A Wholly Commodified World? — Critical Theory

Recapitulation

Fascism in the liberal-democratic West; the Institute’s postwar empirical sociology; psychoanalysis and mass politics. Today the thread runs from mass politics to mass culture, and to a provocative term: the culture industry, in German Kulturindustrie (kool-TOOR-in-doo-stree; /kʊlˈtuːɐ̯ʔɪndʊsˌtʁiː/). “The whole world,” Horkheimer (HORK-hy-mer; /ˈhɔʁkhaɪ̯mɐ/) and Adorno write, “is passed through the filter of the culture industry.” (Quotation 1.) The question hanging over the chapter is whether it is a principled and consistent Marxism, or a case of misrecognition.

The theory of the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment

An expanded theory of ideology

The Marxist theory of ideology has a gap: it never explained internalization, how ideology gets inside people. The theory of the culture industry fills the gap with a critical theory of culture in which consumption is a form of identification. The commodity form enters culture as identification and conformity. And this yields a theory of obedience in advance: masochism, or “identification with the forces of domination.”

Culture and the commodity form

The commodity form reaches into aesthetic content: exchange value colonizes it.

Standardization of form empties out the distinctive inner qualities of works. Culture today infects everything with sameness. Film, radio and magazines form a system: each branch unanimous within itself, all unanimous together; even the aesthetic expressions of political opposites beat out the same rhythm. (Quotation 2.)
Standardization of individuality: pseudo-individualism and stereotype. The frozen genres (sketch, short story, problem film, hit song) are the average of late liberal taste imposed as a norm, as if some agency had issued a catalog of approved products, like Plato’s forms but only numbers, incapable of change. (Quotation 3.) The same babies grin endlessly from the magazines; the jazz machine pounds on; the bread on which the culture industry feeds humanity “remains the stone of stereotype.” (Quotation 4.)
The end of the bourgeois individual? Amusement means putting things out of mind, forgetting suffering even when it is on display. At its root is powerlessness. It is escape, but not escape from a bad reality: escape from the last thought of resisting it. The rhetorical question “What do people want?” is shameless because it appeals to people as thinking subjects while working to annul their subjectivity. (Quotation 5.)
Internalized stereotypes in everyday conduct. The way a young woman goes on the obligatory date, the tone of voice on the telephone, the choice of words in the most intimate moments, the whole inner life sorted by the categories of popularized psychology: all of it is an attempt to make oneself into an apparatus that meets the requirements of success. The most intimate reactions are reified, and “personality” means hardly more than dazzling white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions. (Quotation 6.)

Capitalism and totalitarianism

Recall: “Enlightenment is totalitarian.” Here that becomes a Marxist theory of late capitalism, and it raises the question of whether there is any outside.

What looks like an outside is a fantasy, or a ruse that tames the impulse to escape. The culture industry endlessly cheats its consumers of what it endlessly promises: the promissory note of pleasure is never paid, and the diner must be satisfied with reading the menu. (Quotation 7.) Needs are pre-formed: every need is presented as one the culture industry can fulfil, but set up in advance so that people experience themselves only as eternal consumers. Escape, like the elopement in the cartoon where the father is holding the ladder in the dark, is destined from the first to lead back to where it began. “Entertainment fosters the resignation which seeks to forget itself in entertainment.” (Quotation 8.)

Resistance is impossible, and the cartoons show it in scenes of sadism. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their beatings so that the audience can get used to theirs. (Quotation 9.)

The elitism question

Against this stands art as a “promise of happiness,” the promesse du bonheur (proh-MESS dew boh-NUR; /pʁɔmɛs dy bɔnœʁ/) of Stendhal (stahn-DAHL; /stɛ̃dal/). Is popular culture, by contrast, a realm of pure and free expression? Adorno’s answer is more interesting than either side. “Light” art as such, entertainment, is not decadence. The purity of bourgeois art, set up as a realm of freedom against material practice, was bought from the outset by excluding the lower classes. Light art has accompanied autonomous art as its shadow: it is “the social bad conscience of serious art.” The split between them is itself the truth, and it cannot be reconciled by absorbing either into the other. (Quotation 10.)

