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possibility of change is looming in his critical theory that is concerned with how to change the status quo of contemporary democratic society to avoid its degradation to totalitarianism. Although in Adorno’s conception of utopian negativity a utopia world is not yet achieved, there is the possibility of fulfilled reconciliation, which at this specific point reminds us of Kołakowski’s very different vision of reconciliation through redemption. Both thinkers agree on the possibility and necessity of
reconciliation to propel human history toward a better life, a just life – at this juncture both are pertinent to Conrad’s humanitarian vision of a better world based on the root values of human dignity, fidelity and solidarity to redeem the dilemma of modernity.
II. Adorno’s Interrogation of the “Culture Industry”
This section is an analysis of Adorno’s theory of the culture industry as mass deception, and of other critics’ responses to Adorno’s critical theory in which elitist high arts dominate. My connection of Adorno’s interrogation of the “culture industry” of 1930s American society to Conrad’s representation of the technological industry in early twentieth-century Western societies is grounded on the overlapping concept of the “industry” flourishing in modernity. Although this concept is literal in the case of Conrad, while mainly metaphorical in Adorno, they can be linked together by their common traits and impacts upon modern life. Adorno and
Horkheimer recognize the similarities between “industrial and cultural production” in that both share the utilitarian function of social “homogenization and control”
(Kellner 96). The mass deception characteristic of the culture industry is parallel to the “false promises” and “manipulation” in the “economic, political, and social spheres” as the phenomena of modernity (97). Those spheres are included in my inquiry of the dark sides of modern scientific and technological industry as
represented in the context of the fin-de-siecle and early twentieth century in Conrad’s
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novels. The insights of Adorno’s theory of the culture industry come from the historical context of the wartime employment of mass media, in which capitalist manipulation of entertainment industries was aimed to achieve social control, in both Nazi Germany and WWII America (Kellner 99). This historical fact corresponds to the empire’s manipulation of the imperialist ideology of expansion and progress based on modern science and technology to control domestic as well as overseas peoples as contextualized in many of Conrad’s works. As far as the concept of “industry” is concerned, Adorno’s employment of it is confined to the sociological sphere – “It is industrial more in a sociological sense, nothing is manufactured … rather than in the sense of anything really and actually produced by technological rationality” – while my application of it is related to the technical sphere of modernity as the industrial and technological products represented in Conrad’s works (“Culture Industry Reconsidered” 101). My approach here is nonetheless consonant with Adorno’s in the emphasis on the concept’s anti-enlightenment aspect. Adorno’s concern lies in the commodity fetishism in popular culture as a form of mass deception and capitalist manipulation; while I focus on the technological industries’ mastery and consequent destroying of human nature by means of instrumental rationality.
Adorno’s theory of the culture industry is based on the analysis of the “dialectic of enlightenment,” in which the claim to progress and reason is reversed to its
opposite. As already discussed in Section One, Enlightenment has a self-destructive tendency so that its aim of mankind’s emancipation from mythic power only induces a return to myth and new forms of domination. “Enlightenment reason” is a form of repressive rationality based on the “subsumption of the particular under the universal”
so that the intrinsic and particular values of things are suppressed for the sake of the
“self-preservation” of the subject under the guise of universality (Bernstein,
Introduction 5). In the realm of modern capitalist economy as the foundation of the
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culture industry, its operation is also based on “instrumental reason” and the
“self-destruction of Enlightenment,” which sets the importance of universal exchange-value of production above every particular use-value (5). Accordingly, culture is no longer a sanctified terrain of “beauty and truth,” but is regresses to the status of “rationalization, standardization, and conformity” by virtue of the reign of
“instrumental rationality” for utilitarian ends in the capitalist marketplace (Kellner 87).
Adorno contends that the total effect of the culture industry is “anti-enlightenment” in that enlightenment is turned to “progressive technical domination of nature” and the fettering of human consciousness, which has become a form of “mass deception”
(“Culture Industry Reconsidered” 106).
