The subtlety of horkheimer and adorno

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Peters, J. D. (2003) The subtlety of horkheimer and adorno: Reading "The Culture Industry". In Katz, E., Peters, J. D., Liebes, T., and Orloff, A. (Eds.), Canonic Text in Media Research (pp. 58-73). Cambridge:Polity.

Argument: Horkheimer and Adorno possess both "utopian" cultural studies and "dystopian" political economy (60)

Contents

"Culture industry" is "misunderstood" (58)

  • Persistent value of core questions:
    • What are cultural and political consequences of media consolidation?
    • How do audiences read?
    • What is the value of the canon?
  • "Raises hackles"
    • "What left-leaning intellectual wants to doubt the wisdom of the people?" (58)
    • Peters suggests that it the text is saying what professors "are most nervous about professing in public"
      • Implying that professors THINK but do not SAY these things?
      • Suggests cynical professors saying terrible things about undergrads behind closed doors
  • A&H's understanding of industry/econonmy and text/culture is "subtler" than that of society/audience. (59)
    • Offering a critique and a hope "against hope" for liberation (from what??)

Barriers to understanding

Dialectic of Enlightenment meant to bethe summa of Frankfurt school critical theory

  • Derived from notes taken by Adorno's wife Gretel Karplus while they lived in Santa Monica (60)
  • An incomplete project
    • 30 years later the cultural studies chapter was published, abridged, in English

DA is an unfamiliar genre?

"Fragment [is a] standard mode" in German philosophy, literature (60)

  • "Not a final vision of the world" (61)

"Travelogue" (61)

  • of the U.S. by European intellectuals

"Dialectic gambits" (61)

  • A style unfamiliar to "Anglo-American readers"
  • Some of which are meant to be "self-evidently absurd", "others to be volleys of truth" (61)
  • Statement may be true / false simultaneously (62)

"An adjustment of sensibility" (62)

  • Compared to Joyce (61)
  • Enough to make a "commonsensical English-speaking reader's head swim" (62)

Argument of the book

  • "Nazism was not an exception, but the conssumation of logics already apparent elsewhere" (62)
  • How did Enlightenment turn into a Fascist holocaust?

Examines analysis of the Odyssey (not part of "Culture Industry")

  • For evidence that high art is not salvation
  • Why wasn't this part of Culture Industry?
  • Why is critique of CI dismissed as "rumor" when the counterevidence isn't even available in the text? (63)
"Overall aim is to explain how the dream of enlightenment backfired: revolutionaries died to make us free, philosophers dreamed of reason, scientists fought calcified ideologies, all so that we could spend our time at the movies. Oh, what a being down!" (63)

The chapter's intellectual lineages

Division of labor

  • Adorno:aesthetics
  • Horkheimer:social science (first author by their intent)

Specific type of Marxism

  • Weber+Marx: Georg Lukács, 1968
  • "More concerned with cynical reason than false consciousness" (64)
    • People are "active agents in their own duping" (64)

Adorno is unfairly treated as a "disdainer of the massess" because he followed Benjamin his "last work" (??) (64)

A redemptive reading

Doom and gloom balanced by an omitted aside that there is an unfinished section concerning "positive" aspects of mass culture. (65)

  • No evidence here or anywhere else ever surfaced

Peters positions Adorno as a "forerunner" of Birmingham cultural studies

  • Based on a single, ambiguous quotation
  • And a kind of proto-polysemy that relies on psychology rather than semiotics

Despite multiple episodes suggesting "mass stupidity", Peters suggests continuing relevance (66)

  • Critique of industrial structures and supply-driven economics
  • Clarification from a later essay, "[Masses are an] appendage of the machinery"
  • Relevant to contemporary media consolidation

Conflation of culture and society

  • "They believe that social conditions simply mimic culural and economic ones" (67)
  • Confusing artifacts and audiences

Not passive audiences, actively duped

  • Lament is not about a lack of activity
  • But "vast expenditures of energy spent on distraction" (67)

"So much for the ... supposedly omnipotent media"

  • Accounting of people sleeping in theaters
  • But no revolutionary quality ascribed to this activity
  • Recognize that audience needs and uses can overwhelm the manifest content of cultural texts
    • "Shared" with Columbia, uses & grats, British cult studies (67)
    • But Where is this evidenced?

High / low arts

"the high and the low are authentic; the middling is a mass of repetition and adjustment" (68)
  • "Crazy ambition" of the culture industry
    • To fuse "light and serious art into something easy"
    • Destroys the "intellectual sublimation" of high forms
    • Destroys the "physical release" of low forms
  • Pop's "sugar high" contrasts with both symphony and carnival (68)
    • They "approve of" the "carnivalesque" and "like folk art"
    • Does Peters NOT think this is condescending?
  • "Escapist entertainment" vs "genuine escape"
    • "A call for intensity in experience of art and culture" (69)

Assessment: what is living and dead in "The Culture Industry"?

Dead

  • Freudian psychological understanding of "repression"
    • e.g. Laughing at slapstick an expression of repressed sadism
    • U.S. audiences could "benefit" from thinking more about the "political dangers of their amusements" (69)

Dead

  • "Single bloc" mass culture: industry + text + audience is "defunct"
    • But (aside) "watch Microsoft"

Dead

  • Canon of high culture
  • See Posnock 1992 for Adorno/Dewey comparison (70)
  • But Peters backs off this, too
    • History of influence
    • Endurance across generations
    • Genuine delight

Live

  • Humor: "like a Lenny Bruce who's read Hegel" (71)
  • Black comedy
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