Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer- The Culture Industry as Mass Deception

Using this as a theoretical text, I'm forced to look at The Invisibles two ways: first as a work of art which is part and parcel of the Industry described by Adorno/Horkheimer, and second as a work which directly interrogates ideas put forward by A/H. I'm going to focus mostly on the first one here. The second gets covered on the other blog.

Applicable parts include:

"The details are interchangeable. The short interval sequence which was effective in a hit song, the hero's momentary fall from grace (which he accepts as good sport), the rough treatment which the beloved gets from the male star, the latter's rugged defiance of the spoilt heiress, are, like all the other details, ready-made cliches to be slotted in anywhere; they never do anything more than fulfill the purpose allotted them in the overall plan... 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" (Adorno 1244).

They go on to say that the cliches have become so powerful that the repeated observer is left unable to experience works outside of them:

"Those who are so absorbed by the world of the movie–by its images, gestures, and words–that they are unable to supply what really makes it a world, do not have to dwell on particular points of its mechanics during a screening" (Adorno 1244).

The Invisibles traffics heavily in cliches, which I get into a bit further on the companion post. Sometimes the effect is to undermine/subvert the cliche, and sometimes it isn't. But A/Hork seem to contend that things have come to a point where to use one of these tropes at all will wash out the message of your work, because it positions it so firmly inside the Culture Industry.

This essay seems to ignore a lot of stuff, making the classic Marxist mistake of defining identity solely in terms of status within the capital-exchange system. It also assumes that the producers of this stuff are way more centralized than they are today- sure, five or so firms still own all the major TV stations/record labels/etc., but those aren't the only channels for distribution anymore. I'm not sure how this theory would hold up under a more democratic model of production, but the thought raises a question: if, instead of just Pat Boone making Pat Boone records, five thousand dudes made Pat Boone records, do we as a culture gain or lose from this?

Citation:

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. "The Culture Industry as Mass Deception." in Rivkin and Ryan, ed. Literary Theory: An Anthology, Second Edition. Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

posted by connor @ 2:41 PM  Permalink