The culture industry is wedded to the capitalist market in search of “business interests” (Kellner 94). Driven by the bourgeois values of capitalist modernity, in the regime of the culture industry “aesthetic truth [is] bound to the expression of the untruth of bourgeois society” (Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture” 77). The autonomy of the work of art is destroyed by the culture industry, which only seeks profit and the further accumulation of capital. When the concept of culture is derailed from “the actual processes of life,” or from praxis, by virtue of the “rise of the bourgeoisie and the Enlightenment,” it is possible to integrate it into the
organization of culture industry calculated to meet the consumers’ needs (Adorno,
“Culture and Administration” 117). In the culture industry “culture” or cultural goods are degraded into “administered culture” or cultural products that are “imposed from above, as instruments of indoctrination and social control” rather than a
facilitator of social “harmonization and emancipation” (Kellner 94). In the age of twentieth-century capitalism, culture and the economy are “reunified” so that the former is subsumed under the logic of commodity and becomes homogenized, standardized, and administered for the sake of social control (Huyssen 21). The
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culture industry dictates a form of life in which the people are obligated to obey authority instead of enjoying a “blissful life”: “The connections of the culture industry are neither guides for a blissful life, nor a new art of moral responsibility, but rather exhortations to toe the line, behind which stand the most powerful interests. The consensus which it propagates strengthens blind, opaque authority” (Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered” 105). The productive process of the culture industry follows the model of factory production “where everything is standardized, streamlined, and coordinated, and planned down to the last detail” (Kellner 96). The meaning of
“industry” in the culture industry lies in its “standardization of the thing itself”
through the “rationalization of distribution techniques” which aims to produce effects of “individual air” – but only results in pseudo-individuality (Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered” 100-1). In short, the culture industry works to produce a society of “totalitarian capitalism,” whose characteristic principles are
“standardization, homogenization, and conformity” (Kellner 96). The progress of culture industry masks the fact of its “eternal sameness” that “has changed just as little as the profit motive itself” (Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture” 100). In this situation of universal standardization and eternal sameness, the customers are trained to “accept existing society as natural” by the culture industry’s “endless repeating and reproducing similar views of the world” as the only and real way of the world (Kellner 98). This explains the culture industry’s appeal to order and
dissemination of norms as its desire to maintain the status quo and the conformity of the consumers to general rules at the expense of their individuality:
The concepts of order which it [the culture industry] hammers into human beings are always those of the status quo. They remain
unquestioned, unanalyzed and undialectically presupposed, even if they no longer have any substance for those who accept them. […]. The power
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of culture industry’s ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness. […]. In products of the culture industry human beings get into trouble so that they can be rescued unharmed, usually by
representatives of a benevolent conflict; and then in empty harmony, they are reconciled with the general, whose demands they had experienced at the outset as irreconcilable with their interests. (Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered” 104-5)
The culture industry’s principles of “exchange and equivalence” are parallel to the nature of fascism which through exertion of instrumental rationality aims at domination by “integration and unification” – a “negative integration of society”
(Bernstein, Introduction 4). Culture thus “assimilated” and “integrated” has reduced every cultural entity, including human beings, to totally objectified commodities: “In so far as culture becomes wholly assimilated and integrated in those petrified relations, human beings are once more debased. Cultural entities typical of the culture
industry are no longer also commodities, they are commodities through and through”
(Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered” 100). The culture industry assumes an
“illusory universality” of aesthetic value, which is “the universality of the homogeneous same, an art which no longer even promises happiness but only provides easy amusement as relief from labour” (Bernstein, Introduction 7). This represents the degradation of the culture industry which produces the “false identity of the general and the particular” in order to subsume the particular and makes
everything the same: “The striking unity of microcosm and macrocosm present men with a model of their culture: the false identity of the general and the particular.
Under monopoly all mass culture is identical” (Adorno and Horkheimer 120). The violence of identity and sameness is formed by virtue of the predominance of the exchange value in the market, which has reduced all products in the culture industry,
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or even industry in general, into a state of uniformity. Through the triumph of this
“subsumptive reason” that seeks “unification” and “accommodation” to the general, the culture industry can thrive on the “schematizing,” “patterning” or “pre-forming”
of all experiences (Bernstein, Introduction 11). “All mass culture is fundamentally adaptation. However, this adaptive character, the monopolistic filter which protects it from any external rays of influence which have not already been safely
accommodated within its reified schema, represents an adjustment to the consumers as well” (Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture” 67). This “adjustment to the consumers” of the culture industry is only a “mass deception” to create an illusion of
“relative autonomy of consciousness” (Bernstein, Introduction 21). This is a process of reification of the consumers by means of “classifying, labeling and organizing”
their consciousness and need so that they can only choose products “freely” as long as the latter are designed for his type: “Everybody must behave (as if spontaneously — in accordance with his previously determined and indexed level, and chose the category of mass product turned out for his type” (Adorno and Horkheimer 123).
