Does mass culture deceive?

Does mass culture deceive? Rebecca Broadbent Does mass culture deceive? Rebecca Broadbent BA (Hons) Philosophical Studies, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2010 My intention in this essay is to critically discuss several of the dominant themes in Adorno’s work, particularly false consciousness of the masses, standardisation and identity thinking in mass culture, and, more generally, manipulation of consciousness in contemporary mass culture. I will demonstrate how domination is inextricably linked with deception and I will also briefly discuss if it is possible for the masses to ever overcome their deception, and rather than culture as manipulating the consciousness of the masses, can culture be seen as redemption?1 Adorno believed contemporary mass culture manipulated consciousness. Products of the culture industry, whether it be fine art or the media in general, were not authentic works which consequently became commodities. Moreover, they were initially produced with the sole intention of being sold. We are unaware of the productive origins of such commodities, and therefore they become fetishised. As Cook writes, ‘Cultural commodities serve as exchangeable information or status symbols’2. Commodities gratify the consumer’s narcissistic needs. Mass psyche is indeed under siege with the deception that we are making free choices, and consequently, the culture industry has resulted in mastery over human nature. Fetishes are standardised commodities: they claim to provide and promote individuality, but yet due to their standardised nature, what they provide is actually pseudo-individualism. Adorno contests, ‘The principle of individuality was always full of contradiction’3: the masses are falsely made to believe they are individual. This is apparent within so-called ‘alternative’ cultures of today: such sub-cultures are not genuinely ‘alternative’ to mass culture, as they become a part of mass culture in 1 The terminology ‘Culture as Manipulation; Culture as Redemption’ is borrowed from Martin Jay. His book, ‘Adorno’ includes a cohesive overview of the themes I intend to explore in this essay, particularly mass culture as deception. (JAY, M (1984) Adorno, Harvard University Press, 1997.) 2 COOK, D (1996) The Culture Industry Revisited, Rowman and Littlefield, 1996, p. 31. 3 ADORNO, T W & HORKHEIMER, M (1972) Dialectic of Enlightenment, Verso, 2010, p. 155. Zipes explores this false sense of individualism in a capitalist society, and writes, ‘For Adorno, the entry fee into any Western capitalist society, if one wanted success, was the surrender of individualism, and art’s role was to manipulate listeners and viewers to identify with stars, to take pleasure from such identification, and to seek power through identification with star commodities.’ (ZIPES, J (1997) Happily Ever After. Fairy Tales, Children and the Culture Industry, Routledge, 1997, p. 113.) 1 Does mass culture deceive? Rebecca Broadbent general. Their originality becomes commercialised, and eventually, commodified. This is standardisation, and Adorno writes about its manifestation in music4. Popular hits for Adorno are just one example of standardised commodities. The deception is that the masses believe they are making free, individual choices. Jay writes of such cultural domination, in which the masses are controlled, which, in effect, is a form of deception; ‘Rather than cultural chaos or anarchy, the current situation was one of tight regimentation and control… [whether it be within] the sado-masochistic core of jazz, he was no less willing to discern the same pathology in the music of Stravinsky… all culture for Adorno, high or low, contained a moment of barbarism.’5 Mass culture deceives us, making us believe we are all individual, where in fact everything is standardised. This is reflected in the products of mass culture, such as art and music.6 Paddison writes, ‘There is a constant demand for the familiar and easily recognisable, and such a mode of listening is actually encouraged by the culture industry’7. With standardisation, mass culture acts as a narcotic; it is pre-accepted, prior to being experienced. It does not resist exploitation.8 However, does this not undermine the average person’s integrity? If the answer is yes, the culture industry has, in effect, done its job. Mass culture, and its fetishised commodities are products of the culture industry. It does not permit true individual freedom. It is about capital 4 In Dialectic of Enlightenment(p. 154), Adorno claims pseudo-individuality is predominantly manifested in jazz music, and this conception is essentially what his critique of jazz is based upon: jazz is merely another reified capitalist commodity. Hutnyk discusses mass popular culture in terms of its relation to ‘capitalist imperatives of profit’ and in the tenor of Adorno, makes an appeal to something away from the reification of capitalism. His book Critique of Exotica; Music, Politics and the Culture Industry makes the suggestion that authenticity in popular culture is in fact possible if cultural forms are hybridized, and cultural fusion takes place. (HUTNYK, J (2000) Critique of Exotica. Music, Politics and the Culture Industry, Pluto Press, 2000) 5 JAY, M (1984) Adorno, Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 119. 