"the culture industry: enlightenment as mass deception"
I'm working through Adorno and Horkheimer's "Dialectic of Enlightenment" and primarily the chapter titled "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." From what I gather, the main point of their argument is that what masquarades as culture in society has no true freedom (as one would assume of art/music/literature/film). It is instead a commodity designed to convince a consumer that they have freedom of choice, when in fact that choice has already been made for them. This is an incredible argument given our current society and the manipulation of mass consciousness through advertising and ESPECIALLY political ads in the United States. Just think about the power a "poll" has to raise a political candidate to superstardom or to crush them. Whose voice is represented in these polls anyway? For the past two days I've been keeping up with the news watching specifically for the polls and I haven't been disappointed, in that every news site reads some variation on the same theme: "Bush leads in this poll, tied in others" or "Kerry's lead with women slipping." What does this do then? Does this make their campaign managers and p.r. folks scramble for whatever leverage they can or could it that the truth is closer to what Adorno and Horkheimer are suggesting, that these polls are not designed to gauge any real consumer/social response but to create that response and feed it back to us as if it were our voice? As if we had a collective voice? Do we? Can we?
One question I have with Adorno and Horkheimer's argument is their point that even those appearing to rebel against the culture industry cannot for any sort of rebellion only serves to "...confirm the validate the system" (129). How then do you challenge the system if you risk either alienation from it (which you can see in the demonization of Marxist theories and socialism with a capital "S") or co-optation by it to the point to where everyone from the U.S. president to extreme rightists can use the words of Martin Luther King Jr., Jesus, and Gandhi to give themselves a seeming validity, while damning all notions of the very "liberalism" that each of these men stood for. What this essay does quite well is that it focuses on the economic noose that tightens around artists, essentially forcing some form of acquiesence and conformity or essentially starvation and poverty. Is this true across the board, maybe, maybe not. After all, there have been plenty of cases where people have published their own work, according to their own rules and have made a significant social impact, acquired a decent following but how often does this happen? I was reading another news bit recently about the "rise of American consumption of vegetarian products" and at the bottom of the article, there was a little blurb about how many of these small businesses offering organic produce and organically produced vegetarian goods (including especially non-GMO products) have been bought up by the very corporations that are equally content to put out bio-engineered, radioactive, prettily packaged shit and call it food. So, shouldn't that be a bit troubling?
Some of the most important quotes from this essay (thusfar) are exploring the relationship between the manipulation/monopoly of and the existence of a truly "social" consciousness: They argue "Under a private culture monopoly it is a fact that the "tyranny leaves the body free and direct its attack at the soul. The ruler no longer says: You must think as I do or die. He says: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your property, everything shall remain yours, but from this day on you are a stranger among us." Not to conform means to be rendered powerless, economically and therefore spiritually--to be "self-employed" ..."As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them" (133-134)
So is this arguing that we are essentially both bound to and responsible for subscribing to the very notions of success that enslave us to remain workers for others rather than masters of ourselves? This is interesting in the context of the hyper-individualism that permeates "American" culture. Where does the individual end and the social begin if the very idea of the individual is shaped by the social and cannot be divorced from it and the social is created to give the illusion of individual choice/freedom? Wow. More on this later.
peace.
1 Comments:
Jen,
This is a great response to "The Culture Industry." You do a wonderful job raising questions about Horkheimer's arguments and connecting their theories to current cultural issues. Of course, as prohphetic as their essay is, in many ways, it's hard to imagine how they might respond to the issues of culture and media and politics today. Then again it's very easy to do. I think the primary question you raise, which is quite good, is in response to their claim that there is little space for resistance through culture. Of course, you cannot say that this would be true across the board, but one thing they are getting at is that once an artist--even one like Ani DiFranco who controls her own cultural production--produces her work and puts it out into the world you can never anticipate or control how that art gets used. Maybe if you think about how, for instance, music gets used in particular political campaigns this may give you some insight. Consider Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA." It's a song that he wrote to critique the way Vietnam veterans were treated once they returned home. Ronald Reagan coopted this song and used it in his 1984 election campaign, much to Springsteen's dismay, and shifted the meaning of this song. This is, I think, one way to consider what they are saying about cultural production.
Marcy
Post a Comment
<< Home