SOCI327 – Culture, Economy & Cities
#Lecture
Session 5:
‘The Culture Industry’
Key text:
‘The Dialectic of Enlightenment’ by Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer
Key ideas for this session
* The application of ‘industrial’ processes to culture itself?
* The triumph of economic value over all other forms?
* Freedom only to work and consume?
* The dominance of infantilising global cultural products?
* Living in a fantasy world?
* You are a target market.
Further developments in ‘mechanical reproduction’
1920s:
Commercial radio broadcasting begins
The end of the silent cinema era – ‘talking pictures’
1930s:
Commercial vinyl records
Regular television broadcasts begin
First feature film in Technicolor
(This period also sees the establishment of popular magazines such as Reader’s Digest,
Newsweek, Time, Life, The New Yorker, Radio Times, Glamour, Family Circle, some of
which are still with us)
‘Economies of scale’
Economic benefits can arise from activity on a large scale,
e.g. bulk buying of goods, large-scale reproduction leading to a lower cost per unit.
So, although the cost of a blockbuster feature film is very high…
(Cost of ‘The Avengers’ : $220,000,000)
‘Economies of scale’
Economic benefits can arise from activity on a large scale,
e.g. bulk buying of goods, large-scale reproduction leading to a lower cost per unit.
So, although the cost of a blockbuster feature film is very high…
(Cost of ‘The Avengers’ : $220,000,000)
‘Economies of scale’ (2)
Opens on 12,000 screens simultaneously.
$62 million gross in 1 day
$208 million in 1 weekend
$270 million in 1 week
$500 million in 1 month
$1.5 billion worldwide
[Link]
The Dialectic of Enlightenment
“The twentieth century – with its death camps and death
squads, its militarism and two world wars, its threat of nuclear
annihilation and its experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki –
has certainly shattered this optimism. Worse still, the suspicion
lurks that that Enlightenment project was doomed to turn
against itself”
“This was the daring thesis advanced by Horkheimer and
Adorno in their The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Writing in the
shadow of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, they argued
that the logic that hides behind Enlightenment rationality is a
logic of domination and oppression”
David Harvey, ‘The Condition of Postmodernity’ (1989)
The Dialectic of Enlightenment (2)
“Adorno and Horkheimer argued that the
Enlightenment had postured as freeing
mankind from myth and delusion, but even in
the countries that were currently fighting
Nazism it had degenerated into barbarism –
the culture industry, science and technology as
tools of ideology and domination, the
destruction of the individual, and the
administered society. ”
Stuart Jeffries, ‘Grand Hotel Abyss – The Lives of the Frankfurt
School’ (2016)
Standard forms
“…the fear of a possible extension of the standard form that would end up controlling even
what, for the philosophers of the Frankfurt School – Adorno in particular – constituted
civilization’s last rampart against mechanistic barbarianism: the world of art and culture.”
“The possibility that capital will take control over everything – especially art and culture –
has been staged in a particularly dramatic way by the principal actors of the Frankfurt School.
But such control could be conceived, during the interwar period, only in the form of an
unlimited extension of standardization”
Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre (2017), ‘Enrichment’
Remember this?
“Modern society's obsession with saving time, whether by means of faster transport or by means of powdered
soup, has the positive result that the average American spends three to six hours daily watching television.”
Guy Debord, ‘The Society of The Spectacle’ (1967)
How much of our life does reproducible culture occupy?
The choices offered by the culture industry
“The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong that is
done them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities”
“It calls for [...] Donald Duck instead of Betty Boop.”
Remember this?
Hedonia: “pleasure or positive feeling”
Eudaimonia: “purpose or flourishing” –
“living our best possible life”
(…but who will do the dirty work
while we live our best life?)
The operation of the culture industry (from ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’)
“The entire practice of the culture industry transfers
the profit motive naked onto cultural forms. Ever since
these cultural forms first began to earn a living for
their creators as commodities in the market place they
had already possessed something of this quality. But
then they sought after profit only indirectly, over and
above their autonomous essence.
New on the part of the culture industry is the direct
and undisguised primacy of a precisely and thoroughly
calculated efficacy in its most typical products.”
[Link]
Michael Eisner – CEO of The Walt Disney Company from 1984-2005
“In an infamous 1981 memo, Mr Eisner wrote:
"We have no obligation to make history.
We have no obligation to make art.
We have no obligation to make a statement.
To make money is our only objective.”
[Link]
[Link]
Michael Eisner – CEO of The Walt Disney Company from 1984-2005
Caryatid porch of the Erechtheion, ~410BC The Michael D. Eisner Building ~1990
What does one of the wealthiest living artists think?
“I don’t think there’s any problem with art being made in a factory as long as it’s making
a fantastic product.”