6 Jarvis gives a detailed overview of Art, Truth and Ideology in Adorno’s work in JARVIS, S (1998) Adorno; A Critical Introduction, 1998, Polity Press, pp. 90 - 117. 7 PADDISON, M (1996) Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture. Essays on Critical Theory and Music, Kahn & Averill, London, 2004, p. 88. 8 Critical, reflective music by contrast would be that which reveals the deception in the false whole. Therefore the goal of music for Adorno is to reject pre-accepted meanings. For a collection of Adorno’s essays on music, see ADORNO, T W (2002) Essays on Music, selected by Richard Leppert, Translated by Susan H. Gillespie, University of California Press, 2002, particularly On the Contemporary Relationship of Philosophy and Music (pp. 135 - 150) and On the Fetish- Character in Music and the Regression of Listening (pp. 288- 206) 2 Does mass culture deceive? Rebecca Broadbent and profit, therefore domination. The culture industry produces and reproduces works for mass consumption, therefore even dominating free time, and moulds our interests; this is power and domination at work.9 According to Adorno’s socio-historical philosophy of art and music, culture depends on social, material and economic conditions. He writes, ‘No authentic work of art and no true philosophy, according to their very meaning, has ever exhausted itself in itself alone, in its being-in-itself. They have always stood in relation to the actual life-process of society from which they distinguished themselves.’10 Culture is a reflection of social power relations, and as a consequence, the ideology of the dominant class becomes convention and society inherits this false consciousness and ideology.11 False consciousness is reflection of such ideology. Adopting the Marxian conception of false consciousness, Adorno’s argument is that popular cultural forms are a narcotic to keep masses from realising their exploitation. False consciousness eventually becomes convention. The crucial point is that someone has had the power to manipulate consciousness. Adorno writes, ‘The culture industry is not the art of the consumer but rather the projection of 9 Adorno discusses the domination of free time, and writes, ‘The fetishism which thrives in free time, is subject to further social control’ (ADORNO, T (1991) The Culture Industry, Routledge, 2010, p. 191) He mentions Schopenhauer’s notion of the will, that people ‘either suffer from the unfulfilled desires of their blind will, or become bored as soon as these desires are satisfied’. This incessant want for more and continual consumption is precisely what sustains capitalism. Consequently, free time supports capitalism, just as work does, and therefore, ‘Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work’ (Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 137) 10 ADORNO, T W Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 150. 11 Art and media are characterised and produced by the dominant power relations and particular socioeconomic conditions. For Adorno, there is no transcendental vantage point to view art isolated from the social means which produced it: art always is in relation to the life-processes. He was therefore a critic of Kantian subjective taste and Hegelian inter-subjective aesthetics. The critic of culture is always locked within the culture he wishes to critique. The cultural artifact, whether it be the media or an artwork, can only be fully understood in terms of the social relations. This is clearly something Adorno adopted from Marx, who wrote, ‘If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life processes’ (Marx, cited in KOFMAN, S (1973) Camera Obscura of Ideology, translated by Will Straw, The Athlone Press, London, 1998, p. 1.) 3 Does mass culture deceive? Rebecca Broadbent the will of those in control onto their victims. The automatic self-reproduction of the status quo in its established forms is itself an expression of domination.’12 Conventions become embedded into the fabric of mass culture, and such conventions are in fact a manifestation of false consciousness. Furthermore, ‘No one demands the subjective justification of the conventions’13 and Adorno criticises this employment of conventions in mass cultural art forms. In On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening, he writes, ‘the current musical consciousness of the masses can scarcely be called Dionysian’14. Art no longer gives us guidance on how to live.15Art has become standardised and culture is merely another commodity16. False consciousness is a sign of the masses being controlled and therefore deceived. The culture industry is sustained by capitalism17. Capitalism sustains itself by domination of free time. Adorno writes, ‘The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object’18. ‘Needs’ are handed to us by ideology, in order to sustain capitalism and the culture industry. Capitalism amplifies problems and provides solutions- at a cost. The culture industry is a tool of capitalism. Adorno writes; 12 ADORNO, T (1991) The Culture Industry, Routledge, 2010, p. 185. Ibid., p. 29. 