Murphy Shimamoto

Why does Adorno’s analysis of the ‘culture industry’ play such a central part in his analysis of modern societies?

Introduction

The culture industry is central to Adorno’s analysis of modern societies as it stifles one’s capacity to conceive of the good life and stamps onto society a totalitarian homogeneity. This essay will begin by highlighting the core elements of Kant’s understanding of enlightenment, supplemented by arguments from Habermas, in order to contrast the circumstances of enlightenment liberalism from the anti-enlightenment nature of the culture industry. Moving onto Adorno, the essay will examine some of his core works on the topic, proffering and untangling the claims he advances to charge the culture industry with totalitarianism and erasing the good life. The essay will then conclude by considering an ominous adumbration of the culture industry made by Carl Schmitt, whose claims accord with Adorno’s worst anxieties about the industry’s potentialities.

Enlightenment

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another,” (54).¹ So begins Kant’s iconic exhortation addressing the independent individual, imploring him to utilize his own reason and thereby become his own master. It is this use of independent reason which will, when filtered through and refined within the public sphere, enable the continual progress of a state’s laws towards a rational perfection that emancipates the individual from heteronomy. Public use of one’s reason, however, isn’t extended to all persons but rather restricted, in effect, to the bourgeoisie as Kant adds, “The only qualification required by a citizen…is that he must be his own master…and have some property,” (78).² In the liberal Kantian state the citizen acquires a tripartite character consisting of his existence as a human, subject, and citizen. Hence, politically empowered as a citizen who can employ his reason in legislating autonomous laws which are generally applicable to all subjects, the individual, as a human, is liberated to pursue his happiness (i.e. his conception of the good life) within legal bounds.

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas holds up Kant’s understanding as the ultimate theoretical embodiment of the bourgeois liberal public sphere. One of the many virtues of this work is Habermas’s sophisticated account of the public sphere’s decay into a mixed public-private sphere dominated by a culture industry. Essential for Habermas was the trifurcation of the individual.³ Within this order, the individual participated in reasoned debate concerning political questions in the public sphere, sought after professional ends (mainly profit) in the private sphere, and self-realized as an individual in the intimate sphere (through interacting with family, communing with great art, etc.). In Habermas’s analysis this triadic division was to a degree fictitious, as for example economic considerations, which were supposed to be delimited to the private sphere, penetrated very seriously into the intimate and public spheres (impacting how one marries or votes). It was nevertheless a system sufficient to establish a bourgeois order within which bourgeois individuals could self-realize and politically self-emancipate. This division was undone, in large part, by the enfranchisement of economic groups worse-off than the bourgeoisie. These groups, lacking the ability to satisfactorily pursue their own interests on the free market, utilized the power granted to them in the public sphere to create a new legal order which guaranteed certain fundamental economic interests. Habermas describes this transition as, “A series of functions under private control was replaced by status guarantees…bestowed by the social welfare state,” (156).⁴ The public sphere then degenerated into a zone of competing interests decided on by compromise, lobbying, etc. as opposed to rational agreement on a new norm.⁵ This shift introduced private-consumer tactics such as advertisement into not only the public but intimate sphere. Of this new environment, Habermas states, “The bourgeois ideal type assumed that out of the audience-oriented subjectivity’s well-founded interior domain a public sphere would evolve…the latter has turned into a conduit for social forces channeled into…inner space by way of a public sphere…of culture consumption,” (162).⁶

Adorno

Having supplied brief summaries of Kant’s conception of the public sphere and Habermas’s compelling historical study of its transformation, the essay will now turn to Adorno’s analysis of the culture industry.

Adorno asserts that the culture industry makes the consumer, “all the more subservient to his adversary - the absolute power of capitalism,” (120).⁷ Capitalism and all its consequences, such as mechanization, rationalization, and instrumentalization especially in production and consumption, have broken out of the private-economic sphere and trespassed into all the domains of a person’s life. The culture industry is the manifestation of this trend’s incursion into media. Standardization is the culture industry’s dominant feature as it reproduces its superficially different but essentially homogeneous products for the consumer base. The problematic aspects arise because, “the standardized products…do not permit concentrated listening without becoming unbearable to the listeners, the latter are…no longer capable of concentrated listening,” (49).⁸ Adorno is contesting that the unceasing inundation of the selfsame, predictable consumables dulls the consumer’s rational capacities by making him unable to think outside the bounds of capitalistic thought. Whereas, “The bourgeois who wanted to get something out of it tried to establish some rapport with the work,” (160)⁹, for the late capitalist consumer, “No object has inherent value; it is only valuable to the extent that it can be exchanged. The use value of art, its mode of being, is treated as a fetish,” (158).¹⁰ Hence, the utter penetration by capitalistic thinking of the intimate sphere and its main tool of individual self-realization, art/culture. By subverting the means of self-realization, “Individuals have ceased to be themselves and are now merely centers where the general tendencies meet,” (155).¹¹ It is these individuals who have entirely lost the conception of the good life.

