In the work, “Culture Industry’ Theodor Adorno discusses and analyses the problems of modern culture, its relations to society, and its construction as a separate social institution. Adorno criticizes modern culture unveiling such tendencies as the commodification, fetishization, and standardization of its products, together with the authoritarian submissiveness, irrationality, conformity, ego-weakness, and dependency behavior of its recipients.
Adorno states that modern culture produces standardized goods and services for the masses who passively consume these products. For example, the theory of ‘commodity fetishism’ from a postmodernism point of view continuous with ideas about authoritarianism in a commodification context. It is possible to say that Adorno does not attempt to unify theories, to create some kind of master system that subsumes them all.
That would be a betrayal of his version of the dialectical method. If we liken theoretical systems to an archipelago, then Adorno’s links are the pathways traced by the movement of his thinking as it charts its course between the separate islands. Nevertheless, his restless theoretical work in charting this course effectively develops, albeit tacitly, a unified theory of art and social formation; one that maps the ground between the structuration of social, political, and economic relations and their psychic correlates in the consciousness of individuals (Jay 43).
It is possible to agree with Adorno that it is this radical disjunction between the subject and the objects that are made through him but not by him that is the key factor in the alienation of man from the world of commodities. Marx’s s depiction of alienated consciousness can be referred to Vico’s epistemological principle advanced a century earlier, which proclaimed that the only things of which one can be said to have true knowledge or understanding are those things which one has made oneself.
Capitalism is portrayed by Marx as a system that progressively destroys the individual’s sense of himself as participating in ordering, shaping, and making his world. To that extent, the world is opaque to the subject. “The result for the physiognomy of the culture industry is essentially a mixture of streamlining, photographic hardness and precision on the one hand, and individualistic residues, sentimentality and an already rationally disposed and adapted romanticism on the other” (Adorno 144).
What stands apart from us in our consciousness – what is ‘alien’ – appears self-possessed and sui generis and ceases, as a consequence, to be ‘historical’; it becomes a fetish object. Its qualities and powers are projected onto it by individuals who then submit to them as though they truly were powers originating outside themselves (Witkin, 146). The desire of the individual registers as the power of the object over him, his dependency upon it. From here it is easy to move into the realm of psychopathology and to see, from Adorno’s perspective, that psychoses and even illnesses such as schizophrenia can be assimilated to a discourse of capitalist economic relations and alienation (Witkin, 91).
From a postmodernist point o view, Adorno is right in stating that the system of consumption is no less authoritarian than the system of production. It, too, is not answerable to the subjects whose lives it shapes. Submissiveness and dependency are demanded of individuals both at work and in leisure. The appeal of the (dissociated) fetish-object is always to the de-sociated consumer. It reinforces the narcissism of the individual whose ego-weakness and dependency is a manifestation of the loss of any formative or constructive power about commodities.
The consumer submits to the ‘appeal’ of commodities, to the effects they can work upon him as a dissociated body, but lacks power over them; lacks the power, that is, to express or realize his life-process in them. The object’s gain in power here is the subject’s loss. The subject responds rigidly to fetish objects (stimulus- response fashion) and every response becomes a more or less reliable and predictable reflex (Paddison, 51).
Products are standardized; the response of the consumer to the product is presupposed in the design of the product. It could not be otherwise unless the recipients were to be freely involved in the creation of the product and they are not. Marketization does not encourage self-expression but is its antithesis; it maximizes predictability and repeatability. The system of production thus manipulates and controls the psyches of those who must make it work both as producers and as consumers; as a consequence, the individual ends up disempowered in both domains. n the modern world, the entertainment industry, radio, television, jazz, and popular music as well as film, variety, etc., had become central to everyday life.
Adorno believed that all these media helped to reinforce the regressive and dependent personality (Polanyi and Prosch 82). in terms of postmodernism, show business is taken seriously by the masses and its stars fetishize and ‘hero-worshipped. The repetitive and formulaic character of cultural goods, their utter standardization, makes them more ‘cosy’ and predictable and capable of answering to the individual’s need for security and for meeting the producer’s need for predictability in the market.
Adorno’s ideas correlate with the postmodernist notions that with the development of science and technology and the disenchantment of the world, the principle of domination becomes more or less total. It becomes possible to dream of a purely rational and technical organization of society purged of all non-rational factors. Even subjective desires and needs can be gratified, but only when assimilated to means-end rationality and brought within an instrumental order.
At the extreme, conformity is demanded of all and each individual is rendered maximally dependent and submissive. Intelligence, skill, initiative, and control drain from the life-process of the subject and reappear, transmuted, in the sterile operations of the vast administrative machinery that commands both the working day and the leisured night. “The blending of aesthetics with its residual communicative aspects leads art, as a social phenomenon, not to its rightful position in opposition to alleged artistic snobbism, but rather in a variety of ways to the defense of its baneful social consequences” (Adorno 155).
Adorno emphasizes the development of administrative machinery through which societies seek to exercise their wills. In the age of communist revolutions he had no faith in the view that ‘communist’ societies were anything other than tyrannies; nor did he believe that a working-class revolution was even likely, let alone inevitable, nor that such a revolution, if it occurred, would liberate the world from the totalitarian threat.
The development of the so-called free world led, in his view, in the very opposite direction to that indicated by its ideology. In reality, liberal democracies were subject to an inherent totalizing tendency that was antithetical to the idea of a social order driven from below; an order that is susceptible to its constitutive members who, in turn, are susceptible to each other and to the social whole which they, together, are in the process of forming (Paddison, 86).
Anxiety and doubt about the spiritual well-being of the subject extended to all modern societies, no matter how politically benign they might appear to be. That spark of personal initiative, of spontaneity and expressivity in social life and relations, was being crushed, in the view of these critics, by monolithic capitalism rushing headlong towards a totalitarian future. In the administered society, the system is master and each member is a manipulated cog; every response is programmed by the machine, all is calculated and prefigured, including pleasure.
The direction of determination and force in such a system is from above, from the totality of collectivity and not from below, from the free movement of the elements or individuals themselves. Huxley, Orwell, and others had already imaginatively explored variants of such a future in their famous dystopias (Paddison, 76).
The stark choice confronting those individuals who were still considered to have a choice in late capitalist society was either to resist being assimilated (thereby securing, through critical force, the continued existence of the subject), or to throw in one’s lot with the collective ‘machine’, thereby sacrificing one’s life as an expressive subject in the delusion that identification with the machine would permit one both to escape the threat to oneself that it posed and, vicariously, to share in its power.
In sum, the individual in the sense of an isolated and de-sociated monad lacks all substance, all power of self-determination and self-understanding, and can only be conceived of as a kind of emptiness. A genuine sociality (this is something different from and opposed to certain forms of what might be called false sociality or even pseudo-sociality such as ‘joining in, ‘fashion following or ‘social conformity’) is the defining characteristic of Adorno’s ‘individual’.
Because Adorno’s ideal individual is formed in and through social relations in which he changes others as others change her, the idea of individuation is inseparable from the notion of the historical. At any given point in time, the individual is the precipitate of all the social relations in the past that have gone into its making.
Works Cited
Horkheimer, M. Adorno, Th. The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. Stanford University Press; 1 edition, 2002.
Jay, M. Adorno, London: Fontana, 1984.
Paddison, M. Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Polanyi, M. and Prosch, H. Meaning, Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1975.
Witkin, R. The Intelligence of Feeling, London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1974.
Witkin, R. ‘Why Did Adorno Hate Jazz’, Sociological Theory 18 (2000): 145-70.