14 Ibid., p. 29. 15 Here, Adorno’s thought can be aligned with the thought of Heidegger, who also criticised art in the modern paradigm in The Origin of the Work of Art, for the same reason that art no longer gives man guidance on how to live. 16 This is Commodity fetishism, and is derived from the Marxist concept of a product of human labour becoming ‘phantasmagorical’ in that the labour that went into creating the product is concealed. This quality is a product of the alienation we experience from the commodity, exposing our unconsciousness of the relations of production embedded within the fetish object. For Adorno, the commodity fetish distorts consciousness. In Marxist terminology, the fetish object’s exchange value has become reified into a characteristic of the commodity itself. This is apparent today in the world of advertising we live in. Advertising gives us pseudo-needs: we are deceived in thinking we actually desire things which we may not have wanted otherwise. Advertising is needed to sustain capitalism. We are given these false desires in order to consume products of the culture industry. In terms of art and other cultural artifacts, such as music (which Adorno wrote at length about), despite our intuition that music somehow transcends empirical reality, for Adorno, it is in fact a reflection of the socio-economic conditions of the time, and is dominated by the logic of capitalism and the culture industry. 17 Featherstone has an interesting discussion of capitalism as a direct consequence of the Enlightenment and the application of science and technology in FEATHERSTONE, M (1995) Undoing Culture. Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity, Sage Publications, 2000, pp. 72-85. 18 ADORNO, T (1991) The Culture Industry, Routledge, 2010, p. 99. 13 4 Does mass culture deceive? Rebecca Broadbent ‘Behaviour patterns are shamelessly conformist… prescribed fun which is supplied… by the culture industry… The phrase, the world wants to be deceived has become truer than had ever been intended…. It guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their eyes shut and voice approval… knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without admitting it they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all.’19 Within the culture industry, we inherit false needs given to us by the ideology. The culture industry gives us false and pseudo-needs by the power of advertising, thus manipulating our true needs. Mass culture is directed towards mass consumption by means of entertainment through industry, technology20, mass production and marketing. Consequently, we are never truly satisfied. This is pseudo-fulfilment; ‘The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises’21. If we had been free of false consciousness, our needs would be different Adorno claims. He continues to argue; ‘The principle dictates that he should be shown all his needs as capable of fulfilment, but that those needs should be so predetermined that he feels himself to be the eternal consumer, the object of the culture industry. Not only does it make him believe that the deception it practices is satisfaction, but it goes further and implies that, what ever the state of affairs, he must put up with what is offered’22 Adorno adopts aspects of Freudian theory to explain in a sense why capitalism has triumphed23. For Adorno, it is due to the ‘the promotion and exploitation of the 19 Ibid., p. 103. The infiltration of technology in Western capitalist society effectively aestheticises every day life and transforms reality into images. This ‘hyper-reality’ is a notion which Baudrillard explores. 21 ADORNO, T W & HORKHEIMER, M (1972) Dialectic of Enlightenment, Verso, 2010, p. 139. 22 Ibid., p. 142 23 Cook has an in-depth discussion of Adorno’s ‘Freudo-Marxist Paradigm’. She reads Adorno’s notion of the culture industry as something which works on a deep psychological level, which ‘reinforces the narcissism… symptomatic of individuals under late capitalism… lacking sufficient ego autonomy, narcissistic individuals are virtually defenceless against the culture industry’s libidinal charged techniques’ (COOK, D (1996) The Culture Industry Revisited, Rowman and Littlefield, 1996, 20 5 Does mass culture deceive? Rebecca Broadbent ego-weakness’24. Adorno explores this further in How To Look at Television: ‘This rigid institutionalization transforms modern mass culture into a medium of undreamed psychological control’25. People are hypnotised by the culture industry’s ideology, and as a result, conformity replaces consciousness. Mass culture essentially deceives us, and it is this deception, this inherited false consciousness which enables the culture industry and in effect capitalism to sustain itself. Adorno writes, ‘The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them’26. This is the open deception. But is there any real alternative to mass culture? Everything even sub-cultures are commercialised- but is this necessarily a bad thing? The culture industry deceives the masses, but also there is no other option but this deception, as anything that isn’t the status quo is not widely available. The ultimate result