Culture Industry

A “coherent positive position” for Adorno and Horkheimer might be comprised of these elements and conditions: 

1.  Less or no uniformity of cultural products and processes and less or no uniform viewing of the products and participation in those processes.

2.  More enthusiasm in and of itself for consideration and integration of cultural products and processes.

3.  More enthusiasm specifically for cultural artifacts and processes other than those which are a/ sometimes offered to us or b/ sometimes delivered to us via coercive tactics or c/ sometimes forced upon us.

4.  Engagement in cultural products and processes that are intellectually and/or aesthetically/stylistically  challenging and that move culture forward or at least somewhere other than where it is corporately-owned, mediated, and controlled. 

5.  Some sort of individuality that is not “as a whole and in every part.”

6.  Use of technology and development/design of technology that harnesses power to engage in challenging cultural products (including some allowance for separation of word, image, & music) and that encourages affordances that are of value to the non-elite.  (This is complicated because they also describe the rise of the technical detail over the work itself.)

7.  Public attitude that is removed from the corporate system and the corporately-held cultural system (via technology?)

8.  Homegrown use of classification systems and homegrown classification systems that support individual culture and definition and valuing of style rather than culture industries.  (Are “informal” classification systems even possible?  If so, I think they’d be seeking such a thing.)  Classification matters, in many more ways than we often consider:  “The explicit and implicit, exoteric and esoteric catalogue of the forbidden and tolerated is so extensive that it not only defines the area of freedom but is all-powerful inside it.  Everything down to the last detail is shaped accordingly.” 

9.  A different valuing of the non-elite’s experiences and knowledge base and products (commercial and artist) produced by the non-elite – which matters to their use of (mass and other) culture’s products and processes.  (I don’t know yet my answer to the obvious question of “different how?”  A valuing of it as ‘worth as much as the elites’ experiences’ doesn’t  change the underlying economic and material conditions that support classism and devaluing of the experience of the non-elite.)  However, “the abolition of educational privilege by the device of clearance sales does not open for the masses the spheres from which they were formerly excluded, but, given existing social conditions, contributes directly to the decay of education and the progress of barbaric meaninglessness.” 

10.  Equality in the relationship between the artist and the patron of his/her art without being defined as an outsider from the patron’s circle.  Perhaps, they’re seeking elimination of the patronage altogether or the conditions that support patronage. 

“Even in the early, prosperous days of business, exchange-value did carry use value as a mere appendix but had developed it as a prerequisite for its own existence; this was socially helpful for works of art. Art exercised some restraint on the bourgeois as long as it cost money. That is now a thing of the past. Now that it has lost every restraint and there is no need to pay any money, the proximity of art to those who are exposed to it completes the alienation and assimilates one to the other under the banner of triumphant objectivity.”

11.  Replacement or elimination of corporate exploitation of our desire to use and receive media from a voyeuristic need or desire.  

“The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu. In front of the appetite stimulated by all those brilliant names and images there is finally set no more than a commendation of the depressing everyday world it sought to escape. Of course works of art were not sexual exhibitions either. However, by representing deprivation as negative, they retracted, as it were, the prostitution of the impulse and rescued by mediation what was denied.” 

12.  Re(re)defining of beauty as (somehow) without mediation and (especially and perhaps therefore) removed from parody. 

13.  They seem to seek the detangling of publicity from enjoyment of culture and cultural products.  (However, they define “publicity” as “advertising” and I’d separate publicity from advertising if I were making their argument.”