Adorno’s postwar cultural criticism

Prisms (1955)

Prismen (PRISS-men; /ˈpʁɪsmən/) (1955) was Adorno’s first major collection of essays after his return to Frankfurt. Its opening essay asks about the method of cultural criticism: should it be transcendent, judging culture from outside, or immanent, judging it by its own standards? That is next lecture’s question.

Adorno on jazz

What music did Adorno actually know? Commercial dance-band jazz, Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra, for example: not the music most of us mean by jazz. His critique treats jazz as fashion, as commodified music, and in particular attacks the standardization of the jazz solo: its improvisations, he argues, are pseudo-individuality, deviation within a fixed formula.

Questions and problems

Totalizing criticism. “With jazz, a disenfranchised subjectivity plunges from the commodity world into the commodity world; the system does not allow for a way out.” (“On Jazz,” 1936.) If there is no way out, from where does the critic speak?
Racism. In “On Jazz” Adorno treats jazz’s claims to primordial freedom as false: what it recovers, he says, comes not from the wild but from the domesticated body in bondage, and its triumph is a confused parody of colonial imperialism. (Quotation 11.) The passage is hard to read without seeing the racial assumptions in it.
Suffering and aspiration. Jazz is a transcript of suffering and of aspiration at once. Why doesn’t Adorno acknowledge this as an unresolved dialectic, the very thing his own method would lead us to expect?

Concluding remarks

A German émigré’s misunderstanding?
“Culture” and Kultur (kool-TOOR; /kʊlˈtuːɐ̯/): questions of Eurocentrism and elitism.
Is there a way out of commodified culture?
An exacting and consistent Marxism, or misrecognition?

Adorno’s criticism has ambiguities we have not yet seen. Next time.

Handout outline (Professor Gordon)

I. Recapitulation

fascism in the liberal-democratic West
the Institute’s post-war projects in empirical sociology
psychoanalysis and mass-politics, mass-politics and mass culture
the idea of the culture industry (Kulturindustrie): a provocative term [quote 1]
a principled and consistent Marxism? or a case of misrecognition?

II. The theory of the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment

A. An expansive theory of ideology
- the Marxist theory of ideology and the missing explanation: internalization
- critical theory of culture: consumption as identification
- the commodity form in culture: identification and conformity
- a theory of obedience in advance: masochism or “identification with the forces of domination”
B. Culture and the commodity form
- the commodity form and aesthetic content: exchange value colonizes aesthetic content
- standardization of form leads to emptying out of distinctive internal qualities [quote 2]
- standardization of individuality: pseudo-individualism and stereotype [quotes 3, 4]
- a radical claim: the end of the bourgeois individual? [quote 5]
- internalization of cultural stereotypes and everyday conduct [quote 6]
C. Capitalism and totalitarianism
- “Enlightenment is totalitarian.”
- a Marxist theory of late capitalism and the question of an “outside”
- what may seem like an outside is a fantasy or ruse that tames the impulse to escape [quote 7]
- cultural fantasies of escape and the pre-formation of need [quote 8]
- impossibility of resistance as portrayed in scenes of sadism [quote 9]
D. The elitism question
- art as a “promise of happiness” (or promesse du bonheur, from Stendhal)
- popular culture as a realm of pure and free expression
- light art as the “bad social conscience” of serious art [quote 10]

III. Adorno’s postwar cultural criticism

A. Prisms (Prismen, 1955)
- Adorno’s first major publication of essays after the return to Frankfurt
- cultural criticism and its method: transcendent critique or immanent critique?
B. Adorno on jazz
- what music did Adorno know? Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra, e.g.
- the critique of jazz as “fashion”
- commodification in music
- standardization of the jazz solo and pseudo-individuality
C. Questions and problems
- the question of totalizing criticism
- “With jazz, a disenfranchised subjectivity plunges from the commodity world into the commodity world; the system does not allow for a way out.” (“On Jazz,” 1936)
- the question of racism (“On Jazz,” 1936) [quote 11]
- a transcript of both suffering and aspiration: why no acknowledgement of an unresolved dialectic?

IV. Concluding remarks

a German émigré’s misunderstanding?
“culture” and “Kultur”: questions of Eurocentrism and elitism
is there a way out of commodified culture?
an exacting and consistent Marxism or a case of misrecognition?
ambiguities in Adorno’s criticism [next lecture]

On the back: (1)–(10) Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment; (11) Adorno, “On Jazz” (1936).