of the culture industry is deception. It is the opposite of enlightenment;‘The effect of the culture industry is one of anti-enlightenment... Enlightenment… becomes mass deception and is turned into a means for fettering consciousness.’27 In Dialectic of Enlightenment, the essential claim is that although Reason, the Enlightenment’s great ideal, brought material and moral progress, the use and abuse of nature has lead to crisis: reason and mastery over nature has resulted in violence p. 2) The culture industry is therefore a culture of narcissism, and this is apparent with the infiltration of photography in the mass media which fuels vanity. With mass media we are made to believe the lifestyles of the rich and famous is within reach. This is a deception. Capitalism promises to fulfil us, but never does. 24 ADORNO, T (1991) The Culture Industry, Routledge, 2010, p. 105. Adorno attributes Freudian psychology to such ego-weakness. 25 ADORNO, T (1991) The Culture Industry, Routledge, 2010, p. 160. 26 ADORNO, T W & HORKHEIMER, M (1972) Dialectic of Enlightenment, Verso, 2010, p. 167. 27 ADORNO, T (1991) The Culture Industry, Routledge, 2010, p. 106. The failure of enlightenment, that the masses are controlled and deceived, is something which preoccupies Adorno in other areas of his work. In his Aesthetics of Music, Adorno makes the link between Enlightenment and the crisis of modernity. He conceives such crisis as the breakdown of established meanings, and consequently, art, music and culture in general has suffered. Adorno’s aesthetic theory goes beyond the scope of this essay, however the relevant point to make is that the commodification and felicitation of artparticularly music, is due to the culture industry, in which music’s function has changed, and is now about exchange value. It is the task of Critical Theory and critical philosophical aesthetics to interpret the fragments of modernism. Paddison has an in depth analysis of the autonomy character of music and its social content, the social function of music and its commodity character and the fetish character of music in PADDISON, M (1993) Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, Cambridge University Press, 1993. 6 Does mass culture deceive? Rebecca Broadbent against the particular. This is identity thinking, and for Adorno and Horkeimer, this Enlightenment is a disaster. The knowledge gained from man’s liberation becomes synonymous with power, and is only used to dominate other men. Reason, to not be deceived, should have lead to a world of universal justice. Instead, the Absolute is used to suppress and deceive. The themes of standardisation28, the critique of idealism and the notion that the masses are openly deceived can be summarised in the following passage from Dialectic of Enlightenment; ‘The striking unity of microcosm and macrocosm presents men with a model of their culture: the false identity of the general and the particular. Under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through. The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish the deliberately produce.’29 Adorno argues that Kant refigures what Hollywood does in the very process of production. At the heart of this idealism is control and power, and norms are generated. The Hollywood industry pre-censors images according to the norm of the understanding which will later govern their apprehension. From this, Adorno comes to the conclusion that the fundaments of Kantian schema are the same within the processes at work in capitalist production: when we watch something it has already been pre-moulded for us. We are continually predicating categories to subject, and the deception is revealed when one asks, who in capitalist society decides how predicates are ascribed to subjects? Capitalism therefore becomes akin to Kantian consciousness, generating norms and conventions, ordering the space around us and shaping how we see the world, similar to Kant’s Transcendental Deduction, which explains how the mind applies categories which shape reality. Similarly, our consciousness is reified due to 28 Technology has become a new for of ideology for Adorno and is responsible for the standardization of products of the culture industry. Heidegger also looked at technology with contempt; see The Question Concerning Technology. 29 ADORNO, T W & HORKHEIMER, M (1972) Dialectic of Enlightenment, Verso, 2010, p.121. 7 Does mass culture deceive? Rebecca Broadbent the capitalist categories shaping (and distorting) the way we see the world, by conditioning our consciousness. This is a deception and a form of domination. Adorno’s claim is that the goal of capitalism is to send critical faculties of the masses to sleep, therefore, consciousness has become reified. Mass culture undermines and infiltrates our true nature, thereby distorting our consciousness. Capitalism has seeped its way into our consciousness. Adorno claims, ‘In accordance with the predominant social tendency, the integrity of the mind becomes a fiction’30. Perhaps there is total reification. May be we are totally deceived and immersed in false consciousness, however there is no privileged reasoning point or vantage position for us to stand from