While the real fact is that the culture industry does all the schematizing for the consumers that leaves the latter nothing to classify or choose by means of reason (124-5) – a point which is criticized by latter-day critics of popular culture that stress the subversive, mobilizing force of that culture. The consumers of the culture industry can only react “automatically” since the latter has modeled men as a “type”
that can be reproduced to fit in with any specific product (127). Within the market of the culture industry, every individual becomes a “customer” or an “employee,” and is thus reduced to the status of object: “Industry is interested in people merely as customers and employees, and has in fact reduced mankind as a whole and each of its elements to this all-embracing formula” (147). Consequently, “the possibility of becoming a subject in the economy, an entrepreneur or proprietor, has been
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completely liquidated” (153). This is the feature of “pseudo-individuality” produced by the culture industry, which is generated not only by “the standardization of the means of production,” but also by the individual’s “complete identification with the generality” (154). Pseudo-individuality is thereby formed by the “fictitious
character of the ‘individual’ in the bourgeois era, where a “dreary harmony of general and particular” is prevalent – “The individual who supported society bore its
disfiguring mask: seemingly free, he was actually the product of its economic and social apparatus” (155).
Adorno calls the entertainment industry a “culture industry” or “mass culture” is because its products do not come from “below,” or from the people, but are associated with the interests of the power and the market (Witkin 2). In this administered world the individual is like a “dis-skilled and disempowered cog in the machine” which is
“conformist and dependent” by nature (2). All the creative and unique individual qualities based on “personal initiative,” “spontaneity and expressivity” are purged off in this administered world, where everyone and everything is calculated, programmed, and prefigured by machine (6). The “assembly-line character” of the culture
industry itself is affiliated with advertising, both of which are based on the technical effectiveness that turns “technology” into “psycho-technology” to manipulate mass consciousness:
Advertising and culture industry merge technically as well as
economically. In both cases the same thing can be seen in numerable places, and the mechanical repetitions of the same cultural product has come to be the same as that of the propaganda slogan. In both cases the insistent demand for effectiveness makes technology into
psycho-technology, into a procedure for manipulating men. (Adorno and Horkheimer 163)
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By degrees, the culture industry renders people totally helpless and deprived of resistance even in the face of suffering, since they are already “adjusted” to or
“programmed” by the pleasure provided by the mass media: “Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown. It is flight, as is asserted, flight from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance” (144-5).
In contrast to Adorno’s severe criticism of the culture industry for its regression to “anti-enlightenment,” Walter Benjamin entertains an alternative view of popular culture that is against the separation of “authentic art” and “mass culture” (Kellner 87).
While Adorno criticizes the regressive nature of mass culture that contributes to the totalitarian “standardization” and the “loss of aesthetic quality,” Benjamin celebrates mass culture’s loss of “auratic quality” that helps to fill the gap between the culture and the masses and thereby raise the “political consciousness” of the latter (89).
Benjamin’s “aura” generally refers to the authentic quality and “history-soaked image” of artworks that sets a distance between the everyday life and the ritualistic tradition of art (Witkin 50). The “decay of the aura” takes place when art becomes reproducible and multiplied with the advent of modern technology that brings about the “democratization of arts practice” and the “heightened degree of participation by the ‘masses’” (51). This destruction of aura brings art object back to “ordinary consciousness” of “ordinary people” which in turn has mobilized their political awareness (53). In the face of Benjamin’s optimistic vision of the oppositional potential of popular culture, Adorno offers the cases of modern music and film as examples of the regression of the culture industry to totalitarianism and fascism.
