Adorno - The Culture Industry

Adorno’s book The Culture Industry (2005) focuses on the idea that the “culture industry commodified and standardised all art” and destroyed all critical thinking (Adorno, 2005: 218). Built on the theories from the Frankfurt school he led, Adorno stresses the implications that mass media can have on humanity, our ideologies and beliefs. Bowie (2006) interprets Adorno’s (2005) understanding of mass culture by suggesting that it is “another part of the apparatus which makes people submit to the imperatives of the economic system” (p.195). Therefore it acts as a financial transaction which individuals are manipulated into believing that engaging with this idea will benefit them in some way.

 More importantly in his chapter “How to look at television” he suggests that “the individual is only a puppet manipulated through social rules” (Adorno, 2005: 164). Therefore the individual has no voice, no sense of originality and are supposedly happy for the media to control them in this manner. He goes on further to discuss the implications of film genres stating that the stereotypical convections of these films integrate certain ideas and beliefs about the realities of life. For instance romance films typically follow the same convections; boy meets girl, they fall in love, then fallout but shortly make up again and live happily ever after. This ‘romantic allusion’ represents what Adorno would describe as society’s manipulated ideology due to the constant wearing of blue and pink spectacles distorting their vision of reality.

Adorno also addresses the problem in relation to television soap operas and reality shows, stating that they seem to work in a mimic fashion as they try and reflect reality, which on the surface appears evident to the audience, however the “hidden messages may be more important than the overt ones” (Adorno, 2005: 164). These hidden messages can be understood first, in a literal sense that these “realistic” shows represent how unrealistic societies tendencies have become; but also on a larger scale as a symbolic message of the effects of the culture industry.

Furthermore Storey (2005) discusses the stereotypical confusion that is made about actors on TV, this is often due to the strong character in which they play. These assumptions made suggest that individuals find it hard to separate fiction from reality as they believe this to be their true identity. An obvious example of this would be a soap villain receiving verbal abuse in the street, as spectators assume this to be a realistic character. Storey (2005) identified that this is something that Bauldrillard would describes as the “dissolution of TV into life, the dissolution of life into TV (p. 135) He points out that society is losing the sense of reality, as reality is now becoming a guise of false-realism.

Adorno exemplifies how mass media is now becoming a form of art, presented artistically and appreciated and admired by its spectators. In stating this he suggests that as a consequence of this, high art has lost respect and is now mimicked in a pastiche style as a result of postmodernist popular culture. This idea of media control is something that is scrutinised in Puig's novel Kiss of the Spider Woman as the character Valentin endlessly challenges his cell mate Valentin about his inability to see the world from a realistic perspective. 

 References

Adorno, T., W. (2005) The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Routledge:  London.

Bowie, A. (2006) Adorno and the Frankfurt School. In: Waugh, P. (eds) An Oxford Guide: Literary Theory and Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Storey, J. (2005) Postmodernism and Popular Culture. In: Sim, S. (eds) The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism. 2^nd edition. Oxon: Routledge.