Adorno on Popular Culture

Robert W. Witkin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134494026
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Robert W. Witkin unpacks Adorno's notoriously difficult critique of popular culture in an engaging and accessible style, looking first at the development of the overarching theories of authority, commodification and negative dialectics. He then goes on to consider Adorno's writing on specific aspects of popular culture such as radio, film and popular music.

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CULTURAL NEMESIS

In the decades since his death, Adorno’s thinking has lost none of its capacity to unsettle the settled, to discomfort those who believe, implicitly or explicitly, that the world can be mastered, or even that they have a secure home in it. Adorno struck out against modern popular culture in all its forms. He spared nothing in his relentless critique. To most people, the comforts at the heart of modern living, the entertainment provided by television, radio, film, newspapers, astrology charts and CD players seem harmless enough. The ‘media’ give pleasure, put people in touch with the wider world, provide amusement, excitement and entertainment, improve the access of all social classes to what were hitherto the cultural goods of the rich, relieve the boredom and loneliness of living alone and so forth. The best of their contents are genuinely ‘popular’. For Adorno, however, this popularity becomes part of the object of criticism. He challenges the notion that the elements of popular culture are harmless. He insists on treating popular culture as a deadly serious business, as something that is ultimately toxic in its effects on the social process. If the defenders of popular culture have not been persuaded by Adorno, they have often been discomforted by him, and his thesis, like a bone in the throat, still commands their attention.

To appreciate the force of Adorno’s critique of popular culture, however, it is necessary to set on one side all those easy judgements to the effect that his is a snobbish reaction to the vulgarity of popular art advanced by a devotee of so-called high art. What Adorno offers is not a judgement of taste but a theory concerning the moral and political projects inhering in both ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ art. It is not even true to say that he was incapable of appreciating any popular culture. He was certainly responsive to the films of Chaplin and to the anarchistic humour of the Marx Brothers. And it is clear from his writings that he kept abreast of developments in the major media – films, radio, television and advertising. The odd comment betrays certain implicit preferences – for the screen personality of Greta Garbo, for example. Nor did Adorno fail to recognize that there were highly skilled and talented artists and musicians working in the culture industries. However, it was not skill or talent that mattered to him, here, but the interests it served and the uses to which it was put.

Adorno took all art – and that includes the art produced by the culture industries – very seriously. Many of his critics regard them less seriously than he does and, to them, his judgements are more likely to seem extreme or unwarranted. He preferred the term ‘culture industry’ and even ‘mass culture’ to that of ‘popular art’ or ‘popular culture’. The latter terms carried a connotation of ‘coming from the people’. The products of the culture industry, in Adorno’s view, did not come from the people, were not an expression of the life-process of individuals or communities but were manufactured and disseminated under conditions that reflected the interests of the producers and the exigencies of the market, both of which demanded the domination and manipulation of mass consciousness. The disparity in power between the individual and the rational-technical monolith of modern capitalism that dominated every waking and sleeping moment was at the heart of his preoccupations. The machinery of this administered world operated to dis-empower those whom it organized. This was true for the individual at work, where the advances of the micro-division of labour were making each individual into a more or less de-skilled and disempowered cog in the machine; it was true, too, for the individual in his leisure time, where the Hollywood dream machine, radio and television, Tin Pan Alley and the music industry, were disempowering him further, rendering him even more conformist and dependent. The entertainment industry directed its appeal to the more regressive features of a collective narcissism. Adorno did not deny that people desired the products of the culture industry. He simply saw that desire as an index of the pathology of modern society, as capitulation to the domination of a total machinery. For the individual to resist this process is difficult. It requires both an appreciation of the fact that it is actually happening and some understanding of how it all works. Today, as Martin Jay has argued, we should perhaps view Adorno’s writings on popular culture as prototypical deconstructions ( Jay 1984).

