The Cultural Industry(cont) and the Critique of Instrumental Reason
1. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the term "culture industry" does not simply signify that cultural production has become industrial. They accept the reproduction of individual works of art on a mass scale inevitably requires industry. The important point encapsulated in the idea of the culture industry is that contemporary culture is increasingly "standardised" and repetitive with only "pseudo-individualisation" (marginal differentiation) of cultural objects: "something for all so no one escapes" (DEW123). This is wholly integrated with the commercialisation of promotion and distribution techniques. Despite the ideology of individualism that motivates much consumption in advertising and popular culture, the basic tendency not only of the institutions of late capitalism but also its culture is to eliminate all vestiges of individuality in favor of a predictable and calculable standardisation and uniformity. Horkheimer makes the same point when he says that the rhetoric of individualism impose collective patterns of behavior which disavow the very principle invoked(R&D of I, P158/159). For Horkheimer and Adorno, the leading characteristic of classical autonomous art was its utopian “promise of happiness” with its inherent critical function and enlightening potential. This potential now disappears with the "culture industry” and its homogenization of all culture as mere pleasure or entertainment as respite from drudgery of work. The crisis of the function of culture was symptomatic of the general tendency in the totally administered society to move increasingly towards the institutionalisation of "wants" and "needs" with the object of exercising tighter control. In this context, it is only the genuinely authentic “autonomous works of Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Beckett, Klee, Kandinsky and Schonberg that sustain the artistic vocation by resolutely resisting commodification and disclosing the truth about the world in their radical negation of it. In doing so they render aesthetically manifest the total alienation of the world. But the artistic price of this is high. They must abandon the classical unity of expression and meaning in favour of expressing this alienation and embrace audience incomprehension and refusal to communicate. To be genuine works of art, they must realize the deconstruction of art (Entkunstung).
2. Mass culture not only undermines the validity of autonomous art; it also destroys authentic popular folk culture. The former is achieved not merely by the increasing subordination of art to the status of a mere commodity. What follows from this is a widening of the distance between classical aesthetics and those of the culture industry. The audience for authentic autonomous art diminishes and this results in its cultural marginalisation. As suggested, increasingly a mass public questions the intelligibility of autonomous art. As regards popular culture, the culture industry triumphs through disembowelment. Certain elements, details and motifs are detached from their original organic whole with no thought to the inner consistency and the teleologically directed inner development of the work: instead they are reconstructed in commercial packages that simply feed the craving for new fashions. This inevitably results in the decontextualisation of the original meaning. The pride and resistance to the forces of cultural domination are virtually liquidated in the process of transformation into commodities. The outcome is simply a variation on the old standard product, the “ever new return of the same” rather than a genuinely new cultural work.
3. To fulfill its accommodating function mass culture has to tread a fine line. It must be familiar but also attractive enough to gain the attention. At the same time, it must induce in its receptors a compliant, passive and uncritical attitude. Thus the products of the culture industry must be carefully constructed and packaged. But this does not mean artistic forming or immanent coherent meaning but a packaging for effect and emotional satisfaction. Typically, this means products that neither challenge nor are divorced from existing social conventions and reality. The aim is to reinforce existing emotional expectations and affirm the reigning interpretations of late bourgeois society. The plots and heroes of film and radio rarely suggest other than identification with existing social roles and values. Popular works follow standardised structures and formulae merely imitating previous commercial successes. The contents of programs, songs, film plots are ceaselessly repeated with only minor variations and interchangeable details. Yet, for the sake of marketing, these products must have the appearance of novelty and originality. The impression has to be maintained that this industry is all about the satisfaction of customer choice and an open market. But as indicated, Adorno, maintains this is a more appearance. In fact, Adorno believes that even the very function of advertising has changed: it no longer fosters competition but serves as a blocking device. With its excessive costs it retards competition and binds consumers to the big brands. In any case, the ultimate result is for Adorno the triumph of predictability. The outcome of a film can be guessed from its opening scenes and characterisation is governed by tried and monotonous conventions. Not only are products increasingly repetitive and standardised: Adorno draws attention to the then novel built in cues for response, Canned laughter and continuous commentary elicit the “correct” responses from the audience. Furthermore, the products of the culture industry also take advantage of modern insight into the multi-dimensionality of the psyche. They address us on various levels playing to our unconscious needs and identifications with the aim of ensnaring the consumer as completely as possible.
