THE CULTURE INDUSTRY

Theodor W. Adorno has left an impressive legacy of written work in a broad range of subject matter, from musicology and literary criticism to philosophy, political science and sociology. All his works are original and interesting, but in this entry I have chosen his by far most important socio-political concept, that of The Culture Industry.

This entry utilizes certain excerpts from Adorno’s essays collected under the term he coined, together with Max Horkheimer, that of The Culture Industry. It is a representative sample of his interesting, even if fairly uncomplicated, discourse. As usual, quotes are in blue font. My comments here are in regular font.

My special biographical entry on Adorno (Adorno The Underrated) precedes this one immediately.

The sociological theory that the loss of the support of objectively established religion, the dissolution of the last remnants of pre-capitalism together with technological and social differentiation or specialization, have led to cultural chaos is disproved every day for culture now impresses the same stamp on everything. Films, radio, and the magazines make up a system that is uniform as a whole and in every part. Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are as one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system. The decorative industrial management buildings and exhibition centers in authoritarian countries are much the same as anywhere else; the huge gleaming towers, shooting up everywhere, are the outward signs of the ingenious planning of international concerns, toward which the unleashed entrepreneurial system (whose monuments are a mass of gloomy houses and business premises in grimy, spiritless cities) had already been hastening. Even now the older houses just outside the concrete city centers look much like slums, and the new bungalows on the outskirts are akin to the flimsy structures of world fairs, in their praise of technical progress and their built-in demand to be discarded after a short while, like empty food cans.

Adorno’s main thrust is understandable, and in his depiction of the culture industry as an element and the guiding force of mass culture, there is little for me to argue with. Even if the mass culture of architectural design and the urban and suburban planning has changed in appearance since his time, and the “gloomy houses and business centers in grimy spiritless cities” have given way to a more “cheerful” look, in most upscale neighborhoods, the slums all still look alike as slums, and the projects for the well-to-do have never lost their cookie-cutter touch, and are arguably (as argued by me) no less, and maybe even more, aesthetically challenged than the projects for the poor, and the ones described by him.

But his contention becomes far less persuasive when he claims the universality of all modern culture. I see an exception in Soviet Russia, where the celebrated Russian Intelligentsia never succumbed to the push of the culture industry, and where variety of design and its high aesthetic content had remained a priority, to offset the tedium of mass production.

Take Moscow subway, for instance. Built as a mass transit system, yet each station has been different from the others, all of them aesthetically splendid works of art. Even the notorious Stalin skyscrapers in Moscow have been unfairly criticized by those who may not even have seen them in real life, nor at close range. I’ve seen them all, and I’ve been inside all of them. Fairly small in number, they used to enliven the city skyline adding diversity to the cityscape. Having lived in New York, I never failed to admire the massive structures of Manhattan, beautiful in their own right, even if occasionally monotonous. Both Moscow and New York are cities of great spirit, and what is the best in them is totally unaffected by the blight of mass culture, as Adorno sees it.

But of course, Moscow was not to be spared the ugliness of its own boxes, crates, and food cans. Known as Khrushchoby, or Khrushchev’s slums, these despicable clones of each other, built in a hurry, to relieve the shortages of housing, these days they are mostly gone (having served without fail for half a century, that is, three times their expected “shelf life”), having been demolished with great difficulty, because of the sturdiness of their construction, to give way to the patently tasteless and even more despicable chic of the Yeltsin era (which fortunately began crumbling even before its builders could spend the money they received for it, due to poor engineering and outright thievery), as if to spite me with the reminder that the obnoxious mass culture, as described and denounced by Adorno, spreads like hellfire, when allowed, sparing not even the mightiest fortresses of aestheticism and good taste.

But the city housing projects, designed to perpetuate the individual as a supposedly independent unit in a small hygienic dwelling make him yet more submissive to his adversary, the absolute power of capitalism. Because the inhabitants, as producers, and as consumers, are drawn into the center in search of work and pleasure, all living units crystallize into well-organized complexes. The striking unity of microcosm and macrocosm presents men with a model of their culture: the false identity of the general and the particular.

In a sense, what Adorno is saying is that it is, perhaps, better for an individual to dwell in a communal flat, but with a spirit of its own than to become a homeowner dwelling in a single-family unit with no identity of its own whatsoever. Aesthetically and spiritually, I would agree with him, if he is willing to go that far, for, what is the value of privacy, which has no individuality?

Under monopoly, all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework will begin to show through. The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. They call themselves industries; and when their directors’ incomes are published, any doubt about the social utility of the finished products is removed.

From architecture and housing to all cultural forms which ‘no longer pretend to be art.’ However I disagree with Adorno here, because the real situation is much worse than he describes. The trash has never dropped its pretense to be art, but, on the contrary, it is passing itself as the art of the new era, to the dismissive and denigrating ridicule of the greatest treasures of human civilization.

Interested parties explain the culture industry in technological terms. It is alleged that just because millions participate in it, certain reproduction processes are necessary, which inevitably require identical needs in innumerable places to be satisfied with identical goods. The technical contrast between the few production centers and the large number of widely dispersed consumption points is said to demand organization and planning by the management. Furthermore, it is claimed that the standards were based, in the first place, on the consumers’ needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need, in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger. No mention made of the fact that the basis, on which technology acquires power over society, is the power of those, whose economic hold over society is the greatest. A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself.

Consumerism is, indeed, a form of slavery, and not just the voluntary kind of enslavement, exhibited in all sorts of addictions and obsessions, but real slavery, based on sheer compulsion and oppression. Adorno is, therefore, right on, when he uses the word coercion in the last sentence above.

Automobiles, bombs, and movies keep the whole thing together, until their leveling element displays its strength in the very wrong, which it furthered. It has made the technology of the culture industry no more than the achievement of standardization and mass production, sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system.

Yet again, Adorno lashes at the loss of individuality as a result of the advancement of the culture industry. Those precious trophies of privacy and freedom, won by an advanced democratic society, are immediately forfeited through standardization and mass production, with the end result even worse than before social emancipation: at least then, people had the freedom of thought when they had no other; but having gained those missing ones and then having tied them all up in one large bundle, the loss has been astounding and total, to the dismay of those few of us who have been capable of realizing what exactly has been lost.

…From everything said above, it must be clear by now, why Adorno has become a special case for me, worthy of dedicating at least a couple of full-size entries to. I have a special weakness for all independent thinkers, interdisciplinary Renaissance men, and controversial figures, who engender controversy not like so many of these cheap shock jocks have learned to do it today, but solely by virtue of their independent-mindedness, so letting the chips fall where they may. As promised, my next person of note in this series is also an independent thinker and a figure of great controversy. Her name is Hannah Arendt.