Morgan, Post 8

Morgan Frost

Step One:

Adorno presents us with what is wrong with the culture industry through his examinations of the dangerous and stifling effects of the homogenization and commodification of culture. He shows us how our industrialized culture today has lost the “equilibrium between its social ideology and the actual social conditions under which its consumers live(d)” that the earlier popular culture of the 18^th century maintained (Adorno 218). Within this unbalanced state, our culture has evolved into its state of “adherence to the almost unchanged ideology of early middle-class society, (when) the lives of its consumers are completely out of phase with this ideology” (Adorno 219). With this separation of reality and the accepted social standards, many have succumbed to the forms of culture industry and become the “blind and passive victims” Adorno warns against (Adorno 235). Adorno recognizes the effect of the culture industry on an increasingly controlled social structure, and under it the loss of respect for individual power and the detachment from values this includes.

Adorno focuses on the rise in measurement and organization of culture as a commodity. He notes in The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception with Horkheimer that as soon as we begin to measure things under our technological rationale we are beginning to dominate. Our society today has “transformed the traditional values into the norms of an increasingly hierarchical and authoritarian structure” (Adorno 219). All of this is done under the guise of capitalism and the freedom it implies. We are made to think that free competition and the absence of government control also frees us from ideological control. But in truth, culture of the masses has become a commodity to be sold to its consumer base. It is inevitable that the producer is aware of the audience, as the concept of capitalism is still a concept of economy and the production and distribution of goods to its receiving body. Artists, musicians, filmmakers, and the like operate within the capitalist market and it is true that they have full freedom to create whatever they desire. But in order to succeed financially and as a respected creator, the objects produced must fit within society’s framework of cultural value. What is deceiving is the vastness of this framework. There are so many options and fields of interest to supply for that we may assume our creation is made through the liberty of our own minds. But the eclectic has been unified into the single culture industry—producing works we quantize into categories such as the genres of film, art, music, literature, etc. If an artist thinks he or she is creating something original, the culture industry can show them to reconsider. His or her work can be sold as part of any class; even what one would deem miscellaneous or unique works can be put into groupings of abstract thinking.

With what Adorno calls a “culture monopoly,” the capitalist industry has come to “fit in to totalitarian creeds” as Adorno analyzes specifically with television shows. Though society may preach freedom of ideas, the amount of control held over production of culture is undeniable, making this freedom an unrealistic but pleasing claim. An American tourist may enjoy eating meat in a foreign country, but when he is told it is the meat of a dog, he is upset because dogs are valuable to his culture as a companion rather than a meal. And so when another meal is served he will ask the server, “Just don’t tell me what kind of meat this is,” as if not taking accountability for the truth makes it nonexistent. The culture industry has assumed this kind of justification, and society overlooks the extreme control quite willingly, happily satisfied and all too comfortable with the illusion of freedom it pretends to fulfill.

Under this dominating control of culture, we see the danger of suppression of the individual that our society claims to instead value. And it is true that we value the individual—as long as the individual’s ideas and creations can be fit into our measured realm of culture industry. Adorno notes that “those who produce the material follow…innumerable requirements, rules of thumb, set patterns, and mechanisms of controls which by necessity reduce to a minimum the range of any kind of artistic self-expression” (Adorno 226). Though he is examining television here, the concept is prevalent throughout the culture industry. Especially since, as Adorno mentions, products today are most often created by the collaborative efforts of numerous people. The work is not created only by an individual, but goes through a series of changes and marketing techniques by many people. The path of the individual is obliterated by the crowds that tread upon it. With this mass expression it is evidently necessary that “one has to be ‘realistic,’ that one has to give up romantic ideas, that one has to adjust oneself” to the interests accepted through the industrialized cultural standards. This means that with the rise of the culture industry we see people looking not simply for their own ideas, but their own ideas that fit into the views of the masses. Even if an individual fathoms something unique, his “particular brand of deviation from the norm (is) noted by the industry” and subsequently sold as a uniqueness within the industry (Adorno and Horkheimer). Thus even the little value left for individuals is usurped and adopted by the mass culture. In this way the producers of art have become businessmen rather than artistic individuals. In order to be successful, their products must sell, and so the process of creating them is imbued with this subconscious direction toward consumers. Adorno and Horkheimer point out that by calling distribution of cultural products “industry,” the businesses do not even need to call their products art anymore, as they have become items of economy regardless. The recognition of culture as an industry forms an ideology that purports to justify the framing and quantization of artistic forms produced.

Adorno strongly presents his case that we can be reduced to consumers of cultural products in a capitalistic world. Though he clearly, however briefly, states his sentiment that he does not want society to become “blind and passive victims” of the culture industry and that we need to put art into its “proper context and perspective” in order to not be victimized in such a way, he does not go into depth on any method of avoiding this result (Adorno 235). The concept is much like that expressed by Mary Devereaux when she observes that “the informed spectator is a more critical spectator, and the critical spectator is one less likely to be victimized by the text” (Devereaux 137).

