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.
