User:Andre Castro/FactoryReset/1.3/Annotations-FactoryReset/Adorno-CulturalIndustry
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer The Culture Industry and Mass Deception
Three points appear as most relevant:
Mass culture, a commodity
The authors appear very biased in relation to the possibility of a more popular art, with wider audiences. Phrases such as: 'The idolization of the cheap involves making the average the heroic' and 'For a few coins one can see the film which cost millions'(p.19) demonstrate their disapproval.
Adorno and Horkheimer are also critical of art becoming accepted as a commodity: 'that art renounces its own autonomy and proudly takes its place among the consumption goods'(p.19). Nonetheless they also aware of the impossibility of an an autonomous art and acknowledge its dependence on the marked: 'Pure works of art which deny the commodity of society ... were always wares all the same'(p.19). Their answer to this problem is the work of art's awareness to the struggle between monetary dependence and autonomy. Is then their critique toward mass culture trying to state that it doesn't demonstrate enough awareness of its position? That it try to full spectators into believing in its autonomous when in reality is highly dependent on their few coins?
(Benjamin's: cult value is replace by exhibition value of the work of art)
uniformity and differentiation
The authors identify the differentiation of cultural products happening not in the content, but on external variables that individualize the products for every consumer. 'Marked differentiations ... depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organizing, and labeling consumers. Something is provided for all so that non may escape'(p.2). Cultural products must make the individual feel unique, since its is giving something specific to her, while in reality she is fed the same content masked with a different face that appeals specifically to her.
I ask then do we still witness this process today? Where do we see it happening? Most clearly in online advertising; data collect from each individual's online activity is used for microtargetting - customizing advertising to each particular individual. The individual's surrounding environment is adapted to her particular needs and desires in order to trigger more consumption.
Culture as a tool for control
One of the strongest and most iterated statements is that mass culture is tool for control of the masses, such as the following statements: 'The strong the positions of the culture industry become, the more summarily it can deal with consumer's needs, producing the, controlling them, disciplining them, and even withdrawing amusement'(p.13) 'The National Socialists knew that the wireless gave shape to their cause just as printing press did to the Reformation ... The gigantic fact that the speech penetrates everywhere replaces its content ... No listener can grasp its true meaning any longer ... The inherent tendency of radio to make the speaker's word, the false commandment, absolute (p.20). However the authors seem to evade exploring the inner mechanisms by which culture has been put to work as a control device. The time they seem to tackle that process is reference to films as modulators of the behavior of masses: 'the tragic film becomes an institution for moral improvement. The masses ... are to be kept in order by the sight of an inexorable life and exemplary behavior'(p.17).
'The liberation which amusement promises is freedom from thought and from negation. The effrontery of the rhetorical question, "What do people want?" lies in the fact that it is addressed - as if to reflective individuals - to those very people who are deliberately to be deprived of this individuality'(p.13)