SAME music, the SAME clothes, the SAME everything.

“Any trace of spontaneity … is controlled and absorbed” (122). Can you think of an example?

Further, “anyone who resists can only survive by fitting in. Once his particular brand of deviation from the norm has been noted by the industry, he belongs to it as does the land reformer to capitalism” (132).

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Culture Industry and homogeneity

The culture industry has put an end to the idea of a work of art. Are the products of the culture industry ‘art’?

Can those products be ‘art’ when there is a formula for every commodity. Recall the citation from p. 125: the details are interchangeable.

A&H: “[The] formula replaces the work. … The prearranged harmony is a mockery of what had to be striven after in the great bourgeois works of art” (126)

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Culture Industry and homogeneity

In the culture industry, the “untried is a risk” (134).

As commodities, cultural products must pay obedience to the established order. And, there is “something is provided for all so that none may escape. The public is catered for with a hierarchical range of mass produced products of varying quality” (123).

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Culture Industry and homogeneity

Products of the culture industry serve as distractions (135).

But as mere distractions, we can grow tire of them very easily.

A&H: the products of the culture industry all suffer from this malady: “Pleasure hardens into boredom, if it is to remain pleasure, it must not demand any effort and therefore moves rigorously in the worn grooves of association” (137).

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Culture Industry and homogeneity

Even criticism has been tamed. What is criticism today? We look to comments from the pundits.

Criticism is transformed into “mechanical expertise” by a “shallow cult of leading personalities” (161).

Further, “what connoisseurs discuss as good or bad points serve only to perpetuate the semblance of competition and range of choice” (123). Why semblance?

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Culture industry and ideology

Recall “something is provided for all so that none may escape” (123).

What message does the culture industry provide? “Society admits the suffering it has created …

and ideology has to take this into account” (151). The message that life is harsh and that the brave

individual with a heart of gold who struggle will be fine in the end is repeated in various forms from movies to television to cartoons.

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Culture industry and ideology

“The deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities” (134).

Objection: but we can tell the difference between real life and the movies.

A&H: Can we?