Adorno’s interrogation of the culture industry is mainly based on the Institute theory about the former’s tendency of “rationalization,” “reification” and the “resultant decline of the individual” (Kellner 88). Adorno argues that the “overcoming of the
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distance” between the subject and the object would only result in “identification with the aggressor” and a surrendering to the “collective force” of culture industry that might destroy any critical consciousness (Witkin 54). Adorno’s prime examples are mainstream big-band and commercialized jazz and Hollywood films driven by
capitalist market that aim to produce certain “effects” on the psyche of the individual, and thus “disempowers” both producers and customers (12). Adorno and
Horkheimer see the culture industry as the embodiment of the “regression of
enlightenment to ideology” as realized through the “calculation of effectiveness” and the “techniques of production and distribution” (xvi). For example, with the
calculated aim of social conformity and domination, the experience of musical listening “regresses to mere reaction to familiar and standardized formulas” (Kellner 90). Adorno and Horkheimer offer the case of jazz musician playing the familiar tunes of Beethoven’s work as an example of the status of standardized “sameness”
produced by culture industry, which is a kind of “unity of style” degrading into
“stylized barbarity” (128). Adorno particularly emphasizes the necessity of the jazz musician to “[accommodate] himself most efficiently to the team” in order to serve the collective at the expense of the individual (“The Schema of Mass Culture”
88). Accordingly, when people dance to jazz, they cannot enjoy the sensuous pleasure but only wear the standardized “culture-masks” symbolic of “collective power and terror” (Witkin 62). In the case of film, it serves the “commercial”
instead of “cultural” purposes; while its massive financial investments on reproducible technology help exert the power of technology and capital over the individual psyche (63). Another example is the popularity of radio in American society, whose free and widespread use assumes the illusory form of “disinterested and unbiased authority” that is analogous to Fascism (Adorno and Horkheimer 159).
Adorno defends the high position of the “authentic art” as the “preserve of both
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individuality and happiness, as well as a source of critical knowledge” in stark contrast to the utilitarian function of mass culture that only reproduces the “status quo” and encourages the passive personality to accept the world as it is (Kellner 92).
Apart from “commodification” and “integration” characteristic of culture industry, authentic art employs “avant-garde technique” to achieve “shock-value” and “critical, emancipatory effects” (92). Adorno envisions the “de-aesthetization” of art to unmask the “false veils of harmony and beauty” and to reveal “ugliness, dissonance, fragmentation” as the bloody truth of contemporary society which needs to be examined and transformed (Kellner 92) – “Works of art are ascetic and unabashed;
while culture industry is pornographic and prudish” for “it does not sublimate; it represses” (Adorno and Horkheimer 140). The authentic art should maintain the
“discrepancy” of “form and content, within and without, of individual and society”
without the illusory “striving for identity” (131). Instead of seeking for
“abstractness and self-sameness” as mass culture does in a standardized society, authentic art aims for “sensuous individuation” (Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture” 65) – or the “sensuous particularity” excluded by Enlightenment’s instrumental rationality based on the principles of universality and generality (Bernstein, Introduction 6). Adorno’s vision of authentic art in this age of administration and reification would be art that is able to carry truth-value as
embodied in the “coded language of suffering” while “expressing the life-process that had been mutilated by it” in order to transform the existing world (Witkin 9).
Adorno insists on the “autarchy of Culture” that forms a world of “self-sufficiency and internal consistency” and a “distance from the world of practical and mundane experience” (26). Although Adorno endows the Culture of high art with a capital
“C,” in his thought of negative dialectics the Culture has not yet achieved
reconciliation between the individual and society with the desired ends of individual
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freedom (30).
Adorno distinguishes the “authentic art” of high modernism (such as the works of Schoenberg in music and Kafka in literature) from the pseudo-art produced by the culture industry. Calinescu’s analysis of “the avant-garde” and “kitsch” as the prominent phenomena of modernity corresponds to Adorno’s separation of authentic
Adorno distinguishes the “authentic art” of high modernism (such as the works of Schoenberg in music and Kafka in literature) from the pseudo-art produced by the culture industry. Calinescu’s analysis of “the avant-garde” and “kitsch” as the prominent phenomena of modernity corresponds to Adorno’s separation of authentic