Lettres Persanes

THEODOR ADORNO

Adorno was a member of the Frankfurt School in interwar Germany. He followed a neo Marxian belief that modern art, media, etc. were controlled by the ruling elites. Any dissenting views articulated in art would be co-opted by the all-encompassing culture industry, which would always prevail.

 I.

Adorno`s specific beliefs:

1)                            All the forces of production are intertwined; a system.

2)                            Out of capitalism comes the concept of the culture industry, which it self grew out of capitalism – a mass culture industry which is non-critical and debasing.

3)                            Adorno (being negative) thought that the masses were systematically manipulated and progressively unable to criticize their society effectively; the culture industry is central.

4)                            To Adorono, the only people left how can still critique Enlightenment ideas, capitalism and the culture industry are the avant-gardes.

5)                            Imminent Critique (Frankfurt School)

a) Contrast the best concept of thing  (e.g., capitalism) with its reality.

b) This is negative dialectics; future reality cannot be better than its concept. In the early 1940s, Adorno and Max Horkheimer elaborated on these principles in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

II.

Adorno was more negative, yet elitist, than Benjamin about the implications of the culture industry and commodity fetishism. The confrontation between Adorno and Horkheimer on the one hand, and Benjamin on the other, “centered not on modernism as such, but the historical meanings to be attached to avant-garde and commercialized “mass” art in capitalist society.” (Lunn, p. 150

Adorno (and Horkheimer) on the culture industry:

1)    Adorno argues the culture industry commodifies and  standardizes all art (music, fashion, etc.) then fools you into thinking it`s “original” (“pseudo-individuality”) in order to sell it.

2)    This prompts change in reception ; in music the calls it “regressive  listening”. This turns down the intellectual response to bourgeois art and regresses the response to that of child because the form of the composition forces you to think this way.

3)    This is a machine culture which mutates and dampens conciousness, destroying critical thinking.

 III

Adorno on the music industry (part of the culture industry) :

1)    Authentic art (as defined by bourgeoisie) has difficulty surviving against capitalism; avant-gardes are chewed up by society and become commodities themselves.

2)    The bourgeoisie constructs a dichotomy of classical, “serious” music vs. light, popular music. Thus, there develops a “flight from banality” (e.g., Schoenberg`s atonal music vs. ever more standardized, imitative forms.)

3)    The “incomprehensibility of the serious form” (e.g., Joyce Lawrence) is in part a reaction by the avant-gardes to the “inescapability of fashion”.

IV.

Criticisms of Adorno:

1)    He concentrates on the educated elite.

2)    He allows some elements of nostalgia to creep into his work.

3)    He gets the relationship between high/mass culture wrong, because pre-capitalist popular culture (e.g., the oral tradition of story telling) was also repetitive in nature.

4)    He concentrates  on cultivating particular emotions on the part of these educated elites. (e.g., does Beethoven fall in love better than the average man on the street? Adorno seems to think so.)

5)    High culture does more than react against mass culture; it draws from it more than Adorno admits.

6)    He`s pretty negative about our chances of breaking out of this hegemonic culture industry. Besides, if hegemony is so all-encompassing, how can he recognize it and outside of it.

Written by Dr Shokrkhah

 In persian