[Link]
‘I'm criticized but all your bullets ricochet…’
“For me, "Titanium" is very cheesy. And "Wild Ones" is definitely 100
percent cheese. […] I never intended or wanted either of those songs
to be seen because I felt like it diluted my credibility because I found
them to be very cheesy. I wanted other people to sing them, and I just
wanted to collect the publishing checks at the end of the day.”
Youtube views:
Titanium – 1.8 billion
Wild Ones – 641 million
[Chandelier – 2.7 billion]
“It sounds bad […] but an artist who gets high rotation on the radio is
your target when you're a songwriter. That's the [Link] want
someone who gets highly rotated. […] but now, as my value increases, it
Sia Furler, estimated net worth: actually makes more sense for me to sing those new pop songs as
opposed to giving them to other people. ”
$30 million
[Link]
[Link]
worth/
‘The Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in his Gallery’ by David Teniers the Younger (1650s)
The quality of the culture industry (from ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’)
“Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is
uniform as a whole and in every part […] Culture now
impresses the same stamp on everything.”
“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.”
“[Radio] turns all participants into listeners and
authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs which
are all exactly the same.”
“As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end
[...] in light music, once the trained ear has heard the first
notes of the hit song, it can guess what is coming.”
The quality of the culture industry (from ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’)
“With culture normatively conceived by a patrician Marxist sensibility […] the workers,
once freed of the yoke of oppression, would march to the sunlit uplands of Beethoven,
rather than wallow in the sewers of Hollywood.”
“For Frankfurt School thinkers like Horkheimer and Adorno, if not Benjamin, this output
of trash had a function: to pacify the masses.”
Stuart Jeffries, ‘Grand Hotel Abyss – The Lives of the Frankfurt School’ (2016)
The effects of the culture industry
Culture for profit
Standardization
No escape
Passivity
“Amusement is the prolongation of work”
The scope of cultural commodification
“Signs of cultural difference and even rebellion are embraced by business but not to the
detriment of business. The bottom line remains the bottom line.”
Jim McGuigan, ‘Cool Capitalism’ (2009)
“Eventually, the mods, the punks, the glitter rockers can be incorporated […] After all,
such a subculture is concerned first and foremost with consumption. It operates
exclusively in the leisure sphere. It communicates through commodities even if the
meanings attached to those commodities are purposefully distorted or overthrown.”
Dick Hebdige, ‘Subculture – The Meaning of Style’ (1979)
Put another way
“A Marxist book, an anarchist’s guide, attacks on the institution of the family, songs
celebrating illegal drugs, films and television plays celebrating physical violence or showing
crime as justifiable or successful, can and do become, whatever their varying cultural
sources, profitable commodities”
Raymond Williams, ‘Culture’ (1981)
“This was to become one great theme of critical theory: there is no outside, not in today’s
utterly rationalised, totally reified, commodity-fetishising world.”
Stuart Jeffries, ‘Grand Hotel Abyss – The Lives of the Frankfurt School’ (2016)
Turning rebellion into money
2015:Virgin Money introduce ‘Never Mind The Bollocks’ and ‘Anarchy In The UK’ branded credit cards:
“In launching these cards we wanted to celebrate Virgin’s heritage and difference. The Sex Pistols challenged convention and
the established ways of thinking – just as we are doing today in our quest to shake up UK banking.”
The counter cultural McDonalds wrap (2010s)
Amusement and work
“Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work. It is sought after as an
escape from the mechanized work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to
cope with it again.
But at the same time mechanization has such power over a man's leisure and happiness [...]
that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process itself.”
Others express this view around the same time…
“A break in one’s work, whether of an hour, a day or a week, is still part of the world of
work. It is a link in the chain of utilitarian functions. The pause is made for the sake of
work and in order to work, and a man is not only refreshed from work but for work.”
Josef Piper, ‘Leisure as the basis of culture’ (1952)
Even those making a living from these products seem concerned…
“Obviously I’m very much a self-confessed fan of science-fiction and genre cinema. But part
of me looks at society as it is now and just thinks we’ve been infantilised by our own taste.”
He went on: “Now we’re essentially all consuming very childish things – comic books,
superheroes... Adults are watching this stuff, and taking it seriously!”
[Link]
Money talks
Worldwide gross
Marvel’s The Avengers: $1.5 billion
Avengers: Age of Ultron: $1.4 billion
Avengers: Infinity War: $2 billion
Avengers: Endgame: $2.8 billion
(These are 4 of the
15 highest grossing films ever made)
[Link]
[Link]
A global product
[Link]
This has to stop at some point, right?
[Link]
Quality or quantity?
