S. D. V. Stephens

notes / Critical Theory / week 5: The Politics of Mass Culture

10 Mass Culture and the Commodity Form

Recapitulation: Marxism and modernism

Lukács (LOO-kahch; /ˈlukaːtʃ/) showed us the commodity form at work in consciousness: reification. Walter Benjamin (BEN-yah-meen; /ˈbɛnjamiːn/) took a more hopeful view of the same modern world. The dissolution of the aura, he thought, frees art from ritual, and the mass circulation of reproducible artworks holds out a new promise of mass agency. Today Adorno answers him.

Theodor W. Adorno

Life

Theodor Adorno was born in Frankfurt in 1903, the son of Oscar Wiesengrund (VEE-zen-groont; /ˈviːzn̩ɡʁʊnt/), a wine merchant, and Maria Calvelli-Adorno (kahl-VEL-lee ah-DOR-noh; /kalˈvɛlli aˈdɔrno/), a singer; he published for years as “Wiesengrund-Adorno.” He studied philosophy at the University of Frankfurt with Hans Cornelius (kor-NAY-lee-ooss; /kɔʁˈneːli̯ʊs/) and wrote his dissertation on Husserl (HOOSS-erl; /ˈhʊsɐl/). He also studied composition, in Vienna, with Alban Berg (BAIRK; /bɛʁk/), and music runs through everything he wrote. His habilitation, on Kierkegaard (KEER-keh-gor; /ˈkʰiɐ̯kəˌkɒːˀ/), was supervised by Paul Tillich (TIL-ikh; /ˈtɪlɪç/), a socialist and theologian. In exile he first tried to take a new doctorate at Oxford with Gilbert Ryle (1934–38); then came New York in 1938, Los Angeles in 1941, and the return to Frankfurt in 1949, where he held a professorship at the Goethe (GUR-teh; /ˈɡøːtə/) University and became a prominent public intellectual. He died in 1969.

Major works

  • Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (1933)
  • Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (1944–47), with Horkheimer (HORK-hy-mer; /ˈhɔʁkhaɪ̯mɐ/)
  • The Authoritarian Personality (1950), with a research team
  • Minima Moralia (MEE-nee-mah moh-RAH-lee-ah; /ˈmi.ni.ma moˈra.li.a/): Reflections from Damaged Life (1951)
  • Prisms: Cultural Criticism and Society (1955)
  • Negative Dialectics (1966)
  • Aesthetic Theory (1970)

Some general remarks

Adorno was a philosopher, a sociologist, an aesthetician and a public critic, and a few traits run through all of it:

  • a love of aphorism, paradox and exaggeration, with antecedents in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche (NEE-cheh; /ˈniːtsʃə/) and the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus (KROWSS; /kʁaʊ̯s/);
  • an unresolved tension between his Marxism and his taste for high-modernist European art;
  • an ethic of strong democratic responsibility, and an anti-authoritarian style of “negativism”;
  • a bitter rejection of the existing order, in unresolved dialectic with an animating spirit of utopia.

“On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” (1938)

The commodity form and its effects on consciousness

The essay is, first, a rejoinder to Benjamin. We saw Adorno’s letter of 1936: Benjamin underestimates autonomous art and overestimates dependent art, and the Brechtian hope for the workers misreads them. (Quotation 1.) Now Adorno makes the case in detail, about music.

He takes the fetishism of commodities from Marx and Lukács and finds it imprinted on music. “For all contemporary musical life,” he writes, “is dominated by the commodity form.” (Quotation 2.) In the musical commodity, exchange value takes over: what the listener loves is the music’s success, its price, the fact that everyone loves it. The result is sameness and standardization. The same thing is offered to everybody, and the sacrifice of individuality, doing what everybody does, follows. Adorno connects this to Fromm’s sado-masochistic character: mass culture is masochistic. The listener who loves the commodity is like the prisoner who loves his cell because he has been left nothing else to love. (Quotation 3.)

Masochism in listening means “agreement with everything dominant,” identification with power. But underneath the pleasure lies the knowledge that the shelter it gives is provisional, that everything must eventually collapse; even in surrendering, the listener feels he is betraying what is possible and being betrayed by what exists. (Quotation 4.)

Fetishism in music goes with a regression of consciousness. The mass of listeners is adequate to the fetishized music: it listens by formula, and the debasement could not happen if listeners still demanded anything beyond what is supplied. (Quotation 5.)

