Hello this is Plasticpills on the culture industry. I think this topic was
the first ever request I received for a video, so I do listen. This video was
co-written with Shalon Van Tine more of her work, excellent work, is in the
description below. Roll intro! [Bernie Sanders] We cannot live in a vibrant
democracy unless people get divergent sources of information and have the
opportunity to hear a serious debate about the major issues facing our
country.
Adorno and Horkheimer were Jewish intellectuals who fled Nazi
Germany and moved to California, where they wrote this book. In it, they analyzed
the culture industry of American capitalism--wait think about that
two Jews fled the Holocaust only to dunk on how bleak American culture is. Damn.
Anyway, they co-authored this book discussing how media generates
homogeneity: that is, the same bleak sameness in every product. Mass
production stands in contrast with artisanship which is admittedly less
efficient but goods created by artisans are unique and maintain a sort of "aura"
of the designer or artist, a remnant of human touch. That lasted until art
started to imitate the products of mass production. So now the consumers of these
products are also blandly similar, passive, and unimaginative. What are they
talking about eh? Reboot, sequel, sequel, crossover, spinoff. Anything new
would be risky, too risky, so mass media is essentially stuck on loop. Not all, not
all, but anything that breaks in here just gets looped through every other
aspect of the culture industry.
Adorno and Horkheimer--Adork--diagnose the culture industry as a mechanism of
psychosocial control, and in American capitalism it plays the role of dictator
over taste and opinion. Remember they are talking about dictators when they just
escaped this guy. They write "Real life is
becoming indistinguishable from the movies" and Hollywood films are
responsible for "the stunting of the mass media consumer's power of imagination"--
1940s remember--"the culture industry as a whole has molded man as a type
unfailingly reproduced in every product... not nuanced in any way." Again: 1940s.
That's what Disney was still this--not this. Hey we can wait...
The culture industry stimulates the desire for pleasure, for entertainment, only to defer
it to the next thing; to reboot, sequel, sequel, crossover,
spin-off. Habituation and repetition that resigns subjects to the status quo, lulled
to sleep, as it were, in a flow of products. And it's not just film. Adorno
and Horkheimer started a tradition of studying mass culture as a mechanism for
the maintenance of a status quo, one that continues later in Barthes, Baudrillard,
Jameson and Plasticpills. As with many Marxists in the post-war period where we
get the moniker neo-marxist, Adork were trying to get a handle on why,
despite all the economic contradictions, particularly inequality and alienation,
the public is actually opposed to revolution. They would rather be asleep
as complacent consumers, and really they don't draw much of a distinction between
this, and this. Both are basically technocratic regimes of instrumental
rationality, according to Horkheimer, and oppose the
idea that a better world is possible or worth fighting for. So are they just
elitist culture snobs? Well no, the critique of the culture industry, this
Walmart dreamworld, is not a critique of individuals per se, or even of the pop
culture products themselves. The problem is rather with the
industry that produces them and how their sole purpose is to mass-market
mass-produce products for profit. There's no other human goal to which producers
or even artists aspire. The products of pop culture are not created for the
purpose of artistic or intellectual merit but for the least risky avenue for
making more money--again that's no surprise to anybody. This movie for
example totally redefined what was possible for animation at the time, and
afterwards. See? Look at this. Plus, it almost bankrupted the studio. It's full
of these effects never before even attempted. Some of their animators spent
a full year animating waves and splashes, and anyway, this guy's character
flaws, aside they didn't know if it would work! Compare this to the company who
pumps this out, year after year. These days it's
impossible to imagine them ever taking the risk of a loss, which is why pop
culture is stuck on loop. Still, Adork wrote that all this was the case when
this was on the screen. Just imagine what they'd say about this shlock.
They wanted to figure out how the culture industry stifles revolution. It's exactly
because of the nightmare of fascism that Adorno sought to understand how people
can become dominated by capitalism and what would be required to liberate them from it.
So let's go a bit deeper into Adork's arguments about the culture industry
and pop culture. To clarify: when we say pop culture we don't simply mean
the practices that have been popularized by ordinary people--that's called folk culture.
