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IL NOVECENTO Assignment AVNISH MEHTA (737034) PSSD, Faculty of Design, Politecnico di Milano
La società massmediale: l’industria culturale, i media La critica all’industria culturale : Adorno e Horkheimer, Morin Objective: To understand the idea of "Culture Industry" from the standpoint of Adorno e Horkheimer (A&H) and Edgar Morin's cinematic philosophy in the context of Mass Media of the Cultural Industry.
Methodology: This essay comprises of understanding that has been grasped from the following sequential series of contents : 1. (A&H) Background of the Context - understood in the terms of the textual work, "Dialetic of Enlightenment" Philosophical Context Historical Context 2. (A&H) Background of the Concept understood in the terms of "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" Culture Industry Understanding the Culture Industry 3. (Morin) The Cinema
ADORNO & HORKHEIMER Background of the Context : (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic_of_Enlightenment)
The core textual work of Adorno and Horkheimer, originally in German, from the Frankfurt School of thought concerns towards the failure of Enlightenment by explaining the sociopsychological status quo present at that time. Out of the 5 major sections of the work, whereby explaining thorugh the concept of Enlightenment, they draw towards the issue of Myth and Morality associated with Enlightenment, further reaching to a sample societal study of the role Mass Media plays and recurs its effects on the society. Ranging and basing their theory from an array of disciplines of History, Philosophy, Economics and Human Arts, this is a seminal work which explains our state with the subject in focus , Mass Media culture. The various analyses concern such phenomena as the detachment of science from practical life, formalized morality, the manipulative nature of entertainment culture, and a paranoid behavioral structure, expressed in aggressive anti-Semitism, that marks the limits of enlightenment.The authors perceive a common element in these phenomena, the tendency toward SELF-DESTRUCTION OF THE GUIDING CRITERIA inherent in Enlightenment thought from the beginning. Using historical analyses to elucidate the present, they show, against the background of a prehistory of subjectivity, why the National Socialist terror was not an aberration of modern history but was rooted deeply in the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization. Adorno and Horkheimer see the self-destruction of Western reason as grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the domination of external nature and society. They trace enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, back to its mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth, therefore, are not irreconcilable opposites, but dialectically mediated qualities of both real and intellectual life. "Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology." This paradox is the fundamental thesis of the book. (http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=1103) The work contains: • • • • • •
"The Concept of Enlightenment"; "Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment" "Excursus II: Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality" "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" (in which they prefigure Marshall McLuhan's thesis that "the medium is the message") "Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment" "Notes and Drafts"
Philosophical Context : (Source: http://frankfurtschool.wordpress.com/2008/02/28/summary-dialectic-of-enlightenment/)
Beginning from the concept of Enlightenment which according to Kantian idea leads to liberation from authority, A&H contests this idea alongwith its positivity. They explain against the held belief that Human reason is capable of answering all the questions that the previous authority had answers to, that a rational series of events will lead anyone to same conclusion. Whereby stressing to the fact that an Individual can be empowered by Knowledge to reach Enlightenment to take decisions for his being, and further that he might not need an authority to guide his acts. For A&H, they question whether if we humans really See the World in the Light of OUR Reason? More specifically in the Modern times, not par the post Enlightenment era. They dialiectically reason out looking at our present situation, that if Enlightenment was not a myth then how did we end here in this state of distrust where despite our own reason and rationale we need to be governed by other held authorities or systems. Key Passages: “Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity. Enlightenment’s programs was the disenchantment of the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge” (Adorno, Horkheimer, 1). “Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly matters. Just as it serves all the purposes of the bourgeoisie economy both in factories and on the battlefield, it is at the disposal of entrepreneurs regardless of their origins. Kings control technology no more directly than do merchants: it is as democractic as the economic system with which it evolved. Technology is the essense of this knowledge” (Adorno, Horkheimer, 2). “What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts. Ruthless towards itself, the Enlightenment has eradicated the last remnant of its self-awareness. Only though which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myths”(Adorno, Horkheimer, 2) “The disenchantment of the world means the extripation of animism”(Adorno, Horkheimer, 2). “For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately one, is illusion; modern positivism consigns it to poetry. Unity remains the watchword from Parmenides to Russell. All gods and qualities must be destroyed”(Adorno, Horkheimer, 4-5). “Each human being has been endowed with a self of his or her own, different from all the others, so that it could all the more surely be made the same”(Adorno, Horkheimer, 9). “Humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown”(Adorno, Horkheimer, 11).