4. The functionality which entertainment and distraction of the culture industry serves is the need to reconcile the masses to the drudgery and meaningless of everyday life in the totally administered society. As such it is an index of the truth that people feel oppressed by the lack of control they have over their own lives. The great economic crisis of the 20 's and 30 's created the objective conditions for dependency, which rob individuals of their independence and expose them to manipulation. The great uncertainties of this epoch and its structural tendencies to undermine the economic and social conditions of autonomous individuality have engendered a widespread fear and anxiety about security and employment, which generates ego weakness and neurosis. In these conditions, which systematically undermine real individuality and make it difficult to cope, people take flight in entertainment. It offers respite, relaxation, and relief from the pressures of work with its effort and alienating demands. In this relaxed state, the irrational susceptibilities of the audience are open to manipulation. Here the cultural industry brings its full arsenal to bear to convince contemporary individuals that its dream factory is delivering popular goods and satisfaction when, in reality, everything has been preprogrammed and individuals are merely been assigned their predetermined “needs” and slotted into their pre-assigned places. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the illusion of escaping the everyday world of prosaic life and its demands is, in any case, contradictory. New or reflective experience cannot be derived from these standardized packages and managed leisure. This is the basis of Adorno’s critique of pleasure:
To be pleased means being in agreement: not having to think about it, to forget suffering, even where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It is really flight, only not-- as it asserts—flight from wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance. The liberation which amusement promises is freedom from thought and negation. ( D of E, p)
Mass culture merely reinforces the psychological attitudes that give rise to dependence whereas only real critical reception and intellectual effort (like that of genuine autonomous art) can lead beyond passive dependency and attitudes of resignation. Instead, the culture industry counsels the individual to adjust to the existing social arrangement. In other words, despite its celebration of the individual, it implicitly discourages real difference or resistance and instead counsels reconciliation with existing reality. At the same time, its fake respite from the everyday merely functions to recharge the individual's capacity for continued labor in the totally administered society. Thus, the culture industry not only exploits the passivity arising from the workers objective circumstances but advances this incapacity by creating the particular frame of mind that cultivates the passivity of the mass individual.
5. As mentioned at the outset, Horkheimer and Adorno locate this very critical and negative assessment of modernity as the totally administered society within an even more encompassing critique of historical progress and civilisatory rationality they call the critique of instrumental reason. The central thesis of this cultural critique is a repudiation of the idea of objective progress through a Nietzschian inspired analysis and demasking of the bourgeois concept of reason. The classical Marxist view that assumed man's relation to nature in history unfolded in an emancipatory dynamic creating and liberating human powers and possibilities is inverted in favour of a theory of domination. This finds its roots in the identity logic of instrumental reason--that of subsuming the particular to the general--rationality synonymous with humanity's increasing domination of nature. This once emancipatorally conceived domination is now conceived repressively as the original model of domination from which all later forms are merely derivative. Instead of registering the progressive self-humanisation of the species, social labour signifies the increasing civilisatory need for instinctual sublimation and repression. Man has gained a mastery of nature but this has not been accompanied by a decline in social domination; on the contrary, the latter is only a species of the former. The more complete and rationalised is the contemporary domination of nature, the harder to recognise and the more sophisticated is social domination. Social mastery and repression need not be brutal and can be enticingly subtle as revealed by the culture industry's careful co-option and seduction of the mass individual. In the most provocative terms Horkheimer and Adorno construct a definite nexus between the development of civilisatory rationality and the barbaric domination both of self, others and nature. Whereas Marx wanted to find a specific historical explanation of domination through a structural analysis of the dynamics of bourgeois society, Adorno and Horkheimer view commodity exchange itself as a mere social medium. This extends throughout society a deeper mode of rationality already dominant in the original human project to master nature. Thus in the perspective presented in Dialectic of Enlightenment, class conflict is merely a subordinate mode of human domination of nature. In this perspective, the process of humanity's separation from nature and its conquest of nature as a mere object of domination signifies two things: firstly a distortion of human cognitive interests and secondly a repression of the natural in man. The human species only overcomes the threatening natural environment by abandoning the limits of a merely passive resistance to natural dangers and transforming mimetic reactions into instrumental acts of control. However, in this historical transformation born by the agency of social labour, the natural environment is increasingly objectified and deprived of its sensory richness by an increasingly exclusive cognitive and instrumental appropriation. At the same time, humans must forcibly constrict their sensory experience and discipline their original organic instinctual potential. This is the paradox of the civilisatory process. In order to free ourselves from the domination of nature, we enchain ourselves to a process of increasingly sophisticated social domination. In this process, the subject and the ultimate fruit of the process--humanity -- is deformed, restricted and subordinated into a means. Ultimately it is dominated, repressed, contorted and even destroyed by the very instrument--reason--that was supposed to be its means of its liberation.