Rather pop culture is the collection of cultural products that
have been marketed via the mass media, specifically the culture industry; that
is, from the top down. In other words, the cultural products that are created,
marketed, and distributed for mass consumption. The fact that all these
products are produced, advertised and distributed means that ordinary people
only share in the consumption--not in creation. Thus they're pacified by it.
Politics, news, entertainment all follow the same channels in the culture industry.
Though the Internet has disrupted that to a degree.
In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adork sought to explore why the inequality of
capitalism does not spur revolution in America. Capitalist society pumps out
repetitive, unsurprising forms of entertainment to stimulate desire and
make money. It's not concerned with the creation of intellectual or
revolutionary art. I don't know if you know this but art used to matter to some people.
Walter Benjamin, Adorno's mentor, articulated this idea in the Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction which argued that mechanical, factory-like
reproduction of art objects reduces its perceived aesthetic intimacy with
the artist, its "aura", that's what made it special. Advertising replaces the aura and
tries to associate what we now call a brand with the product. The purpose of
art is, or at least could be, according to Adorno is that it shakes you away from
your Walmart dreamworld. If you know anything about art these days it has
become its own cultural industry where the super-rich can park their money as
an investment. Owning the present isn't enough for them so they buy the past as
well. Well played. Everything produced by the culture industry takes on this
polished veneer: bright colors, plastic, and costume, such that any trace of the
real human is erased from art, from music, and from artificially constructed
political personae. For these Marxist humanists you need something really
human to inspire action and you could say that the entire purpose of the culture
industry is to alienate the activity of consumption from every other part of life.
It becomes a frictionless process that then just endlessly reboots itself.
They held out for more when it came to art. In his book on aesthetics, or what
he imagines art could be, Adorno writes:
"Art respects the masses by confronting them as that which they could be rather
than conforming to them in their degraded state.: So Benjamin was somewhat
optimistic about pop culture. The death of the aura, he theorized, might
mean that pop culture had the potential for stimulating real
democratic action. However he committed suicide, rather than being captured by
the Nazis, before he could get to the US, so he never got to see the American
culture industry up close. Adorno and Horkheimer, on the other hand, came to see
the culture industry as a powerful agent in perpetuating capitalism. They write:
"Culture today is infecting everything with sameness. Film, radio, and magazines
form a system. Each branch of culture is unanimous within itself and all are
unanimous together. Even the aesthetic manifestations of political opposites
proclaim the same inflexible rhythm... all mass culture under monopoly is identical.
Films and radio no longer need to present themselves as art. The truth is
that they are no longer anything but business used as an ideology to
legitimize the trash they intentionally produce." I mean damn, that's hard to argue
with. It's hard to argue with that. So besides the obvious examples of
advertising and product placement the culture industry has another function in
the capitalist economy: psychological control. Picture this: after a long day of
alienated wage labor you're tired; not looking for art to challenge you. Instead,
you want to chill to the drone of sports or to the comfortable formulae of
sitcoms or reality TV. These two realms of life, the active producer and the
passive consumer, complement each other perfectly in the maintenance of this
particular status quo. Way back when, bad Santa himself, Karl Marx, addressed this
duality: "What then constitutes the alienation of Labor?
Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the
human brain, and the human heart operates on the individual independently of him--
that is, operates as an alien divine or diabolical activity--so is the worker's
activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his
self. As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active
in his animal functions--eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his
dwelling and in dressing-up etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels
himself to be anything but an animal." So for Marx, labour is essential to being
human. That is creating, having pride in what you do in a day, and having agency
over your own destiny, but since your labour is owned by someone else you have
to act your freedom in your leisure time alone. But for most people leisure time
is basically reduced to consuming, not creating, and "what is animal becomes
human and what is human becomes animal." There's an argument for capitalism that
you've likely heard: that you're free to consume as you wish--but not to create as
you wish, because that requires the privilege of ownership.