Historical Context : (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic_of_Enlightenment) ECONOMIC CONTEXT: Arguing that National Socialism, State Capitalism and Mass Culture cannot be explained by the traditional Critical Theory. Understanding this in economic context would mean, that State Intervention (as present) in the economy had effectively abolished the tension in capitalism between the "relations of production" and "material productive forces of society," a tension which, according to traditional Critical Theory, constituted the primary CONTRADICITION within capitalism. POLITICAL CONTEXT: The market and private property had been replaced by centralized planning and socialized ownership of the means of production, leading to a shift, not of a social revolution, but of Fascism and Totalitarianism. And thus the role of the political system (Authority) does not ensures Freedom or Liberation to the masses, in fact facilitates the existing system of Capitalism (state/private) to worsen the state, exactly against the original intention (of liberation!). Thus re-evaluating the Societal and Individual (self/ego) history, they agree on the Regression of Reason with the rise of National Socialism into something where it originated from in against as a result of historical progress or development.
Background of the Concept : (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry)
Culture Industry : The term coined by critical theorists A&H, arguing in (the chapter) "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," says that Popular Culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods through film, radio and magazines – to manipulate the masses into passivity; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture make people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances. A&H saw this mass-produced culture as a danger to the more difficult High Arts. Culture industries may cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, or genuine happiness. A&H theorised that the phenomenon of mass culture has a political implication, namely that all the many forms of popular culture are a single culture industry whose purpose is to ensure the continued obedience of the masses to market interests. The Theory : The Modern view of Mass culture comprises of a single market place with centralized power of a few multinational corporations controlling production and distribution. And the main protagonist are these authoritative bodies in our society which shape the course of our being through the processes standardization and commodification, whereby creating Objects rather than Subjects. This is a furtherance of annihilation of the individual identity in the name or the sake of collective needs or demands which are not real representative of the Subjective being but entirely Objective being. The culture industry claims to serve the consumers' needs for entertainment, and is delivering what the consumer wants. "[S]tandards were based in the first place on consumers' needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows even stronger." By standardizing these needs, the industry is manipulating the consumers to desire what it produces. The outcome is that mass production feeds a mass market that minimizes the identity and tastes of the individual consumers who are as interchangeable as the products they consume.
The rationale of the theory is to promote the emancipation of the consumer from the tyranny of the producers by inducing the consumer to question Beliefs and Ideologies. Adorno claimed that enlightenment would bring Pluralism and Demystification, much against the standardization and commodification induced by the corruption of the capitalist industry with its exploitative motives.
Understanding the Culture Industry : (Source: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm)
The Present State / The Story: The sociological theory that the loss of the support of objectively established religion, the dissolution of the last remnants of pre-capitalism, together with technological and social differentiation or specialisation, have led to cultural chaos is disproved every day; for culture now impresses the same stamp on everything. Ranging examples from the city infrastructure of housing or the monumental buildings, there is a persistent mundaneness brought by the uniformity in observation of thier aesthetics. They do not invoke differentiation and so is also the case with Media. That the individual unit of dwelling provided to man mirages to provide him liberation, is in actuality making him subservient to the politically empowered powers of Capitalism. The perpetuation of the medium of Mass Culture in effect to their other realms of being are also influenced in similar tones, whereby Identical identities are created which are false impression as against the subjective identity. And thus following this movies and radio should not pretend to be Art. They should coincide to the fact that their present significance has been situated in and as Businesses of Monopolistic nature. And because of this nature they are continous streamliners of rubbish which is a false interpretation of the real needs. The Conflict: The counter arguement sufficing its genuinity states that "because millions participate in it, certain reproduction processes are necessary that inevitably require identical needs in innumerable places to be satisfied with identical goods." "It is further claimed that the standards were based in the first place on consumers’ needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger. " Also the fact that the medium of mass culture, only possible and propoagated through Technology following the rationale of domination, is in the hands of economically dominant players. This has further made the technology of the culture industry no more than an action of achieving Standardization and Mass Production over the thought maintaining the logic of the work and of the social system. And this is not because of any law of its movement but because of its function in today's economy. Followed from the transition of a Telephone to Radio earmarks this deprivation where from an active Subject one succumbs to the passive Object status, where the latter in the name of democratic raking has allowed itself to make all people listeners and authoritatively made the same broadcast function. And this has further not only made the situation this grim but more by taking away the liberty of individual or private broadcasting.