“Culture - as that which goes beyond the system of self-preservation of the species - involves an irrevocably critical impulse towards the status quo and all institutions thereof,” (116).¹² According to Adorno, having assured themselves means to life, the following struggle which humans embark upon is that of living the good life, precipitating the emergence of culture. The emancipation from the exigent demands of self-reproduction engenders a process of self-realization. This process, as the assertion of the particular against the general (for Adorno), creates not just culture but its critical impulse. Therefore, “That which legitimately could be called culture attempted, as an expression of suffering and contradiction, to maintain a grasp on the idea of the good life,” (104).¹³ The culture industry’s products, however, are absolutely antithetical to this ‘legitimate culture’. Its standardization is so complete that, “no scope is left for the imagination,” (127).¹⁴ The individual is prevented from communing subjectively with works of art and instead made to consume unreflectively. This elimination of thought, reflection, and imagination from consumed products, “drapes over the idea of the good life as if existing reality were the good life,” (104).¹⁵ The individual in possession of an imaginative faculty truncated by the culture industry becomes incapable of conceptualizing any life beyond that presented by the culture industry. Hence, the elimination of the Kantian human and Habermasian intimate sphere within which free individuals pursue their good life.

The political ramifications of the culture industry brand society with an unmistakably totalitarian character. The culture industry whose standardization of thought has deprived the individual of the capacity to personally conceive of the good life has additionally debilitated him in the public sphere. As, “consumers are made to remain what they are: consumers,” (185)¹⁶, people within society become unable to participate in the public sphere as autonomous individuals and thereby politically self-emancipate. Rather for political questions, they consume media which feeds them information that is unreflectively adopted. Hence, “The lying words of the radio announcer become firmly imprinted on the brain and prevent men from speaking to each other,” (221).¹⁷ The late capitalist consumer, lacking the capacity to autonomously judge for himself because of the culture industry, absorbs the political opinions of whatever media outlet he consumes, an outlet which in itself is established, financed, and run by capitalist enterprises with their own private interests that they pursue in the public sphere. Therefore, the homogenization of society into a standardized mass (or collection of antagonistic masses) by the culture industry, “impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves…the precondition for a democratic society,” (106).¹⁸ The door is thus always open for special interests, monopolists, or a leader to seize the means of communication and keep this unreflective totalized mass in a state of unfreedom and use it to carry out any political agenda it may choose.

Schmitt

Schmitt begins his digression into communication technology with the haunting statement, “with the increasing intensity of the social subordination of the individual and with the changes in communication technology…the idea of the unlimited freedom of the individual becomes a mere fiction,” (206).¹⁹ Schmitt explains this statement by stressing that film is, “only image and mimetic portrayal,” (206)²⁰ which by its mimicry of a perceived unmediated reality carries greater power and force over its viewer than the more clearly subjective forms of expression characteristic to bourgeois liberalism (such as writing, print, etc.). It presents itself as actuality and thus engages the consumer on a basis totally dissimilar to language-based communication which engages with the reader and whose claims appear more open to disagreement and verification. Schmitt sees such media as so problematic that “The state must place it in the services of the existing order, even if it does not have the courage to use it openly as a means of integrating a social-psychological homogeneity,” (207).²¹ Now, further consideration of Schmitt and his views unfortunately cannot be addressed in this essay. The essential factor is that Schmitt’s positive solution to the challenges posed by mimetic media is exactly what Adorno’s analysis identifies as highly problematic. The state²², as determined by a public sphere captured by private interest-pursuit, setting the bounds of what film can represent still perpetuates the standardization of the culture industry. Furthermore, it would prevent the release of anti-status quo films from using this powerful media technique, thereby solidifying the status quo. However, Schmitt’s preferred alternative, use of film to promote homogeneity, would perhaps be the worst of all possible scenarios from Adorno’s point of view as the coercive political mechanism of a state would, through nearly irresistible technology, impose the most complete uniformity on society. Schmitt’s solution is a reminder that the powers of the culture industry can be harnessed not only by private enterprise but also the state²³ which then has the capacity to impose and perpetuate an inescapable totalitarianism within which the personal conception of the good life is inconceivable.

Notes

¹ Kant, Immanuel, and H.B. Nisbet (translator), Kant Political Writings (1970), 1991 edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

² Kant, Kant Political Writings

³ Habermas’s exact divisions can become more complex, but the essay will uphold this simple trinary as the further divisions shouldn’t be relevant to the forthcoming analysis.

⁴ Habermas, Jurgen, and Thomas Burger (translator), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), 2022 reprint (Cambridge: Polity Press)

⁵ According to Habermas, liberal bourgeois rational debate didn't create a just order as the non-bourgeois were excluded and the debate never turned against bourgeois interests which used force to defend them.

⁶ Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

⁷ Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer, and John Cumming (translator), Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), 2016 edition (London: Verso Books)

⁸ Adorno, Theodor, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (1991), (New York: Routledge Classics)

⁹ Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

¹⁰ Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

¹¹ Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

¹² Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture

¹³ Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture

¹⁴ Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture

¹⁵ Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture

¹⁶ Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture

¹⁷ Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

¹⁸ Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture

¹⁹ Schmitt, Carl and Jeffrey Seitzer (translator), Constitutional Theory (1928), 2008 edition (Durham: Duke University Press)

²⁰ Schmitt, Constitutional Theory

²¹ Schmitt, Constitutional Theory

²² Schmitt does not support this type of state.

²³ Something of which Adorno was aware and opposed.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Routledge Classics, 1991.

---, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. 1944. Translated by John Cumming, Verso, 2016.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. 1962. Translated by Thomas Burger, Polity, 2022.

Kant, Immanuel. Kant: Political Writings. 1970. Translated by H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge UP, 1991.

Schmitt, Carl. Constitutional Theory. 1928. Translated by Jeffrey Seitzer, Duke UP, 2008.