Thedor+Adorno+-+Critique+of+the+Culture+Industry



Theodor Adorno was a German philosopher and musicologist involved with the prominent Institute for Social Research, better known as the “Frankfurt School” (for the city of Frankfurt), of pre-Fascist Germany. Adorno fled the Nazi government in the 1930s and took refuge in the U.S. until 1953, when he and his colleague Max Horkheimer returned to Germany and revived the Frankfurt School. He died in 1969 (Welty, 1).

Influenced by the advent of the anti-intellectual Fascists in Germany, and the plastic, mass-produced quality of Hollywood in America, “Theodor Adorno took a long, critical look at society and culture in the mid-20th century and concluded that it was a giant, vacuous hole of despair and hopelessness” (Schabe 1). Adorno and Horkheimer called the perpetuator of this “vacuous hole” the “culture industry.”

** THE CULTURE INDUSTRY **
The term “culture industry” is meant to differentiate the object of Adorno’s critique from “mass culture.” Both are popular, but mass culture, as its wording might suggest, arises from the masses; it is a spontaneous, common culture. The culture industry, on the other hand, perpetuates a uniform culture, enhanced and propagated by the media. It is devised by the entertainment and advertising elite to target an audience, and is then funneled down to the masses like a feeding tube, except there is no nutrition. It bastardizes high art and civilizes the rebelliousness and emotion of low art, taking the intrigue and the bite out of anything that formerly made people think (The Culture Industry Reconsidered, 128-29).

Some critics of Adorno have called his approach inapproachable “because it is so dense and intricately constructed” (Schabe, 2). One cannot absorb the content of his readings just at face value. In this way, Adorno is either a practicing purist or a narcissist, because //thought// appears to be his criterion for what constitutes culture or art. The piece or the subject is autonomous and waits upon the audience to court it. The audience must invest a moment’s time to analyze a subject, to think upon it, and achieve some conclusion, about the piece or themselves. There has been some intimacy or information exchanged between the art and the audience.

media type="youtube" key="zPu7ZDDLB54" height="385" width="480" Adorno acknowledges that any widely-recognized piece of culture has always possessed a commercial aspect—Beethoven had the means to write his compositions thanks to his patrons; the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was commissioned to Michelangelo by the Pope. The difference with these pieces, however, was that the musician or the painter aspired to put time and thought and inspiration into the piece in question, to move people emotionally and make them think about matters within and beyond themselves. Such productions “sought after profit only indirectly, over and above their autonomous essence” (Reconsidered, 129).

Products of the culture industry, on the other hand, “are no longer //also// commodities, they are commodities through and through” (Reconsidered, 129). Art is no longer courted; instead, people looking to make a profit do careful research of demographics and target audiences, and everything that made art //art// has been aborted in favor of high audience reception and money, prostituting itself and contaminating its audience (129). Movies follow the same horror or action or chick-flick formulae; three- and four-minute songs lack musical and lyrical and substantial variation. Common sense itself has been has been hijacked by “the stupefaction which lies in the claim that advice which is valid every day, and which is therefore idiotic, needs the approval of the stars" (134). The culture industry has eliminated any room for thought, imagination, or interpretation; because appointed role models have laid everything out in a format that a child could easily comprehend.

** THE EFFECT OF THE CULTURE INDUSTRY **
Due to expert research and advertising, the ghost of art doesn’t even have to court its audience anymore. Dissidence is either commercialized, and thus softened, or labeled //verboten//, and the dissenters are either reabsorbed, like the hipsters, or marginalized, like the Amish in the countryside, the crazy ascetics in the mountain, or the kid who doesn’t watch MTV. media type="youtube" key="6n1vtZR16RY" height="385" width="640" In this way an authentic counterculture is virtually inaccessible, because the culture industry has spread out and achieved a monopoly, even on the supposed rebellion, blinding its audience to any true alternative (The Culture Industry, 145).

The worst aspect of the culture industry, according to Adorno, is that Culture once hunted its audience like the noble stag, whereas the culture industry now farms its audience like brain-dead cattle. The masses have been stupefied into liking the same thing over and over and over and over again (Reconsidered, 130). Since Adorno was a musicologist, a classical music aficionada and an ardent critic of insubstantial pop music, using music as an example one finds that:

We recur to the stuff that is ‘nostalgic’—the only music we’re wired to instinctively appreciate. If Adorno’s right, and we’ve let our intellectual means for appreciating music atrophy, and we’ve instead become reliant on these emotional/instinctive methods for assimilating music, at a certain point we become frozen; without the intellectual basis upon which to enjoy music we haven’t heard before, we’re incapable of taking pleasure in anything new. This lost ability is serious stuff to Adorno, because real music, like all real art, when heard with the intellect, offers listeners a means by which to criticize a given reality, to synthesize alternatives. Without it, we’re trapped in the status quo, and worse, self-deluded into enjoying it as plentitude (Horning, 1).

The greatest danger of the culture industry is that people, caught up in mind-numbing repetition, forget its presence and its influence. Then it maintains its hold forever.

** Works Cited: **

 * Adorno, Theodor W. “The Culture Industry Reconsidered,” trans. Anson G. Rabinbach, 1967.
 * Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in //Dialectic of Enlightenment//, trans. John Cumming. New York: The Continuum Publishing Corporation, 1982. pp. 120-67.
 * Horning, Rob. “Adorno for pop critics.” //PopMatters//. 20 September 2006, accessed 11 May 2010. <[]>.
 * Schabe, Patrick. “Philosophy of New Music by Theodor Adorno; Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor.” //PopMatters//. 19 September 2006, accessed 11 May 2010. <[]>.

** Additional Resources: **

 * [|“Why Adorno is Relevant to the 21st Century” (video)] – Adorno made accessible.