An author that truly explores a process of overcoming this undesirable control of industry on individuals is national award winning author Walker Percy in his work “The Loss of the Creature.” In this essay he reveals the potential of an object or idea to possess a certain value he terms the “it.” The problem is that this object or idea also comes in a “package” that the value must be extracted from. This “it” must be recovered by the person, and in today’s society the person most often fails to exert the effort to obtain the “it,” and is instead satisfied with being a consumer of the package. For example, in Percy’s work tourists flood the Grand Canyon daily, yet they do not recover its “it.” They instead wander about taking pictures and listening to the tour and buying concessions and fanning themselves with brochures. These people take in these details as part of the Grand Canyon experience, and so are merely consumers of the package—not recoverers of the true “it.” But another man in the story finds a place off the beaten path to camp out in his tent. At sunrise he hikes to the Grand Canyon to discover it and as he looks at it he is truly able to experience the “it.” Through “The Loss of the Creature,” Percy analyzes the methods by which a person can or cannot exercise personal sovereignty in achieving the experience of the true “it.” It is very interesting to look at his work with Adorno’s, as the parallel can be drawn that it is crucial for society today to be conscious of its position as a consumer, and to resist being set within this rigid framework and instead discover the freedom of the individual.

Step Two:

The culture industry can be looked at like the surface of a vast ocean. While it has expanded exponentially to cover an incredible area, its depth is considerably limited. Its expansion has not been a growth of any kind except by size, and it has failed to gain any purpose other than to satiate the commodity thirst of consumers. This is caused by what Adorno and Horkheimer refer to as how “the irreconcilable elements of culture, art and distraction, are subordinated to one end and subsumed under one false formula: the totality of the culture industry.” This is to say that the culture industry can consume every element of culture and reduce it through the quantification and categorization of it. But what keeps the addition of new materials on a shallow level is the fact that “the interest of innumerable consumers is directed to the technique, and not to the contents” of a work. Adorno and Horkheimer make sure to note that the technique they refer to is not the technique of the artist in creating the work, but of the industry in the “distribution and mechanical reproduction” which remains “external to its object.” Here we see that they are articulating that it is not what the work actually portrays that we find is important to the culture industry, but instead the “package” that it is delivered in—which in their opinion is “stubbornly repeated, outworn, and by now half-discredited.”

Any kind of art can be seen as evidence for this. Movies, books, music—everything takes on an identity that we have seen either part or all of somewhere else. It might be the actual content we have seen before (such as the story of Romeo and Juliet playing out in modern films “Romeo and Juliet,” “West Side Story,” “Lovers of the Arctic Circle,” “Map of the Human Heart,” etc.), or it might simply be the category we have seen before (a new concept in music but within the realm of country music). Instead of exploring one category more in depth, culture industry causes society to consume more—not more profoundly.

Step Three:

The difference that Adorno saw between products of freely created artwork and products of the culture industry is that the latter serves a second purpose other than to fulfill the needs of consumers while the former has no other purpose than this. In his work with Horkheimer he describes how true culture “did not simply accommodate itself to human beings,” but “raised a protest against the petrified relations under which they lived.” So the mark of true culture is a mindset that does not accept the structure in which it exists, but a mindset that can analyze and question this structure. Mark Tansey’s work titled The Innocent Eye Test perfectly demonstrates this concept. With the cow being shown as a judge of the realistic quality of the painting, Tansey questions the way we judge art. He recognizes that we must question who the experts are on such subjects as paintings and who has the authority to claim what a piece of art truly is or represents. Thus Tansey’s work does not solely serve the purpose of accommodating society, but questioning an element of society’s structure.

Formulaic culture industry products, however, do not have any other purpose separate of their market value. With the rise of the culture industry we see an “intolerance of ambiguity (which) is the mark of an authoritarian personality” (Adorno). This authoritarianism is exercised through the calculated market of commodities as only such. For example, TV shows have come to provide the consumer with a marked value as pertaining to horror, comedy, romance, adventure, etc. When we pick up a TV Guide and browse its contents we are forced into this measured framework and find ourselves directed by our own preferences but those that can grab our attention and appeal to us the most. What we find does not need to serve any purpose other than the filling of time with a viewing experience we are told is valuable as a commodity.

The difference between these two types of art matters to Adorno because the dominance of the commodity type reveals a change in society that stifles true freedom of thought and the individual. He points out that “Although the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, the masses are not primary, but secondary, they are an object of calculation…The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object…” (Adorno and Horkheimer). Here he delivers us to the conclusion that the overwhelmingly increasing trend toward commodity does not offer true value. Adorno and Horkheimer show that the disaster that is forming from this problem is society’s acceptance of it. “The phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended. People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured.” And here the difference between imaginative art and commodified art is paramount. Where art lacking the imaginative element can do nothing but feed a hungry populous with sheer volume of material, creative art can influence people to question their own world and to not become one of the many victims of the culture industry’s commodification and homogenization of culture.