Week 4: The Culture Industry

This week’s theorists present a bleak view of culture and the possibility of producing true art within it. Adorno and Horkheimer’s major position is that the culture industry has turned the form and content of art into a commodity and given art the use of making money as a commodity, setting up an almost impenetrable cultural system bent on self-perpetuation. The system spins like a machine in place, churning out the same cultural products over and over (with only the details switched) so that technical form is substituted for content. The masses are powerless to rebel against the system, which itself dictates every form of rebellion. Moreover, the individual can only choose to be poor and hungry, economically and spiritually bankrupt, if the individual can even be said to exist in the wake of such oppression. Moreover, the culture industry forces its participants to be willing: the masses gulp cultural poison not only ignorantly (thinking it’s potable), but willingly because they operate under the illusion of free choice.

Jameson picks up the bleak train where Adorno and Horkheimer left off. Although he agrees with their negative social and cultural criticism, Jameson undercuts what he sees as their (tacit?) endorsement of modernism as a positive alternative to the arid cultural products churned out by the culture industry. By rejecting their supposed “valorization of traditional modernist high art as the locus of some genuinely critical and subversive, ‘autonomous’ aesthetic production” (133), Jameson erases our hope of escaping the culture industry’s clutches. All art, including the works of modernism, buttress the culture industry. After all, to define oneself by negation, as modernism does, is to engage with, and thereby legitimize, what one is fleeing from.

Jameson’s reorients the polarization of high versus mass art. Rather than discuss which is better, he wants to redefine the works of each group as those that developed contemporaneously with the other group. Thus, there was no high art (represented by modernism) without mass culture, and vice versa: they must be viewed as socially and historically dialectical (“high and mass culture as objectively related and dialectically interdependent phenomena” – 133), two opposing solutions to the same problems “of form and of a public” (134) that interact with each other.

Jameson goes beyond Adorno and Horkheimer in two other ways. First, he fleshes out the process by which literary texts feed the culture industry, demonstrating how “the reading process is itself restructured along a means/ends differentiation” (132). Jameson says every division of a novel is reduced to a means to an end. Thus, the paragraph is the pay-off for the sentence, the page the pay-off for reading the paragraph, the chapter for the page, and the end is the reward for reading all of the chapters, pages, paragraphs, and sentences. The effect is a work of art as a closed circle, only interested in being read (and forgotten), another brick in the culture industry’s immense wall. Secondly, Jameson ratifies Adorno and Horkheimer’s hopelessness of throwing off the culture industry by demonstrating how films: i) release and contain our anxieties (“transformational work on social and political anxieties” – 141) and ii) undercut any rebellious tendency we may have toward the culture industry by allowing us to believe in the illusion of the utopia of social harmony. (Jameson does admit the small redemptive quality of ii)’s ability to express our hopes, as there’s supposedly consolation in knowing our goals even if they’re unattainable.) The effect of i) and ii) is conservative: to cement the spectator/consumer of the film as a cog in the machine, both incapable of and resistant to revolution (we have to and want to watch television’s trash (137)). The culture industry is now just as pernicious as it was in Adorno and Horkheimer: it does not distract us, but demands we change and want to change ourselves in the industry’s image.

In this (bleak) context, the artist is lonely and misunderstood (137) and only class struggle can bring about the collective social life that brings about authentic culture and “authentic cultural creations” (140) we term “art.” Jameson does not discuss what these cultural products would look like, since he has no interest in playing Nostradamus and these collectivities supposedly do not yet exist (in 1979 – do they now?).

Having tried to provide a brief on this week’s readings (feel free to correct any faulty reading on my part), I’d like to bring up a few questions I found interesting and that you might want to tackle in your post or that we can talk about as a class:

• Where do Adorno/Horkheimer fall in the debate over whether film should reflect reality? Is realism a tactic that reinforces the culture industry by refusing to raise our consciousness, part of the ideology that thinks: “Whatever the camera reproduces is beautiful” (148)?

• What do we do if we buy Adorno/Horkheimer/Jameson’s demonization of culture? Withdraw? Resign ourselves? After reading these articles, I felt like renouncing all cultural products. I was pretty sure I couldn’t watch a movie, especially one whose name mimicked my newfound stance toward society and myself: Contempt. How would you be affected if all of the radio stations and theaters closed down (A&K, 139)?

• Does economic powerlessness entail spiritual powerlessness (A&K, 133)?

• Do you think Adorno and Horkheimer are correct when they argue we can only relax when our leisure activities resemble our work? Are we happy as mechanistic spectators (Benjamin/Duhamel/Adorno/Horkheimer all believe film’s control over the temporal dominates our perception and determines our reaction) who react to the signals embedded in cultural products (A&K, 137) rather than viewers who respond to content in a human way? Does that hold up in your own experience, or might it be an outdated argument?

• What are we doing in a film class if this week’s theorists are correct? Are we ending our ignorance of the culture industry without affecting our powerlessness with regard to it? How can we rationally overthrow the ultra-rational system supposedly oppressing us?

• What does it say about the possibility of rebellion against the culture industry that while reading these two articles, I had to resort to analogies with cultural products in order to understand their arguments and respond? For example, I thought of The Matrix, The Truman Show, and Orwell’s 1984 to imagine the culture industry as a type of Machine/Omnipotent & Unseen Director/Totalitarian State, Slumdog Millionaire in terms of my own expectations regarding how I want films to end, It’s a Wonderful Life for its possibly taming message of placid stoicism rather than active revolt in the face of a brutal world, Revolutionary Road for how films give us our everyday problems rather than an escape from them, and Trading Places for Brecht’s claim that anyone could be turned into anything (Jameson, 140-1).