Now the culture industry does its best to take that freedom from you too, by
codifying your leisure time, by determining taste, and then only
producing sanctioned forms of entertainment that will not upset or
subvert the status quo. So what Marx called "spontaneous action" becomes
increasingly difficult, if not impossible, so the canned formula of TV works in tandem
with the repetitive drudgery of labour, capitalist labor, in order to prevent
anything like spontaneous action, such as protest, from occurring and it seems to
work! This is why, for the Frankfurt School, capitalism is not just an
economic model but a whole psychology. A friend of Adork--Herbert Marcuse--
explores this psychology in his book Eros and Civilization, where he argues that
freedom and creativity are stifled. He combines Marxist analysis of the
alienation of Labor with a Freudian analysis of how institutional repression
affects our psychology; particularly in which actions or goals we consider
possible to undertake or accomplish. Now I may be repeating myself, fair enough,
but there is a very important point here yet to make: every book I have referenced
so far is over sixty years old, and since then everything about the culture
industry has gotten much, much worse. I know these facts are endlessly trotted
out but check out how amazingly perceptive these
guys were, in the 40s, it's incredible. The culture industry today is monopolized by
these few companies, that's it! 90% of it is owned by five companies!
Virtually all pop culture: TV, movies, advertising, and most importantly news
and politics are filtered through the interests of these companies. So please,
make no mistake, the culture industry is not some amorphous concept-blob invented
by neo-marxists; It's just this! Right here! and you best believe that if you say
you're gonna get money out of politics or break up a media monopoly you're
gonna have this cabal to answer to. [Bernie Sanders] when you have a smaller and
smaller number of large media conglomerates owning and controlling what the American
people see, hear, and read you have a real threat to the kind of democracy that
many of us want this country to be. Alright, let's talk about catharsis,
because it gets worse. Owners don't think we're stupid--they know we're not happy
and they know we're not blind, so the culture industry co-opts our dissatisfaction
with the status quo by incorporating notions of rebellion or
calls for social justice into their products. This is called catharsis and
goes way back to Aristotle's aesthetics... Never mind. Catharsis gives us the sense
that we're participating by feeling the emotions displayed to us in
entertainment even though they aren't our own emotions. Advertising deploys the
sentiments of social justice so that we can feel like consuming products is
participating in those causes, when the roots of those causes are part of the
system maintained by those same owners of production. And thus being entertained
we never have to go so far as to act on them in any way. Hell, I'm not even immune
to that criticism: this platform is owned by the second or third most valuable
corporation to ever exist. So Mark Fisher explored this idea in Capitalist Realism,
which argued that consumer capitalism has become so pervasive in
modern society that even having explicitly anti-capitalist
or pseudo-revolutionary themes in pop culture doesn't affect the ownership
problem in any meaningful way. In fact, it actually reinforces it:
obviously symbols of rebellion don't bother them in any way.
Joker came right out of here and made them a billion dollars. "Capitalist
realism is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the
production of culture but also the regulation of work in education, and
acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action." Okay so
this is gross. In essence the culture industry takes legitimate sentiments
regarding social justice causes or protest and inserts them into the pop
culture products, then sells it back to us! In turn, we once more feel the
cathartic release of having participated in spontaneous action all the way
maintaining the domination of that exact same culture industry.
Calm down.
I did a video a while back on how advertising proffers spiritual or symbolic commodities
like justice, to veil the injustice required to produce such a product in
the first place. You cannot resolve the injustice inherent to a capitalist
economy by consuming more. Film and advertising legitimate social justice
issues as a way to stimulate an emotional connection in order to sell
you movie tickets, shoes, and corn syrup. Wait, go back to Adorno: "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." [Zizek] I already did my duty to
our society it's pure ideology and the culture industry is it engine. Anything
human in us: the desire for change or social justice, our heroes, our villains,
even our fears and anxieties are sold back to us. As Terry Eagleton put it:
"Nothing is more generously inclusive than the commodity, which in its disdain
for distinctions of rank, class, race, and gender will nestle up to anyone at all
provided they have the wherewithal to pay for it."
Social justice is important. Causes are important. But if you buy this thesis
than any cause, call for justice, or campaign that does not advocate for a
change in ownership...it's just PR.
You can do something, or you can do nothing.
Most likely nothing will change either way.
But it could...