The Role of the Audience in the Culture Industry

Horkheimer and Adorno have frustrated me since the first time I read them in a theory class as an undergraduate. I find too much value in mass culture to be anything but frustrated by their assessment of it. I'm too enamored of television as a medium to let myself set too much store by their argument. (Film may be a product of Horkheimer and Adorno's culture industry, inextricably tied to box office revenue and the market, but the arguments for film-as-art are solid and today we're here in a film class. The roots of television are completely in advertising; the majority of shows tend to be formulaic and repetitive. TV is not only inextricably tied to the culture industry, it is born of it. While there are television shows for which I would make the art argument, the nature of the medium makes it harder).

Horkheimer and Adorno write: "real life is becoming indistiguishable from the movies. The sound film, far surpassing the theater of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respong within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story; hence the film forcs its victims to equate it directly with reality" (Horkheimer and Adorno 126). I look at the language they use. The film leaves no room. The audience is unable to respond. The film forces its victims. The producer produces and the consumer consumes what is produced and there is no escape, no possibility of useful response to the text or effective resistant reading. The audience is powerless to get anything out of a text that isn't put there by the producer. Horkheimer and Adorno don't even specifically address this issue, but I would guess that to them it wouldn't matter if resistant reading were possible, we're also so entrenched in the culture industry that we are slaves to it and the texts exist in and of themselves as tainted products of that industry.

It's one of the most depressing things I've ever heard and mostly, I'm just not prepared to allow for such a complete dismissal of the audience, such an erasure of resilience and resistance. I'm writing here from a different context, granted, but I would argue that any reading of mass culture texts cannot ignore the lenses that readers or subcultures bring to them, or the possibility fo an active and particpatory audience who can engage with the text and with its messages. There is an elitism in Horkheimer and Adorno since the implication is that the more available something is to the masses the less value it has. They say that culture should not be fused with entertainment and that "pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown . . . the liberation which amusement promises is freedom from thought and from negation" (Horkheimer and Adono 144). There's no hope there and there is no credit given to the audience/consumer.

The binary opposition between mass and high art is clearly a false one, so I appreciated Jameson's deconstruction of it. Due to that deconstruction, I found his piece more accessible than Horkheimer and Adorno's. He claims that "the only authentic cultural production today has seemed to be that which can draw on the collective experience of marginal pockets of the social life of the world" (Jameson 40). He goes on to say that " . . .class struggle, and the slow and intermittent development of genuine class consciousness, are themselves the process whereby a new and organic group constitutes itself . . ." (Jameson 40). For Jameson, at least there's an out, though not much of one and the power is still given completely to the culture producers.