Thereby technology has made a control on out individual consciouness which does not allow us to resist the central control. Such a scenario grims in conjunction and sync to the broadcasting heads who do not allow spontaniety from public and are being the chess heads of the industry. Since they consented on follwoing those terms they have been deemed to be fit there! The opposites in friendship / The Villians: The objective social propoaganda hidden under the subjective purposes of the company directors , who at the same time head the other powerful industries, as against the weaker and dependent Culture monopolies, lead to the diminishing lines between the economy and the technology, where the purpose of one is made loaded to promote on the other. This Unity in culture industry affects our Politics, where "the public is catered with a hierarchical range of mass-produced products of varying quality, thus advancing the rule of complete quantification. Everybody must behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with his previously determined and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product turned out for his type." Consumers in such conditions appear merely as statistics on their research charts divided by their respective income groups into red, green, and blue areas!! The Methodology / The Strategy of Conspiracy: This partnership is so formalised that the critque even follows into discussing the semblance over differentiation in minute ways, following into the perpetuation of their competition. E.g the Chrysler range and General Motors, the Warner Brothers and Metro Goldwyn Mayer productions, all conspire to make even in the presence of innumerable number of differentiating categories, the products to have Uniformity where their culture industry budgets have the slightest relation to factual values over the meanings of the products. The Protagonist - Media: Television aims at a synthesis of radio and film, and is held up only because the alliance of word, image, and music is all the more perfect arising to the identity of a sensuality which is distinctive. This devoids the man with leisure to accept offering from the culture manufacturers, robbing away him with his individual function by schematising things for him. Reflectively in media, specific content of entertainment (the hit songs, stars, and soap operas), are derived from consciousness of the production team and not by the individual, keeping the details interchangeable but the core idea remains similar or same. "The short interval sequence which was effective in a hit song, the hero’s momentary fall from grace (which he accepts as good sport), the rough treatment which the beloved gets from the male star, the latter’s rugged defiance of the spoilt heiress, are, like all the other details, ready-made clichés to be slotted in anywhere; they never do anything more than fulfil the purpose allotted them in the overall plan. Their whole raison d’être is to confirm it by being its constituent parts. As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished, or forgotten. In light music, once the trained ear has heard the first notes of the hit song, it can guess what is coming and feel flattered when it does come. The average length of the short story has to be rigidly adhered to. Even gags, effects, and jokes are calculated like the setting in which they are placed. They are the responsibility of special experts and their narrow range makes it easy for them to be apportioned in the office...."
The Refrain : "The development of the culture industry has led to the predominance of the effect, the obvious touch, and the technical detail over the work itself – which once expressed an idea, but was liquidated together with the idea. When the detail won its freedom, it became rebellious and, in the period from Romanticism to Expressionism, asserted itself as free expression, as a vehicle of protest against the organisation. In music the single harmonic effect obliterated the awareness of form as a whole; in painting the individual colour was stressed at the expense of pictorial composition; and in the novel, psychology became more important than structure. The totality of the culture industry has put an end to this." This exclusive concern with the effects and not the novel 'work' has made it subservient to the established ''formula', inflicting the same effects on the whole as well. And this further devoid the Whole of the relation to the details, most eloquently demonstrated by stories of a successful career where things arraange in order to fit the situation where the details are not in coherence to the order (success). The whole and the parts are alike; there is no antithesis and no connection. This creating the illusion to prevail that the outside world is the straightforward continuation of that presented on the screen. Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. And the array of details provided through these media does not leave room for imagination forcing him to a situation where he is only able to equate it with the reality of his life. An individual as a mass-media consumer should ascribe to the loss of attributes where the objective nature of these product (and specially sound films) are the culprit in the event. The might of industrial society is lodged in men’s minds. Everything down to the last detail is shaped accordingly. In the culture industry thus imitation finally becomes absolute. And the Capitalist production so confines their body and soul, that they fall helpless victims to what is offered them. "The movie-makers distrust any manuscript which is not reassuringly backed by a bestseller. Yet for this very reason there is never-ending talk of ideas, novelty, and surprise, of what is taken for granted but has never existed. Tempo and dynamics serve this trend. Nothing remains as of old; everything has to run incessantly, to keep moving. For only the universal triumph of the rhythm of mechanical production and reproduction promises that nothing changes, and nothing unsuitable will appear." The culture industry can pride itself on having energetically executed the previously clumsy transposition of art into the sphere of consumption. This has become so that the value of arts had diminished in the mass culture, the prevalence of such commodification has devalued the conceot which was held earlier associated withthe pleasure derived from artisitc engagement. Further, "Criticism and respect disappear in the culture industry; the former becomes a mechanical expertise, the latter is succeeded by a shallow cult of leading personalities."
