Brian O. Sheppard's quotes from Adorno:
> "In our drafts we spoke of 'mass culture'. We
> replaced that expression with 'culture industry' in order to exclude
> from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that it
> is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from
> the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art. From
> the latter the culture industry must be distinguished in the extreme.
> The culture industry fuses the old and familiar into a new quality. In
> all its branches, products which are tailored for consumption by
> masses, and which to a great extent determine the nature of that
> consumption, are manufactured more or less according to plan."
Thus anything that can be understood as "genuinely" popular culture must be distinguished from "the culture industry" (the industrialisation of culture) in order for the idea to work. Adorno is directly referring here to ideas of popular culture like the one Yoshie cited, where popular means emerging directly from "the people". Two problems: first, say you distinguished soccer/football as a community game from soccer as a profit-making industry for which the game does not involve the people but the production and mass- dissemination of elite "stars", well this clearly and in practice doesn't stop it being part of or the ground for "community", and even games that aruse spontaneously can remain connected in all sorts of ways to the game as an industry (I'm not saying distinctions can't be made, but it's not a neat or, as A wants, distinguishable in the extreme). Second, when Adorno actually comes to talk about what opposes, defies, exceeds, resists, is other than, mass culture, he will never talk about something like soccer/football (though it seems to fit), he will talk about "Art", and any opposition between art and culture industries or equation of art and popular culture is extremely difficult.
> "The total effect of the culture industry is one of anti-enlightenment, in
> which, as Horkheimer and I have noted, enlightenment, that is the
> progressive technical domination of nature, becomes mass deception and is
> turned into a means for fettering consciousness. It impedes the
> development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide
> consciously for themselves.
What matters for A&H -- and I'll concede that the abstracting of this chapter from _The Dialectic of Enlightenment_ does not really do the main concerns of the text justice -- is less the commercial production of culture, and it would be more stupid than they are to pretend culture was never commercial before the emergence of what they understand to be "mass culture", than the commodification of how culture is received. their concern then is chiefly that the industrialisation of culture builds into cultural products the kinds of pleasures and desires which will demand their repetition -- if it homogenises culture, and in some senses it does, this is less the case and less important than the homogenisation of the subjectivities which consume them. Two problems: first, they have a weird distinction going between cultural forms and cultural "consumption", which allows them to see Art as a privileged field and not be able to talk easily about any cultural forms in which there's no clear dichotomy between an "artist" and those appreciate their "art" (the whole Kant thing comes in here). Second, it doesn't take much to notice that even the cultural consumption which best fits their argument, say their examples of pop music industries, film, or makeup, are consumed very differently in different places and at different times. The last is important because the detachment of culture from any social/historical context is one of the most important charges in this attack. So, while it's true that when my students are stunned by jazz=pop music, and this is because they do not belong to the social context in which jazz was that kind of popular music, this itself refutes A's claims. If he was right, degraded, pre-consumed pop music would always be that, regardless of changes to the popular field of music, and their could be no such thing as popular "art" music -- the kind of taste-context in which jazz is commercially successful today.
> "These, however, would be the precondition for a democratic society which
> needs adults who have come of age in order to sustain itself and develop.
> If the masses have been unjustly reviled from above as masses, the
> culture industry is not among the least responsible for making them into
> masses and then despising them, while obstructing the emancipation" of
> humans.
I love going on about this one, but this post is long enough (believe me, the other one was longer). Must do other thigns now.
Catherine
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