Week 4

I was excited about this week's readings because I was actually able to understand them!

Luckily, I was familiar with the Horheimer and Adorno piece- "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." I had originally read the piece as an undergraduate in a class entitled Celebrity and Spectacle. Just thing semester, I was asked to read the piece a few weeks ago in my Cultural Politics of TV class and now, I was able to review the piece for this class. Its really interesting to me that one body of work can be so important to three very different areas of study. Horkeimer and Adorno seem to adopt a critical approach towards the culture industry, which is composed of films, the radio, and music. Main ideas coming out of the article are the fact that they believe that mass production of art and culture, the commodification and fetishism of art products as well as the inclination of art to becoming identical and unified, with the intent to serve capitalism. In this scheme original art becomes cheap imitations and value is applied not for its inherent value, but instead for what it can be exchanged for. Society is alienated, no longer able to be participants, but instead they are merely listeners. Horkeimer and Adorno also discuss the use of language in the culture industry. The culture industry created its own language which was universalist and totalitarian. Writing in 1946, much of their article seems, especially the part about language, seems to be reflective of their experiences with Nazi Germany. During WWII both moved to the United States in order to escape the Holocaust. The culture industry language was filled with propaganda and a sense of obedience to the norms. Keeping all of this in mind, one can assume that Horkeimer and Adorno would not have believed films to be art. For them, once they were created, pure art was destroyed because films became too available to the masses and high art was corrupted. Films were made to make money unlike high art like paintings which were a sign of intellectualism and not amusement. I think what bothers me most about this article was the fact that the audience is given zero power or autonomy, being spoon fed whatever the culture industry produces, no questions asked. While I do feel they make some valid points, I also feel that the audience does have some say in what they choose to see and not see. While there might not always be a perfect option, a person can choose not to view something. Furthermore, I do feel that a person has the ability to differentiate between high art and entertainment and outside of this, why can't entertainment have value for entertainment sake ad high art be valued on its own scale. Just because films are different than paintings, can't both be considered valuable for different reasons? Lastly, apparently Horkeimer and Adorno didn't believe in laughing, and I'm not sure if I can take anyone seriously who does not believe in the power of laughter. 

Now, in a culture that produces hundreds of films a year, I wonder what these two would say about "artsy films," such as those played at the E St. Theater versus those played at other mega cinemas. Would they be higher up on the scale of something closer to high art or does it not matter since these films are still available to the masses. 

I believe Jameson is on to something in his criticism of the Culture Industry when he states "The great work of modern high culture-whether it be Shoenberg, Beckett, or even Brecht himself-cannot serve as a fixed point or eternal standard against which to measure the degraded status of mass culture...For all these reasons it seems to me that we must rethink the opposition of high culture/ mass culture in such a way that the emphasis on evaluation to which it has traditionally given rise...Such an approach demands that we read high and mass culture as objectively related and dialectically interdependent phenomena" (Jameson, 133). I think this approach to separating high art and mass culture seems to make more sense to me, each can't exist without the other, but each is still given there own special place along the spectrum. Furthermore, instead of thinking about mass culture as reactive, or as a symptom or a result of a cultural crisis, more positively it can be explained as a solution, which fills the gap from Horkeimer and Adorno's piece which gave individuals no choice.