The Final penury : Culture is a paradoxical commodity and it has so blindly been consumed that it can no longer be used. Therefore it amalgamates with advertising. The more meaningless advertising seems to be under a monopoly, the more omnipotent it becomes and the motives are certainly economic. One could certainly live without the culture industry, therefore it necessarily creates too much satiation and apathy. Advertising is its elixir of the culture industry. But it eventually coincides with publicity, which it needs to be enjoyed. In a competitive society, advertising performed the social service of informing the buyer about the market; it made choice easier and helped the unknown but more efficient supplier to dispose of his goods. Far from costing time, it saved it. Today, when the free market is coming to an end, those who control the system are entrenching themselves in it. It strengthens the firm bond between the consumers and the big combines. Only those who can pay the exorbitant rates charged by the advertising agencies, chief of which are the radio networks themselves; that is, only those who are already in a position to do so, or are co-opted by the decision of the banks and industrial capital, can enter the pseudo-market as sellers. The costs of advertising, which finally flow back into the pockets of the combines, make it unnecessary to defeat unwelcome outsiders by laborious competition. They guarantee that power will remain in the same hands – not unlike those economic decisions by which the establishment and running of undertakings is controlled in a totalitarian state. Advertising today is a negative principle, a blocking device: everything that does not bear its stamp is economically suspect. Because the system obliges every product to use advertising, it has permeated the idiom – the “style” – of the culture industry. It has been so victorious that the intials on the top floors of renowned buildings perpetuate its slogan. So much has it lead to the influence of our language that the magic attached to their original signification is under loss. Cited through the American example where, in order to hide the awkward distance between individuals, they call one another “Bob” and “Harry,” as interchangeable team members. This practice reduces relations between human beings to the good fellowship of the sporting community and is a defence against the true kind of relationship. By now, of course, this kind of language is already universal, totalitarian. Conclusion : Today, the culture industry has taken over the civilising inheritance of economy and politics in such a sense that it is questonable in very sense that if it were ever present in the beginning. All are free to do anything they might desire. The most intimate reactions of human beings have been so thoroughly reified that the idea of anything specific to themselves now persists only as an utterly abstract notion: personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odour and emotions. The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.
Summary : In short or crisp sense, following are the core observations and the crux of the dialectic argument: 1. The Interchangeable Cultural Objects : Underlining the fact of the value of a cultural object which is based on its monopolistic rent in the case of an interchangeable context of our society is a factor contributing to its value decline too. And this contrastingly did not appear in the period of late capitalism, however, which in their words can be summarized as under the idea where the Exchange Value replaced the Used Value of those cultural products. Underlining the phenomenon of Fetishism, which makes people judge a product not on the quality of its content but packaging, where the assessment of the value by people is based upon its exchange value, featured by its price or its top 10 ratings etc..This to which they consider as the height of Fetishism. 2. The Repetitive Culture Industry : As illustrated with 1. Music: 'popular' music against 'serious' music where the former is essentially Standardized further to imply Interchangeabiliyt and Substituitability of parts, while the later is characterized by its concrete Totality, where loss of a detail leads to the loss of the whole, where the issue of interchangeability does not feature; 2. Films : Formula of a horror film ; 3. Soap Operas : their substituitable episodes. This Repetition and Standardization, according to them, is a resultant of the Standardization and the Repititve nature of the processes of a monopoly capitalist industry. Thereby, implying to the fact that we cntinue to replicate our nature of Work into our Leisure time tasks, whereby it numbs our independent thinking leading towards a Standardization of the audience. Which further directs towards the idea of Interchangeability of men, the loss of individual identity and furtherance of substituitive potential in our society. Summarisingly, "Both popular culture and its audience suffer a radical loss of significance under late capitalism." (Welty) 3. Role of Technology : Dismissing the role of technology determining the cultural product with standardization (identity of mass culture) , they argue that, Standardization of the cultural product is not a consequence of Mass production delievered by Technology. They underline that Technologies attain power through the Monopolies or Corporations. While they are weak and dependent on Technology, Technology is only a medium which produces and markets the mass culture. 4. Standardization through Isolating effect : Modern communication by having a social + physical isolating effect purports the idea of Standardization by uniformity. This phenomenon illustrated again through 'popular' music which 'promotes the thoughtlessness of the masses or else provides the content of their thought' (Welty) , Adorno with his Distraction Thesis, says that Capitalism with the anxiety (job loss etc.) promotes fear through distraction which syncs in co-relation (of 'non-productive' entertainment) to the need of relaxation as the escape from concentration. Thus, one understands how popular music takes a listener to inattention which can be possible only in the context of anxiety (capitalism). Furthering through his example, he says, Popular music serving an ideological funtion for its listeners has 2 major mass responses: 1. 'rhythmically obedient types', who are susceptible to the masochist adjustment to authoritarian collectivism, while; 2. 'emotional types', who consume to weep (as confession of unhappiness) overtaken by the musical expression of frustration (rather than happiness), leading to reconciliation of their social dependence.