The theoretical roots of Adorno’s thesis concerning popular culture are as wide as they are deep. He was a sophisticated philosopher, steeped in German idealist philosophy, writing critically about the philosophies of Hegel, Heidegger, Kierkegaard , Husserl, etc. He was a serious musician and composer, a pupil of Alban Berg and a member of the circle of composers and musicians surrounding Arnold Schoenberg. He was a Marxist sociologist (albeit an unorthodox one) and together with Horkheimer and other members of the Frankfurt Institute, developed the critical theory of modern culture along Marxist lines. He was also a student of psychology and a Freudian thinker (again, an unorthodox one) who developed a Freudian analysis of modern character. The strength of his theoretical contribution owes a great deal to the originality with which he traced pathways between the central themes of German idealist philosophy, Marxist sociology and Freudian psychopathology.

Those persistent themes of Adorno’s critique of modern culture – the commodification, fetishization and standardization of its products, together with the authoritarian submissiveness, irrationality, conformity, ego-weakness and dependency behaviour of its recipients – are developed by him in ways that forge tacit links among diverse theoretical sources, making, for example, the theory of ‘commodity fetishism’ from a Marxist point of view continuous with ideas about authoritarianism in a Freudian context. 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 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 own 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.

Alienation

In so-called simple societies, where goods are produced by families and communities in the process of providing for known local needs and for realizing and sustaining a traditional way of life, an individual could see the life-process of his or her community reflected in the goods produced. A pot or a spear in such a society would not appear to consciousness as a thing detached from the social relations involved in its production; those relations – aesthetic, political and religious as well as instrumental – would fill out such objects as their spiritual core.

In Marx’s analysis of capitalism, the objects ‘manufactured’ are commodities. They are not the outcome of any such ‘organic’ social process; they are not the expression or realization of the life-process of genuine ‘communities’ nor of the life-process of the individual labourers whose labour power is utilized for their manufacture (Marx 1986: 31–78). The development of capitalism demands, in the interests of a relentless pursuit of economic efficiency, a progressive de-sociation and de-skilling of labour. The process of production comes to be initiated, ordered and controlled not by the direct producers but by the production system that keeps them employed. Workers become ‘appendages’ to this system, estranged from the product of their labour. They do not choose it, nor does it express their social being. Work is progressively de-skilled and each individual performs routinized, atomized and meaningless tasks at a pace and under conditions s/he does not control. These atomized performances become the elementary particles of a system of production, external to the subject that has garnered to itself all power of initiative, design and control. Finally, workers are estranged from their fellow workers. The organic ties that should bind workers in a genuine process of social cooperation have been destroyed and with them the basis of mutual respect and a spirit of ‘community’.

Fetish-consciousness

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 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. 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. 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 Freudian 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.

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 is demanded of individuals both at work and in leisure. The appeal of the (desociated) 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 in relation to commodities. The consumer submits to the ‘appeal’ of commodities, to the effects they can work upon him as a de-sociated 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.

The psychological correlates of fetish-consciousness are the counterpart of the socio-economic form of capitalist social relations. 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.

In 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. Show business was taken seriously by the masses and its stars fetishized 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 predicatability in the market.

Domination

While Adorno subscribed to Marxist ideas about the economy and about the exploitative relations of capitalism, exploitation in the more limited economic sense is less a key concept for Adorno than is the broader notion of ‘domination’. In his major writings, and especially (with Horkheimer) in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979), he subsumes the exploitation of nature and the exploitation of man by man in the concept of domination. The latter is not restricted in its application to descriptions of modern capitalist societies but is used to categorize social relationships in societies that are neither modern nor capitalist. The formula Adorno resorts to is simple enough. Nature is experienced as overwhelmingly powerful and humankind as weak. In an effort to turn the tables and to dominate nature, society organizes itself as an instrument of domination. It achieves this by taking the principle of domination into its internal relations – man’s domination of man. These antagonistic relations manifest at an ideological level in mythology and in art. Domination takes root in the psyche as fetishized authority; it is built into the psychology – the intra-psychic constitution – of the individual. In its efforts to free itself from the domination of nature, mankind ends up as the victim of its own pursuit of self-mastery.

