Culture and Its Dialectic — Critical Theory

Recapitulation

Was Adorno’s theory of the culture industry a German émigré’s misunderstanding? It raises questions of Eurocentrism and elitism: “culture” against Kultur (kool-TOOR; /kʊlˈtuːɐ̯/). Is it an exacting, consistent Marxism, or a misrecognition? Above all there is the problem of totalizing criticism: if the whole world passes through the filter of the culture industry (quotation 1), is there any way out of commodified culture?

Against the culture industry Adorno set autonomous art as a promesse du bonheur (proh-MESS dew boh-NUR; /pʁɔmɛs dy bɔnœʁ/), a promise of happiness. And we asked why he would not see popular music, jazz included, as a transcript of both suffering and aspiration, an unresolved dialectic. Today we find more nuance in Adorno than the culture-industry chapter suggests.

The method of cultural critique: “Cultural Criticism and Society” (1955)

The paradoxes of cultural criticism

Adorno begins by turning criticism on the critic.

Complicity with its object. The cultural critic makes distinction his privilege, and so forfeits his legitimacy by collaborating with culture as its “salaried and honored nuisance.” Even when criticism speaks the truth about a false consciousness, it stays imprisoned in the orbit of what it fights, fixated on its surface. (Quotation 2.)
Freedom of thought has its own dialectic. The free expression of opinion, the intellectual freedom on which cultural criticism is founded, freed the mind from theological and feudal tutelage, only for it to fall increasingly under the anonymous sway of the status quo. (Quotation 3.)
Culture as a source of “values.” By making culture his object, the critic objectifies it once more, though the meaning of culture is precisely to suspend objectification. Once culture is debased into “cultural goods,” with their philosophical rationalization as “cultural values,” it has already defamed its reason for being; the echo of commercial language is no accident, and it puts culture at the will of the market. (Quotation 4.)
The classical idea of ideology is defunct. There are no more ideologies in the authentic sense of false consciousness, “only advertisements for the world through its duplication,” and the provocative lie that does not seek belief but commands silence. (Quotation 5.) Call it the duplication thesis; the British critic Mark Fisher would later call something like it “capitalist realism,” the sense that there is no alternative to what exists.

What does cultural critique consist in?

Critique is the negation of ideology: the negation of what affirms the false. But where does the critic stand? There are two choices.

Transcendent critique presupposes an Archimedean point, a standpoint outside society from which to call culture as a whole into question as ideology. It looks more radical, because it aims at the totality. But the choice of a standpoint outside the sway of existing society is as fictitious as any construction of an abstract utopia. (Quotation 6.)

Immanent critique works from within. It takes seriously the principle that ideology is not untrue in itself; what is untrue is its claim to correspond to reality. Through the analysis of a work’s form and meaning, it seeks the contradiction between the work’s objective idea and that claim. A successful work, for immanent criticism, is not one that resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one that expresses the idea of harmony negatively, by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure. (Quotation 7.)

Adorno does not simply choose. To insist on the choice between immanence and transcendence, he says, is to fall back into the traditional logic that Hegel (HAY-gel; /ˈheːɡl̩/) criticized in Kant: every method that sets limits goes beyond them. “Dialectics means intransigence towards all reification.”

“Culture and Kultur” (1957)

The German ideal of Kultur

The German concept of culture is spiritual: Kultur means transcendence of the world, the inner life raised above politics and commerce. It has a history. Germany’s bourgeois revolutions failed in 1848, and the German bourgeoisie took refuge in an inward culture in place of political freedom.

The American idea of culture

American culture, by contrast, lacks transcendence. But that is not simply a lack. In America the bourgeois-democratic ideals have been realized in culture, and America realizes the universal principle of exchange, which carries within it a “principle of humanity”: everyone is, in principle, the equal of everyone else.

Utopia in everyday happiness

Then comes one of the most surprising passages in Adorno. The way an American child can eat an ice-cream cone with such undisturbed intensity, he writes, and find a fulfilled infantile happiness in every moment, in a way almost unimaginable for German children, is really an element of fulfilled utopia: the utter contentment, the freedom from fear, that belongs to the idea of a chiliastic kingdom. (Quotation 8.) The same thought appears in Minima Moralia (MEE-nee-mah moh-RAH-lee-ah; /ˈmi.ni.ma moˈra.li.a/) §37, “This Side of the Pleasure Principle”: only someone who could situate utopia in blind somatic pleasure, Adorno says, has a stable and valid idea of truth. Adorno’s utopia is sensual.

Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1961–62)

The critique of “light” music

“Light” music (Strauss waltzes, opera buffa (OH-peh-rah BOOF-fah; /ˈɔːpera ˈbuffa/), the American “evergreens” or standards) shows conformity even in its apparent individuality. Adorno mocks the “plastic acoustic curves” of the evergreen “Deep Purple” (1933/1938).

The advantages of light music

Light music also has advantages: proximity and humanity. It preserves an element of differentiation within the totality. Jazz has the potential of a musical breakout from mass culture by those who were refused admittance to it; its history is that of a heresy received into mass culture. (Quotation 9.) And the evergreens have a specific quality that cannot simply be dismissed. With wholly shopworn material they score an expressive hit on a specific and unmistakable target; the idiom has become second nature and permits something like spontaneity and immediacy. In America, reification sometimes recoils, unforced, into “a semblance of humanity and proximity—and not just into a semblance.” Popular music shelters a quality that was lost in “higher” music but was once essential to it: the relatively independent, qualitatively different individual element within a whole. (Quotation 10.)

Concluding remarks

Critique toward what end? Every critique presupposes emancipation. Next, the man who said so most openly: Herbert Marcuse (mar-KOO-zeh; /maʁˈkuːzə/) and the student movement.

Handout outline (Professor Gordon)

I. Recapitulation

a German émigré’s misunderstanding?
“culture” and “Kultur”: questions of Eurocentrism and elitism
an exacting and consistent Marxism or a case of misrecognition?
the question of totalizing criticism: is there a way out of commodified culture? [quote 1]
autonomous art as a “promesse du bonheur” or promise of happiness
a transcript of both suffering and aspiration: why no acknowledgement of an unresolved dialectic?
nuances in Adorno’s criticism

II. Methodological presuppositions of cultural critique: Adorno’s “Cultural Criticism and Society” (1955)

A. The paradoxes of cultural criticism
- complicity with the object of criticism [quote 2]
- freedom of thought and its dialectic [quote 3]
- the ideological notion of culture as a source of “values” [quote 4]
- the classical idea of ideology is defunct
- the duplication thesis or “capitalist realism” (Mark Fisher) [quote 5]
B. What does cultural critique consist in?
- critique as negation of ideology: negation of what affirms the false
- where does the critic stand? the choice between transcendence and immanence
C. Transcendent critique
- presupposes an “Archimedes’ point” or standpoint outside of society [quote 6]
D. Immanent critique
- criticism is exercised from within and reveals immanent contradictions [quote 7]

III. Adorno’s “Culture and Kultur” (1957)

A. The German ideal of Kultur
- German spiritual concept of culture as world-transcendence
- Germany’s failure of 1848 bourgeois revolutions
B. The American idea of culture
- lack of transcendence
- American realization of the bourgeois-democratic ideals in culture
- America realizes the universal principle of exchange, which embodies a “principle of humanity”
C. Utopia in everyday happiness
- the American child and hedonic pleasure [quote 8]
- Adorno’s sensual utopia: §37, “This Side of the Pleasure Principle,” in Adorno, Minima Moralia: “He alone who could situate utopia in blind somatic pleasure […] has a stable and valid idea of truth.”

IV. Adorno’s Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1961–62)

A. The critique of “light” music
- Strauss waltzes, opera buffa, American “evergreens”
- the reference to “plastic acoustic curves” in the jazz evergreen “Deep Purple” (1933/1938)
- conformity even in apparent individuality
B. The advantages of “light” music
- proximity and humanity
- preserves element of differentiation within the totality
- “a semblance of humanity—and not just a semblance”
- this differentiation that was “lost” in the “higher” music [quote 10]

V. Concluding remarks

critique toward what end?
the premise of emancipation
Marcuse and the student movement [next lecture]

On the back: (1) “The Culture Industry”; (2)–(7) “Cultural Criticism and Society”; (8) “Culture and Kultur”; (9) on jazz; (10) Introduction to the Sociology of Music.