MORIN (http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/books/06/39/edgar_morin.html) According to Morin, Cinema demands Anthropology for its studies relating the methodologies and it is essential to recognize the affect, participation and chance as institutions of cinema which is a structures form of enchantment to be ideally understood and appreciated for its anti-rationalising reason. Morin believed that for a serious investigation into cinema, one needs to reflect back into their personal experience.In fact, he feels the truth of cinema will only be revealed to those who “plunge, without getting lost, into the fundamental contradictions that define cinema” (pp. 216-217). Cinema to him, emerges as supernatural – more real than reality. "Cinema is neither simply a reflection of society nor just another of civilisation’s tools or inventions, like the airplane. Cinema is not to be understood as an epiphenomenon because it never simply supplements, extends, nor mirrors our world. Since it stands at the threshold of both individual consciousness (“imagination”) and engaged interaction (“participation”), cinema reveals a socio-anthropological fact about the human’s relation to the world, according to Morin: “The cinema allows us to see the process of the penetration of man in the world and the inseparable process of the penetration of the world in man” (p. 204).
The astonishment that audiences felt in their first encounters with cinema a century ago is, he argues, only slightly different from the enchantment that cinema brings to viewers today. Repetition is central to cinema’s magnetism even after our hyper-rational culture of modernity influences us today. Morin explores why cinematic replay does not diminish astonishment. Cinema may have its mechanical genesis in replication, duplication, reiteration, but we rarely experience the “objective presence” of the image as a recurrence. In a world where the irrational has been granted centre stage in the arena of politics, the hegemony of the rational may now seem a quaintly 1950s sentiment. Nonetheless, Morin’s attention to the subjective lures of images reveals just how much further we need to go in developing a language that critically engages in the terms of wonderment. Always attentive to the corporeal and affective qualities of motion pictures, Morin speaks to the concerns of recent work; e.g. embodiment and emotion as critical categories, the notion of the ghostly as a means to theorise the cinematic image, an interrogation of the utopian promises of universal participation . For Morin, cinema is a “complex of dream and reality”, or “the product of a dialectic where the objective truth of the image and the subjective participation of the spectator confront and join each other”. He is of the opinion that in reality cinema has a dual nature – both perceptual and participatory.
Morin’s socio-anthropological studies on Cinema demonstrates and represents a key juncture in the intellectual history when it was possible to imagine a methodology uniting four areas of investigation now often studied segregated: 1. theoretical speculation on human subjectivity; 2. observation of affect and participation; 3. historiography and cultural history; 4. empirical data such as audience surveys and other sociological measurements. In spite of refusing Marxist theory and semiotics, Morin offers descriptions in The Cinema that also presage two decades of theories about cinematic subjectivity, including accounts of suture, fetishism, spectacle, and heterogeneity/homogeneity (part-whole relations). When Morin describes cinema’s “omnipresent eye” heralding a new empire of ubiquitous surveillance, rapidly expanding in all directions (p. 205), it is hard not to think of film theory’s adaptation of Michel Foucault’s panopticon. While considering the film spectator ship as a larger and a collective phenomenon,
Metaphors allow Morin to describe the reciprocal relationship of spectator to image, a quality of cinema otherwise hard to analyse or even to access critically. The irreducible “physical” characteristics of cinema – its irrepressible affectiveness, the messy viscosity of its image transfer, its promiscuous flirtations with both the uncanniness of stillness and motion – guarantee that the things cinema represents are “not hardened in their identity” (p. 72). In The Filmology Movement, Lowry has written that for Morin, “the cinema, unlike the photo, does not crystallize the image, allowing it to be an object of fetishism” (p. 117). Here Morin reads the evolution of film aesthetics as a history of perpetual adaptation; cinema is always adjusting itself to the ebbs and flows of spectatorial expectation and subjective needs. He perfected to convey through the transdisciplinary way.