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 a means–end rationality and brought within a totally 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.

Adorno’s Marxism was unorthodox, even heretical. Antagonistic relations were seen as characteristic of all societies; they were not restricted to capitalist societies but embraced state-socialist and communist societies. Like Weber, Adorno places the emphasis on the development of administrative machineries 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 ideal 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.

Adorno’s structuration model

At the heart of Adorno’s critique of radio, film, jazz, variety theatre and popular culture of all kinds is what he and so many modernist writers and artists of his generation perceived as a crisis of the ‘subject’ and of ‘subjectivity’ in the modern world; the sense, widespread among contemporary intellectuals, of a subjectivity increasingly overwhelmed and absorbed by the all-powerful machinery of the ‘totally administered’ society. 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 a monolithic capitalism rushing headlong towards a totalitarian future. In the totally administered society, the system is master and each individual 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 or 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. 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.

Adorno takes it for granted that the arts, both ‘serious’ and popular, are constitutive elements in the formation of mind and spirit. Such a claim had been a pillar of the German Romantic reaction to the French Enlightenment from the late eighteenth century through to the early twentieth. It was a pivotal element in Adorno’s intellectual heritage and it is key to both his aesthetic theory and his critique of popular culture. The equating of art with knowledge is not meant to suggest that art provides a propositional knowledge of the world. The implication is, rather, that works of art inscribe the condition and experience of the human subject; they constitute an understanding that is at once sensuous, affective and spiritual. To know, in this sense, is to ‘form’ a ‘being’, to become, and is thus is equivalent to the self-understanding and self-development of the subject. His theory effectively polarizes art works, indeed cultural forms generally, by dividing them between two categories, those that speak to the self-formation of the subject and those that undermine any such process. The latter displace the social process of self-formation with a ‘sensationism’ that impacts upon and ‘manipulates’ the consciousness of the subject, thereby reinforcing egoism and narcissism in modern society.

Notwithstanding his style of writing, his dialectical thinking and his sometimes surprising turns of argument, Adorno was profoundly structured and ‘structural’ in his thinking. There is a basic formulation of part–whole relations, a set of fundamental conditions, that recurs in all his discussions of forms and structures, from social systems to musical structures such as the sonata-allegro or the rondo. The state of part–whole relations that Adorno viewed as healthy, was one in which the whole structure – for example, a society or a work of art – develops out of the interactions among its elements. The elements in such a structuration are all open and responsive to each other, changing each other and being changed by each other, thereby giving rise to the totality that is the outcome of these relations and which remains responsive to them. While Adorno’s ideal of freedom rests upon the free and spontaneous movement of the parts – the individuals in a social system or the musical motives in a sonata – it also rests on the responsiveness of the parts or elements to each other, their mutual susceptibility.

These two aspects are inseparable in his approach to structuration. Freedom, in Adorno’s theoretic, is grounded in the sociation of individuals. It is in and through relations with others that the individual develops a substance, a solidity or plenitude. 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 differing 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 s/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. Each individual or element carries within – in its very constitution – a congealed history that is undergoing further development in the present; that is through answering to problems in the present. Congealed history – as an inner ‘suspense’ within each individual – has its own kinetic force, lending direction and tendency, a reflexive project, to the movemen...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• 1 Cultural nemesis
• 2 The theory of pseudo-culture
• 3 The dialectic of enlightenment and the ring of the nibelungen
• 4 The decay of ‘aura’ and the schema of mass culture
• 5 Star power
• 6 Situating music socially
• 7 On popular music
• 8 Adorno’s radio days
• 9 Film and television
• 10 Woody allen’s culture industry
• 11 Walking a critical line home
• References