Robert De Vries (2019), ‘Critical Statistics’
Franchises really start to dominate in the 21st century
[Link]
Advertising and the Culture Industry
Image: ‘John Carpenter’s They
Live’ (1988)
“Advertising and the culture industry merge technically as well as economically. In both cases
the same thing can be seen in innumerable places, and the mechanical repetition of the same
culture product has come to be the same as the propaganda slogan.”
Adapting the masses to the market
“Adorno was apt to see Nazism in nearly everything he disliked – understandable
given what it was about to do to him, his colleagues and his family.”
“[Adorno] regarded American commercial radio as akin to the totalitarian radio he
had heard in Nazi Germany, which, he reflected, had been assigned the task ‘of
providing good entertainment and diversion’ to control the masses. He came to
believe that the function of American commercial radio was to distract listeners
from political reality while making them passive consumers who chose what was
offered to them.”
Stuart Jeffries, ‘Grand Hotel Abyss – The Lives of the Frankfurt School’ (2016)
Adapting the masses to the market
“[…] its victims, as Adorno called them, were locked into a degrading relationship of
dependency with commodities, consuming things that they did not need, becoming
passive, stupid and – no small matter this to the German composer – increasingly
unable to properly hear music deserving of the name.”
“what they hated about putatively popular culture was that it was not democratic
and that its subliminal message was one of conformism and repression.”
Stuart Jeffries, ‘Grand Hotel Abyss – The Lives of the Frankfurt School’ (2016)
Everything’s entertainment
[Link]
The age of alienation?
“Benjamin wrote in 1936 that mankind’s
self-alienation had ‘reached such a degree
that it can contemplate its own
destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of
the first order.’ By mankind, he meant
that part of it that had succumbed to the
delusive dreams of the Italian futurist
poet and fascist Filippo Marinetti who
saw war as beautiful.”
Stuart Jeffries, ‘Grand Hotel Abyss – The Lives of the
Frankfurt School’ (2016)
Is it that simple?
“During 1952 and 1953, for instance, Adorno spent ten months in California analysing
newspaper astrology columns, radio soap operas and the new medium of television […]
Adorno found in all these forms of mass culture a symmetry with fascist propaganda:
both mass culture and fascist propaganda, he argued, meet and manipulate the
dependency needs of the pseudo-individual character, ‘promoting conventional, conformist
and contented attitudes’.
If you were an American, of course, this might have seemed incredibly patronising.”
Stuart Jeffries, ‘Grand Hotel Abyss – The Lives of the Frankfurt School’ (2016)
Is it that simple?
“If the forms and relationships, on which participation in this sort of
commercially provided 'culture' depend, are purely manipulative and
debased, then the people who consume and enjoy them must either
be themselves debased by these activities or else living in a
permanent state of 'false consciousness’.
They must be 'cultural dopes' who can't tell that what they are being
fed is an up-dated form of the opium of the people. That judgement
may make us feel right, decent and self-satisfied about our
denunciations of the agents of mass manipulation and deception - the
capitalist cultural industries: but I don't know that it is a view which
can survive for long as an adequate account of cultural relationships:
and even less as a socialist perspective on the culture and nature of
the working class.”
Stuart Hall, ‘Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular’ (1981)
Is it that simple?
“Ultimately, the notion of the people as a purely passive,
outline force is a deeply unsocialist perspective.”
Stuart Hall, ‘Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular’ (1981)
Piccadilly Circus, London from early to mid twentieth century
Culture and advertising (1950s)
Culture and advertising (1990s)
[Link]
Even Benjamin can be used for branding…?
[Link]
Everything’s for sale
[Link]
Back to Debord
“The obsession with commodities and manufactured products that take aim at our self-image rather than our
actual material needs, argues Debord, “has taken on such a central role in the life of consumers that it has
displaced any other cultural, intellectual or political reality.”
We are all of us deindividualized actors—objects, really—in an ongoing spectacle staged by advertisers and
corporate molders of desire. “The spectacle,” writes Debord, “is the effective dictatorship of illusion in modern
society.”
The dictatorship works so well because we participate in it while believing we are free, coaxed by a barrage of
pop songs, magazine and newspaper articles, movies, advertisements, and television shows that flatter our
uniqueness, our attractiveness, our illusory will to choose.
We have surrendered ourselves to the spectacle, the theory goes, striking poses, playing roles, adapting
personae, drifting further and further from our true selves and even from the ability to recognize that such a self
might exist. As a result, we feel depressed, unmotivated, hollow, and, since we live so deeply inside the spectacle,
we experience this feeling as a personal failure”
Michael Greenberg, ‘The Passions of Vargas Llosa’: [Link]
John Berger, Ways of Seeing, episode 4 (1972)
[Link]