Culture Industry (Adorno)

Culture Industry

Adorno, a highly unconventional philosopher, was among the first to recognize the potential social, political, and economic power of the entertainment industry. He saw the culture industry as a principal source of domination within complex, capitalist societies, denying freedom and obstructing the development of a critical consciousness. Adorno's vision of the culture industry is unequivocal in its depiction of mass consumer societies as being based upon the systematic denial of genuine freedom.

Adorno described the culture industry as a key integrative mechanism for binding individuals, as both consumers and producers, to modern, capitalist societies. He argued that the culture industry functions to maintain a uniform system, to which all must conform. David Held, a commentator on critical theory, describes the culture industry as producing for mass consumption and significantly contributing to the determination of that consumption. The culture industry, integrated into capitalism, integrates consumers from above, with the goal of producing profitable and consumable goods.

Adorno's specific notion of the culture industry goes much further, arguing that individuals' integration within the culture industry has the fundamental effect of restricting the development of a critical awareness of the social conditions that confront us all. The culture industry promotes domination by subverting the psychological development of the mass of people in complex, capitalist societies.

Adorno argues that cultural commodities are subject to the same instrumentally rationalized mechanical forces that serve to dominate individuals' working lives. Through our domination of nature and the development of technologically sophisticated forms of productive machinery, we have become objects of a system of our own making. Through the exponential increase in volume and scope of the commodities produced under the auspices of the culture industry, individuals are increasingly subjected to the same underlying conditions through which the complex capitalist is maintained and reproduced.

Symmetric exposure to the culture industry has the fundamental effect of pacifying its consumers, as they are denied any genuine opportunities to actively contribute to the production of the goods to which they are exposed. Adorno locates the origins of the pacifying effects of cultural commodities in the underlying uniformity of such goods, a uniformity that belies their ostensible differences.

Adorno conceives of the culture industry as a manifestation of identity-thinking and as being effected through the implementation of instrumentally rationalized productive techniques. He presents the culture industry as comprising an endless repetition of the same commodified form, arguing that the diverse range of commodities produced and consumed under the auspices of the culture industry actually derive from a limited, fundamentally standardized menu of interchangeable features and constructs. The structural properties of the commodities produced and exchanged within the culture industry are increasingly standardized, formulaic, and repetitive in character, as it results from the increasingly mechanized nature of the production, distribution, and consumption of these goods.

Adorno's analysis of the culture industry, particularly music, is extensive and focuses on the production and consumption of musical commodities. He argues that industrialized production techniques have changed the structure and manner in which these commodities are received. Adorno presents such musical commodities as set pieces that elicit set, largely unreflected responses, and that contemporary listening has regressed to an infantile stage, losing the capacity for conscious perception of music and rejecting the possibility of such perception.

Adorno also viewed the production and consumption of musical commodities as exemplary of the culture industry in general. He also extended his analysis to other areas of the culture industry, such as television and astrology columns. Adorno considered astrology to be a symptom of complex, capitalist societies and recognized its widespread appeal as an albeit uncritical and unreflexive awareness of the extent to which individuals' lives remain fundamentally conditioned by impersonal, external forces. Society is projected onto the stars, unwittingly, to obtain a higher degree of dignity and justification in which individuals hope to participate themselves.

Adorno argued that the instrumentally rational character of complex, capitalist societies actually served to lend astrology a degree of rationality in respect of providing individuals with a means for learning to live with conditions beyond their apparent control. He described astrology as an ideology for dependence, as an attempt to strengthen and justify painful conditions that seem more tolerable if an affirmative attitude is taken towards them.

For Adorno, no single domain of the culture industry is sufficient to ensure the effects it generally exerts upon individuals' consciousness and lives. However, when taken together, the assorted media of the culture industry constitute a web within which the conditions for leading an autonomous life, for developing the capacity for critical reflection upon oneself and one's social conditions, are systematically obstructed. The culture industry fundamentally prohibits the development of autonomy by means of the mediatory role its various sectors play in the formation of individuals' consciousness of social reality.

The culture industry is understood by Adorno to be an essential component of a reified form of second nature, which individuals come to accept as a pre-structured social order with which they must conform and adapt. The commodities produced by the culture industry may be "rubbish," but their effects upon individuals are deadly serious.