etibbetts post 8

Erica Tibbetts
1. I think Adorno’s major problem with mass produced culture is summed up in the following quite, “the style of the culture industry, which no longer has to test itself against any refractory material, is also the negation of style. The reconciliation of the general and the particular, of the rule and the specific demands of subject matter, the achievement of which alone gives essential, meaningful content to style, is futile because there has ceased to be the slightest tension between poles: these concordant extremes are dismally identical; the general can replace the particular and vice versa” (Adorno). Culture is supposed to reflect the values, artistic richness, and priorities of a people. If this people suddenly loses the ability to evaluate their ways of living, the things they consumer, the ideas they have become stagnant. This means that a people cannot grow collectively, but are stuck and stifled by the very network and expression of themselves they have created. A sort of cycle arises, whereby the current beliefs and values cannot be expressed because they cannot show through the old, and the future will be superseded by the present. In a sense nothing fresh or new can be done because without a way of getting rid of the old everything fits into the same old mold.

Adorno says that consumers are at the mercy of massed produced and targeted culture because, “Capitalist production so confines them, body and soul thay they fall helpless to what is offered them” (Adorno). This is dangerous because individuals lose the ability to think for themselves, they lose autonomy, creativity, any sort of critical eye, and the ability to evaluate media for themselves. By turning the viewer into a sort of automaton that has no ability to decide between good and bad, mass produced culture can then do/be whatever it wants. However, it is partly the unfeeling reactions of the viewer that allow culture to become what it is. The process is never entirely one-sided.

The problem with the culture industry, according to Adorno, is the sameness that now exists. All movies have the same ending, all shows, all books, all novels are produced to follow a certain pattern, and if they stray from this pattern they are not accepted. One of the things that allows culture to continue in its stagnation is the fact that, as Adorno points at, “The connosieur and the expert are despised for their pretentious claim to know better than the others, even though culture is democratic and distributes its privileges to all” (Adorno). So, culture has created a sort of cocoon that will not even allow of critique. To critique is to go against the majority, and proclaim one’s self a sort of outcast because the ability to step outside the masses shows an outsider way of thinking. Adorno says that this trend leads to, “constant reproduction of the same thing” (Adorno). If nothing can be critiqued, nothing can be changed.

I tend to disagree a little with Mr. Adorno here. I think that we have more ability to critique than he says we do. What we may not, however, be able to do, is step outside of the framework provided by fabricated culture. We cannot criticize our own culture because we embody our own culture. It would be like trying to lift yourself up by your shoelaces. In order to criticize our own culture we have to step outside ourselves, our language, our experience, our knowledge and our means of criticism. However we can criticize elements of our culture, like books, like movies, like television shows. Unfortunatly, also, we can only prepare this criticism in means of comparison and taste. Our taste is prepared for us by the elements of culture that we like, and these elements cannot help but be part of the mass produced culture we live in, or a reaction against said culture.

2. Almost everything “we” as Americans, as members of a capitalist society do today is surrounded, engrossed in, impossible without consumption or exposure to some sort of mass media. Television, radio, movies, music, billboards, newspaper ads, (even news itself) all contains some interest in materialism, commerce, and entertainment. As Adorno points out, “the irreconcilable elements of culture, art and distraction are subordinated and subsumed under one false formula: the totality of the culture industry. It consists of repetition” (Adorno). Everything seems to fall under the blanket of entertainment provided as culture. It is very hard to think of present day America, without some emblem of entertainment along side, whether it be the logo of a fast food chain, the face of a start athlete, a glamour photo of a Hollywood star or the words of a politician.

As Adorno points out, “Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an escape from the mechanized work process, and to recruit strength I order to be able to cope with it again” (Adorno). Work, play, amusement, relaxation; they all work together in a sort of mirroring and description of one another. Neither can have meaning without the other, and each is driven by the culture industry. Almost any job (although in this case, not every job) has some connection to entertainment, whether it is represented by the industry, or actually exists as part of its bureaucracy. Culture is inescapable anyway, as it is almost impossible to form an identity without some sort of national, local, or group identity, all of which revolve around the culture created by the chosen group. So, in order to not be an unidentifiable mass of individuals, we must adopt a culture, and if that turns out to be a culture defined by sameness, stagnation and mass media, we cannot help but adopt it, until we figure out how to change it.

3. Adorno defines the cause and effect, constancy of current culture that traps the individual in an inability to as follows: “Everybody must behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with his previously determined and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product by income groups into red, green, and blue areas; the technique is that used for any type of propaganda” (Adorno). Even though people think they have their own tastes and ideas about what makes good entertainment, they are deceived because media caters to and creates the tastes they think they have. People fit into different sections of mass produced media. Everyone has a demographic into which they are placed by age, lifestyle, gender, state of origin, and other factors that they use to identify themselves. Music, television, radio all cater to these forms of identity, but at the same time these identities are backed up, reinforced, and in part created by music television and radio. Culture then becomes the tightly bound, above critique, type of organism describe above.

This view of modern culture contrast Adorno’s description of traditional culture, which existed in the “Christian middle ages” and “Renaissance” due to “the different structure of social power, and not the obscure experience of the oppressed in which the general was enclosed” (Adorno). He says that, “the great artists were never those who embodied a wholly flawless and perfect style, but those who used style as a way of hardening themselves against the chaotic expression of suffering, as a negative truth” (Adorno). Style, culture that is pure and not mass produced, truth, only come about when artists strive against the majority belief, and try to do something that isn’t perfect, but is nonetheless art and culture. If all art has to fit in a box and has to conform to certain regulations, it ceases to be a purveyor of truth and becomes, as Adorno says, the opposite of truth.

Formulaic culture is the mystery novels, the romantic comedies, the pop songs, and the art adorning billboards. These types of culture and art are produced according to a newly designed set of regulations that do not allow for a deviation from what has been proven most popular to the most people. No one can branch out, nothing can be different, because to be different is to defy the very thing that created you and the very thing that everyone else subscribes to, the very way that everyone else thinks. And, to fight this culture is to validate it, to acknowledge that it is there, that it is dangerous and omni-present.

The traditional art, the “good” art is slightly more elusive. It must have been created before the explosion of pop culture that has taken over our lives. Good art does something that mass culture cannot even conceive of, whether as a reaction or as a part of the mass produced culture. Good art has to be created almost in a cultural vacuum, where nothing of the vapid outside world can enter. Emily Dickinson’s poetry, most of which was never published until after her death, Beethoven’s music composed as he was going deaf, Rauschenberg’s mixed media pieces, which not only do not conform to aesthetic tradition, but throw aesthetic tradition right out of the window; all of these examples of art could be seen as devoid of the sameness and emptiness that characterizes modern art.