1) Theodor Adorno’s writings address several primary and related concerns. Each of these various concerns is caused either directly or indirectly by the rapid expansion in the entertainment business and the effect that this might have upon our culture and our views of art. It is Adorno’s primary fear that the entertainment business has become a kind of “culture industry” that serves to stamp out creativity and individuality and present the public instead with a unified, homogenized picture of culture.
Adorno is right to identify this process with technological progression. The invention of the camera might have done more than any other single step to replace individually crafted images with mass produced ones. The machinations of culture control that he attributes to the culture industry was certainly not a premeditated goal at this point; rather, the ease of mass production and replication was simply reason enough in itself for this method to gain a stable foothold. It was only after it became clear that the majority of people had become accustomed to seeing nothing but mass produced images that the implications of how such images might be used really started to sink in.
There is no room left in the culture industry for individuals with creative and unique visions. Even if one manages to break through the standard uniformity, they are quickly labeled, boxed, and commodified. Jackson Pollock was allowed to paint his style of paintings because he was Jackson Pollock and that was what he did. It was still carefully controlled. Adorno argues that this manipulation by the culture industry eventually reduces the content of a work to insignificance. The style and form eventually become all that really matter, and this leads to an even more problematic issue for Adorno: “In the culture industry this imitation finally becomes absolute. Having ceased to be anything but style, it reveals the latter’s secret: obedience to the social hierarchy” (Adorno).
By standardizing the form and to a great extent the content of all new cultural material produced, the culture industry has done a remarkably effective job of creating an image of a homogenized, single culture. Outsiderness is discouraged due to the sheer force of the apparent standardization, and anyone who manages to overcome this obstacle and become an innovative outsider is made to look even more bizarre and foolish. Once the mass population has bought into the images they are given, they accept the assumptions and stereotypes of the paradigm in a very Kuhnian sense. Anyone who has the courage to disagree is made to look insane because they do not accept the assumptions of the paradigm. “When the outsider is excluded from the concern, he can only too easily be accused of incompetence” (Adorno).
What’s wrong with the culture industry is that it purports to depict the works of the people, and yet it stifles those very same people. Differing and dissenting opinions are ignored and even if they manage to come into being they are drowned out by the mass produced images created by the culture industry. It sells the people on the image it chooses, not the one that they choose.
2) If the origins of the domination of mass-produced images over individually crafted ones were in the invention of new technologies, then the rapid development of such mass-media innovations as the internet have certainly only increased the power of the culture industry. Youtube and other similar file-sharing websites alone have the power to dominate what the general public is viewing.
And yet, the internet also might offer some hope for overcoming this phenomenon. While the products of individual creation on the internet might not be viewed in the same way as art works produced by such individuals as Picasso or Pollock, the works of the internet users are still created with a certain freedom from the influences of the culture industry. True, they are likely still bound by the assumptions and influences that the culture industry has already drilled into them through other sources, but they still have the freedom to create individual works (even if the works themselves are likely to be confined within certain parameters of the paradigm).
Perhaps the strongest evidence that the culture industry is still running at full steam, however, is the continuation and even expansion of advertising. “The assembly-line character of the culture industry, the synthetic, planned method of turning out its products…is very suited to advertising” (Adorno). The ad industry represents billions of dollars in business every year; companies would not spend that kind of money if they did not feel that it was effective. We buy into ads more than we like to think that we do, even if the acceptance is at some subconscious level. Given how the mass produced art and music have been reduced to mere commodities, they fit perfectly well into the scheme of the advertisement business.
3) For my two examples of freely, imaginatively created art and formulaic products of the culture industry, I will actually be focusing on something slightly different than images. Writing could very well be accused of the same kind of structuring and commodification. An example of the former would be a poem by a poet such as T.S. Eliot. An example of the second type of product would be a poem printed on a Hallmark greeting card. The differences between these two should be apparent enough to need no direct enumeration. Instead, what does need further explication is Adorno’s reason for believing the former to be better than the latter.
The benefits of the T.S. Eliot poem would be (presumably) that the poem makes us think in ways we had not before and gives a deeper, more nuanced understand of the human condition. Much of this hinges upon understanding of the poem (no guarantee), but there is something seemingly valuable regardless of whether or not the poem seems accessible to anyone and everyone. The poem comes from a rather unique perspective, was created to deal with a specific issue, and came into being only as the result of great labor.
The poem in the Hallmark greeting card, while cute, lacks many of these same attributes. The main goal of the poem in the card is not to give a greater understanding of the nature of humanity or to broaden our scope of vision and thought, but rather to sell cards. And therein lies the difference. The Hallmark card is all about commodification, about selling itself. It normalizes us; the cards are not tailor made for us any more than they are made to accommodate those who wish to say unusual things in their greeting cards. The greeting card, while hardly oppressive in and of itself, is part of the mass produced system that tells us what our culture is and how we ought to feel about it.
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