The Culture Industry

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The Culture Industry

• COMU2020 Phil Graham
• Week 7

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Context

• The piece is first published in 1947 following
  WWII.
• Adorno and Horkheimer are German refugees living
  in the US
• Movies have become very sophisticated
• Leni Riefenstahl pioneers the blockbuster
  propaganda technique with Triumph of the Will (cf
  triumph of invested capital p. 124)
• Television is new and has yet to develop its
  genres
• Monopoly of production and distribution becomes
  overt

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Key Points I

• By being industrialised, culture takes on a
  quantitative, formulaic, technologised form. Aims
  at repeatability and predictability.
• All products are therefore alike and exist to
  promote themselves and the system they represent.
  This results in the freedom to choose what is
  always the same (p. 167).
• The industry adopts a technological rationale
  for this, but at the same time claims this is
  done to satisfy the spontaneous wishes of the
  public (pp. 120-122)
• First to notice that audiences are a product of
  media industries. Dallas Smythe realises this
  again in 1981 (Smythe, 1981).

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Key Points II

• Culture becomes mass education interesting
  point
• Culture becomes publicity
• Uses Nazi propaganda to illuminate the amplifying
  aspects of mass media, especially in respect of
  language (that is so not cool)
• Means of assisting free markets to an end
  compares advertising in a competitive market as
  informing people of differences compares this
  with the role advertising in monopoly capitalism
  that of creating false differences.
• Notes the impact on ditributions of power the
  culture industry ensures power remains in the
  same hands (p. 162)

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Politics of culture

• Culture industries provide a dynamic definition
  of what is desirable in people, places,
  thingsDiscourse in general.

2004 1960 1955
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Beauty (?) II

• Mr Universes

1960 1970 2000
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Producing tastes

• The stronger the positions of the culture
  industry become, the more summarily it can deal
  with consumers needs, producing them,
  controlling them, disciplining them, and even
  withdrawing amusement no limits are set to
  cultural progess of this type (p. 144)
• What do you want?
• Answers
• WHY do you want those things?
• WHAT is the the basis of those desires?
• HOW do you know about the objects of your desire?
• WHEN do you want them?
• WHERE do you see youself when and if you have
  these?

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Critique

• The idea that media industries shape desires and
  attitudes is abhorrent to many people.
• This is called media determinism
• That means that the media determine our tastes
  and desires and that we are passive receptacles.
• Is that true?
• If so, why and to what degree?
• If not, why not?

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Political economy of culture

• The diachronic transition from the concrete
  commodity-forms of Marxs day to the more
  abstract cultural commodities of late capitalism
  creates an increased
• immediacy that takes the place of the
  mediated, exchange- value itself. If the
  commodity in general combines exchange- value and
  use value, then the pure use value, whose
  illusion the cultural goods must preserve in a
  completely capitalist society, must be replaced
  by pure exchange-value, which precisely in its
  capacity of exchange-value deceptively takes
  over the function of use value (Adorno, 1991, p.
  34).
• In other words, the culture industries
  facilitate more and more intricate forms of human
  activity to be rendered as part of the labour
  process.

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Conclusions

• The culture industry was a shock to the people
  who noted what was happening at a political
  economic level in the development of mass
  mediations
• This was amplified by the success of propaganda
  campaigns in WWI and WWII
• There is a close relationship between new media,
  culture industries, language, and the meaning of
  being human
• In this sense, it important that, as
  professionals, you create mass communication
  instruments with this in mind.
• There are practical reasons for this, including
  the capacity for creativity, the ethics of labour
  appropriation, and the, owneship of leisure the
  lack of a creative society means the lack of
  creative producers and consumers it can create
  intellectual morbidity.

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References and suggested readings

• Adorno, T. W. (1991). The culture industry
  Selected essays on mass culture. London
  Routledge.
• Carey, J. (1989), Communication as Culture.
  London Routledge
• Smythe, D. (1981). Dependency Road Capitalism,
  Communication, Culture, and Canada. New York
  Ablex
• Hart, K. (2000). The memory bank Money in an
  unequal world. London Profile
• Graham, P. (2000). A Bunch of Notes and Quotes
  III Labour. LNC http//www.cddc.vt.edu/host/lnc/p
  apers/notes3.htm
• Jarvis, S. (1998). Adorno A critical
  introduction. London Polity.