and realise this. With Adorno‘s criticism of idealism comes the problem of reification. In social systems, the particular is damaged by forcibly subjugating it under the concept, to control a particular. This is Identity Thinking, and essentially holds that language itself is riddled with domination. Identity thinking violates and dominates the particular, thereby deceiving the masses. Adorno writes, ‘Culture has become ideological… The illusory importance and autonomy of private life conceals the fact that private life drags on only as an appendage of the social process. Life transforms itself into the ideology of reification- a death mask… the most powerful interests realize themselves.’31 Whereas Kantian categories enable the subject to form the world, capitalist categories distort and dominate the world. ‘The culture industry has its ontology, a scaffolding of rigidly conservative basic categories’32, yet the masses are unaware of their deception. Adorno’s notion of identity thinking coincides with his theory of reification, in which a mental idea is reified into a tangible object. Consequently, status and values are ascribed to the object and it becomes a part of our judgement and language33. The 30 ADORNO, T W Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 148. 31 Ibid., p. 158. 32 ADORNO, T (1991) The Culture Industry, Routledge, 2010, p. 100. 33 The relation between the universal and particular; what interests Adorno is the fact that concepts refer to objects in the sense of referring to the ideal conditions of the object. The universal concept is 8 Does mass culture deceive? Rebecca Broadbent issue at stake here is that someone has had the power to join predicates with objects, and, in essence, to deceive us. This is false consciousness. In Marxist terms, to reify something is to fetishize it. Reification makes the existential model of authenticity impossible: we cannot distinguish between the authentic and inauthentic, as all is commodity. Adorno believed the consciousness of the masses was reified; they can not see the truth about their exploitation. Both false consciousness and identity thinking are epitomised by the commodity form. For Adorno, the alternative to Identity Thinking, and therefore the way to overcome our deception is Non- Identity Thinking. In such a system, the concept would be revealed as more than what is predicated and would consequently liberate the masses by showing the object as it is by revealing the non- identity between the universal concept predicated of a particular object.34 To conclude, although Adorno ultimately believes mass culture does in fact deceive, his aesthetics of music however gives hope for the possibility of authentic ‘critical music’.35 Adorno believes Critical Theory is the key to realising our deception. With Critical Theory, we do not only understand the objective social and historical context of the object, but the relation between the individual and society embedded within the concept. Critical Theories aim to expose contradiction, to liberate us from false consciousness, critiquing ideology of the power relations frozen in objective theories. Bibliography predicated towards particulars, being asserted to x as the conditions of its ideal existence- the utopian function of identifying- identifying universal with particular ideally. The problem is the concept cannot identify the true object- there is distortion at work. To make a judgement requires a universal concept, through rational identity, we arrive at the utopian notion- the condition reached when the concept would really be identical with the object. But for Adorno all we see is the non-identity in the concept’s application. 34 Adorno is not saying we can know the object-in-itself, but is asking how we connect predicates to subjects, universal concepts to particulars. Adorno is dubious of Heidegger’s ontological reality to claims: power distorts language. 35 There are certain postmodern thinkers who hold different positions. Vattimo, for example, believes the modern society is heterogeneous rather than homogenous, therefore gives us more freedom and choices. Similarly, Habermas is sympathetic towards the Historical Hermeneutic disciplines, and is aware that, despite being engaged in conversation, we are ultimately locked within our own horizon of meaning. Our interests are not naïve, they have their own horizon of meaning conditioned by our own normative framework. To understand our own consciousness, we must hermeneutically uncover why we hold certain values and in a way, justify our axiological framework. 9 Does mass culture deceive? Rebecca Broadbent ADORNO, T W (1967) Prisms, translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber, Neville Spearman, 1967. ADORNO, T W & HORKHEIMER, M (1972) Dialectic of Enlightenment, Verso, 2010. ADORNO, T W (1948) Philosophy of Modern Music, translated by Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Bloomster, Sheed & Ward, London, 1973. ADORNO, T W (1993) Beethoven. The Philosophy of Music. Fragments and Texts, edited by Rolf Tiedermann, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Polity Press, 1998. 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