Benjamin had praised the “distraction” in which audiences take in film: a relaxed, collective, critical way of seeing. Adorno calls the musical version deconcentration. Standardized songs, alike in everything except a few conspicuous hooks, cannot bear concentrated listening, and listeners can no longer manage it anyway. So commercial music is attended to only in conversation or as accompaniment to dancing; it is fine for dancing and dreadful for listening; and deconcentrated listening makes it impossible to perceive a whole. (Quotation 6.)

Benjamin hoped that artworks without aura would give way to play. Adorno answers that today’s mass music shows little of that disenchantment: nothing survives in it more steadfastly than illusion. Artworks without aura are consumed in a way that abolishes them as signs of freedom. Even play has become a duty, and by being put to use it loses the trace of freedom it once had. (Quotation 7.)

Open questions

  • In Aesthetic Theory (1970) Adorno would put it bluntly: “One cannot abolish aura and still want art.”
  • Is it the obligation of the intellectual to affirm popular taste? Adorno thinks not: the praise of mass music’s vitality, its technical progress and its collective breadth is the self-abasement of intellectuals who want to end their alienation from the masses by coordinating themselves with mass consciousness; and “this positive is negative,” the irruption into music of a catastrophic phase of society. (Quotation 8.)
  • Is the essay, then, a document of Adorno’s elitism?

Concluding remarks

Benjamin’s cultural criticism is vulnerable to capitalist reappropriation: the post-auratic, reproducible artwork is exactly what the market wants. Adorno and Benjamin’s exchange is a conversation without a conclusion. And Benjamin had his own dialectical dictum, which Adorno could have signed: there is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of barbarism. Next time: Benjamin’s memory, and his last testament.

Handout outline (Professor Gordon)

I. Recapitulation: Marxism and modernism

  • Lukács on the commodity form in consciousness: reification
  • Benjamin’s favorable remarks on the dissolution of the aura
  • mass-circulation of reproducible artwork as a new promise for mass agency

II. Theodor W. Adorno, life and work

  • A. Biography
    • born in Frankfurt, 1903: son of Oscar Wiesengrund and Maria Calvelli-Adorno
    • studies philosophy, University of Frankfurt (with Hans Cornelius), dissertation on Husserl
    • studies music composition with Alban Berg (Vienna)
    • habilitation on Kierkegaard with Paul Tillich (socialist and theologian)
    • exile, attempts at new doctorate in Oxford with Gilbert Ryle (1934–1938)
    • New York, 1938; Los Angeles, 1941; return to Frankfurt, 1949
    • renewed professorship at Goethe-Universität (GUR-teh-oo-nee-vair-zee-TAYT; /ˈɡøːtə ʔunivɛʁziˈtɛːt/) Frankfurt; work as public intellectual
    • death 1969
  • B. Major works
    • Kierkegaard: The Construction of the Aesthetic (1933)
    • Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (1944–47); with Horkheimer
    • The Authoritarian Personality, co-authored with research team (1950)
    • Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951)
    • Prisms: Cultural Critique and Society (1955)
    • Negative Dialectics (1966)
    • Aesthetic Theory (1970)

III. Some general remarks on Adorno: philosophy, sociology, aesthetics, public criticism

  • love of aphorism, paradox, and exaggeration (antecedents in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Karl Kraus)
  • an unresolved tension between Marxism and taste for high-modernist European aesthetics
  • an ethic of strong democratic responsibility and an anti-authoritarian style of “negativism”
  • a bitter rejection of current order in unresolved dialectic with an animating spirit of “utopia”

IV. Adorno’s “On the Fetish Character in Music and Regression of Listening” (1938)

  • A. The commodity form and its effects on consciousness
    • a rejoinder to Benjamin [quote 1]
    • from Marx and Lukács: the “fetishism of commodities” as a form imprinted on music [quote 2]
    • exchange value in the musical commodity: sameness, standardization [quote 3]
    • masochism: “agreement with everything dominant,” or “identification with power” [quote 4]
    • regression of consciousness accompanies fetishism in music [quote 5]
    • deconcentration (contra Benjamin’s emancipatory “distraction”) [quote 6]
    • artworks without aura are consumed in a way that abolishes them as signs of freedom [quote 7]
  • B. Open questions
    • “One cannot abolish aura and still want art.” Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970)
    • it is the obligation of the intellectual to affirm popular taste?
    • a document of Adorno’s elitism? [quote 8]

V. Concluding remarks

  • the vulnerability of Benjamin’s cultural criticism for capitalist reappropriation
  • Adorno and Benjamin: a conversation without conclusion
  • Benjamin’s dialectical dictum: every document of culture is also a document of barbarism
  • the memory of Benjamin and his last testament [next lecture]

On the back: (1) Adorno, letter to Benjamin, 18 March 1936; (2)–(8) Adorno, “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” (1938).