User:Grrrreat/research/notes-03-05-12

Adorno and Horkheimer make the argument that products produced by the culture industry are basically all the same. The differences between the products of one genre are in fact very small, but they appear to be of importance because the range of varieties is so extremely small and because they are advertised as revolutionary and important when they are actually not. They see this as a result of the industrial process introduced into the realm of cultural production. Here they draw a comparison between the production and design of cars, which has cultural production (the design) as well as the industrial notion very obviously implied, and the big Hollywood movie production companies, which are in fact industrial complexes as well.

Drawing further on the image of industrial production they bring the factor of budget and economic efficiency to the debate. Since movie productions for example, are multi-million dollar undertakings there has to be some gurarantte that they will produce a surplus in money. This is the reason why the culture industry is streamlined for profit, keeping the boundaries for possible variations very tight.

"The varying budgets in the culture industry do not bear the slightest relation to factual values, to the meaning of the products themselves." (What are factual values in the sense of Adorno and Horkheimer, are they to be seen as absolutes?)

Therefore they see the invested capital itself as the plot of every movie, because it defines the boundaries of what is possible and what is not:

"It is the triumph of invested capital, whose title as absolute master is etched deep into the hearts of the dispossessed in the employment line; it is the meaningful content of every film, whatever plot the production team may have selected."

And to go even further: by defining economy/the capital as the plot of cultural productions it is replicating itself as the main message in the behaviour of recipients and producers alike.

From making the plot of the capital universal and therefore neglectable in a way, they move on to what is now left of the cultural matter.

"The development of the culture industry has led to the predominance of the effect, the obvious touch, and the technical detail over the work itself—which once expressed an idea, but was liquidated together with the idea.[...]The totality of the culture industry has put an end to this. Though concerned exclusively with effects, it crushes their insubordination and makes them subserve the formula, which replaces the work. " (page 3,4)

Here they are talking about the rigor with which aesthetic rules (or rules of consistency?) are to be followed in the modern day culture industry. On the other hand: these effects and tight boundaries in terms of aesthetics make the agglomerating mass of cultural productions more easily navigatable. Like in a topographic map where the structure of the relational grid has to be obeyed at all times to make the map function as reference to the actual territory, war movies have to look like war movies to make us (the decepted?) identify and accept them as war movies instantly. Yet in this 'working' form they do not hold potential for subtlety or subversion.

Adorno and Horkheimer go even further and say that the culture industry is a way of extending the workplace to the leisure time by providing the same structures (which again derive from industrial structures) in cultural production as in industrial work.

Here they talk a lot about the upper classes and the rest which seem to be sitting in office and industrial jobs exclusively. But at the same time modern freelance jobs seem to be even more applicable since the subordination into the factory-structure is self-chosen and self-organized.

"Life in the late capitalist era is a constant initiation rite. Everyone must show that he wholly identifies himself with the power which is belaboring him."

"What happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure time. All amusement suffers from this incurable malady. Pleasure hardens into boredom because, if it is to remain pleasure, it must not demand any effort and therefore moves rigorously in the worn grooves of association."

It seems as if they see the factory or maybe even capitalism not as a superstructure but as the original structure/constraint from which not only the structure of culture industry but also structures of social behaviours etc. spung, always bearing the original message/plot of the root structure:

"Since all the trends of the culture industry are profoundly embedded in the public by the whole social process, they are encouraged by the survival of the market in this area. Demand has not yet been replaced by simple obedience. As is well known, the major reorganization of the film industry shortly before World War I, the material prerequisite of its expansion, was precisely its deliberate acceptance of the public’s needs as recorded at the box-office—a procedure which was hardly thought necessary in the pioneering days of the screen."

For me this text is especially interesting for serving the approach of seeing all (almost?) cultural production devoid of a 'plot', of content and originality and solely based on the effect, the technique , which again, can be seen as the economic interest manifested as it is what the consumers pay for.

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"it is to be found in those features in which discrepancy appears: in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity. Instead of exposing itself to this failure in which the style of the great work of art has always achieved self-negation, the inferior work has always relied on its similarity with others—on a surrogate identity."

"By subordinating in the same way and to the same end all areas of intellectual creation, by occupying men’s senses from the time they leave the factory in the evening to the time they clock in again the next morning with matter that bears the impress of the labor process they themselves have to sustain throughout the day, this subsumption mockingly satisfies the concept of a unified culture which the philosophers of personality contrasted with mass culture

"the totality of the culture industry. It consists of repetition. That its characteristic innovations are never anything more than improvements of mass reproduction is not external to the system. It is with good reason that the interest of innumerable consumers is directed to the technique, and not to the contents—which are stubbornly repeated, outworn, and by now half-discredited"

"The idea of “fully exploiting” available technical resources and the facilities for aesthetic mass consumption is part of the economic system which refuses to exploit resources to abolish hunger"