Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 10:46:34 -0400 (EDT)
From: Neil McLaughlin <nmclaugh-AT-mcmail.CIS.McMaster.CA>
Subject: Ralph's comments on DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT: THE CULTURE INDUSTRY






Ralph's comments on the culture industry are helpful and insightful.
Personally, I also find the insights about the culture industry have more
staying power than the enlightenment argument.
It seems to me that the culture industry argument is a living argument
today, a useful foil against other ways of thinking about popular culture.
But here is the problem I see that ties into the other thread of recent
discussions.
Ralph is, as usual, very sharp about places where the H and A argument
overplays its hand, misses critical aspects of modern popular culture, or
is insufficantly knowledgeable or grounded in an empirical understanding
of
various culture forms (African-American culture, in particular).
Recent American sociology, in an area sometimes called The New American
Sociology of Culture, has produced an enourmous outpouring of literature
on alternative music, theatre, art ect, as well as empirically grounded
organizational analysis of the political economy of contemporary culture.
This work is methodologically sophisticated in ways that go far beyond
anything produced by the Frankfurt School.
What this literature lacks sometimes is the critical stance and the
ability to stand outside the academic specialization of the sociology of
culture to ask the kinds of questions Ralph is asking.
Overall, where are there places of dissent in contemporary culture, and
where might this link up to movements for social change?
I am on this list partly because the critical theorists asked these
questions sharply in ways that are useful, even if Adorno and Horkheimer
did not finish their lives as radicals asking these kinds of questions,
something Steve Eric Bronner's work reminds us.
But their efforts as empirical researchers of culture are so outdated and
shallow, I
really wonder what the value of their methodological approach is, other
than as an important part of 20th century intellectual history?
Moreover, I do think that task of taking critical positions on culture
today is something best undertaken by those playing the role of
"social
critics" either from within or from outside the modern university.
Academic disciplines or research programs don't perform such a task very
well, because of the nature of modern universities and the dynamics set in
motion by academic competition ( where theory and methods and
specialization by topic tend to crowd out the role of social critic).
Nor did the critical theorists successfully come up with a model of social
critic on culture that keeps one leg in the world of scholarship where
the disciplined empirical study of culture goes on.


So two cheers for the culture industry chapter...


Neil G. McLaughlin     			KTH-620
Associate Professor			McMaster University
Department of Sociology			Hamilton, Ontario
E-mail: nmclaugh-AT-mcmaster.ca		L8S 4M4
Phone (905) 525-9140 Ext. 23611		Canada

On Sun, 20 Jul 2003, Ralph Dumain wrote:

> Paradoxically, the greatness of this chapter, whose subject is generality,
> is in its own generality.  The general principles, whether or not they
> accurately encompass all the particulars of the 1940s, can easily be
> abstracted out of their original social context to be applied to the here
> and now, without anyone skipping a beat.  This chapter could just as well
> have been written the night before last while I was watching "Bernie
> Mac".  What matters most about the culture industry is its systematic
> method of mass production and relentless pursuit of total control.  An
> important nuance should not be lost: the manner in which individuality is
> absorbed into the cultural apparatus whose very design is to smooth out all
> individual characteristics that would jar the system.  Talent scouts and
> competitions feed prospective entertainers into the system whose individual
> characteristics meld with the what the system demands of them (Cummings, p.
> 122).  But to elaborate:
>
>   "In the culture industry the individual is an illusion not merely because
> of the standardization of the means of production. He is tolerated only so
> long as his complete identification with the generality is unquestioned.
> Pseudo individuality is rife: from the standardized jazz improvization to
> the exceptional film star whose hair curls over her eye to demonstrate her
> originality. What is individual is no more than the generality's power to
> stamp the accidental detail so firmly that it is accepted as such. The
> defiant reserve or elegant appearance of the individual on show is
> mass-produced like Yale locks, whose only difference can be measured in
> fractions of millimeters. The peculiarity of the self is a monopoly
> commodity determined by society; it is falsely represented as natural. It
> is no more than the moustache, the French accent, the deep voice of the
> woman of the world, the Lubitsch touch: finger prints on identity cards
> which are otherwise exactly the same, and into which the lives and faces of
> every single person are transformed by the power of the generality. Pseudo
> individuality is the prerequisite for comprehending tragedy and removing
> its poison: only because individuals have ceased to be themselves and are
> now merely centers where the general tendencies meet, is it possible to
> receive them again, whole and entire, into the generality. In this way mass
> culture discloses the fictitious character of the "individual" in the
> bourgeois era, and is merely unjust in boasting on account of this dreary
> harmony of general and particular." [p. 154-5]
>
> We can see this operating on a number of levels.  The requisite for stardom
> is something distinctive about the individual--looks, personality, gesture,
> etc.  This becomes highlighted in the film industry, where distinctive
> individuals--Cary Grant, Bette Davis, etc.--parade across the screen, where
> their star quality is really the message, but not because of any distinct
> thoughts or values of their own but by their virtue of their seamless
> incorporation into an overall ideology and cultural system.  Hence
> generality stamping the accidental detail.  Secondly, as I have just
> mentioned, there is the incorporation of the individual into the
> totalitarian industrial system of culture manufacture stamped by the
> ideology that drives it.  To backtrack to talent scouts, etc., the very
> aspiration to stardom is to submit one's distinctive individual
> characteristics to whatever packaging it takes to sell oneself,
> disregarding anything autonomous about one's objective talent and
> distinctiveness.  This was bad back in the 1940s, but it is worse now, in
> popular music especially: just think of "American Idol" and shudder.
>
> Thirdly, no individual viewpoint or critical thought must be permitted to
> be invoked in the audience.  With one or two exceptions, the modern sitcom
> is the exemplar of this.  Even with the contemporary cynical twist and loss
> of former taboos and sanitizations of reality, the sitcom almost invariably
> reinforces conventional morality and perception, neutralizing all the
> idiosyncrasy, mockery, anarchy, and parody of conventions it otherwise
> unleashes.  (The most significant partial exceptions were also the most
> successful, though: "The Simpsons" and Seinfeld.)  Comedy remains the one
> genre where imagination and critique sometimes enter, but subversive
> perceptions are usually smoothed back into conventional morality.   It is
> now just as bad for the movies, ruled by the blockbuster.  Even movies
> which unleash critique undermine it with the conventional ending: Good Will
> Hunting, Groundhog Day.  ("The Truman Show" skirts the very edge of the
> ambiguity of the performative contradiction that all establishment
> anti-establishment entertainment embodies.)   (See my analysis of
> "Groundhog Day": http://www.autodidactproject.org/my/groundhg.html.  My
> review of "What Dreams May Come" is also pertinent:
> http://www.autodidactproject.org/my/whatdrem.html)
>
> Intermission: while I was out today reading close to the end of the chapter
> on anti-semitism, I somehow lost my entire week's worth of written notes on
> this book.  As I lack time to read it again, I will have to reconstruct the
> rest of my argument from memory.
>
> Another ideological feature of the culture industry named by A & H--which
> (I think) since the 1980s is even more extreme 980s than 60 years ago--is
> the obsession with style, with maintaining the supremacy of a style above
> all individuated content.
>
> Another passing observation they make which is even more true to today:
> that stupidity is stepped up to keep pace with the increase in intelligence.
>
> A & H argue that the culture industry work is organized along the lines of
> an industrial system, leaving no detail out of account or to chance,
> calculating all effects down to the minutest degree.  (Note: A fascinating
> article appeared in THE NEW YORK YORK TIMES as Jay Leno was about to assume
> permanent custodianship of The Tonight Show, which described how each joke
> in each of Jay's monologues was tested and organized down to the smallest
> detail on an assembly line basis, with alternative comebacks planned in
> advance of each possible audience reaction.  While individual stand-up
> comics have to do this sort of thing on their own, the fact that Leno's
> jokes are processed by a highly organized team in this manner is not only
> the result of the talk show format and the ratings game, but registers also
> the hegemonic ideological location that this middle-of-the-road consensus
> brand of comedy as well as its social location in the political & economic
> organization of Hollywood.)  No nook and cranny of stylistic organization
> or audience response is left to itself.
>
> This I think is a central aspect of the analysis of the cultural industry,
> as it operates from the top down in its endeavor to appropriate all the
> concrete details of experience.  As a _tendency_, this is described quite
> effectively by A & H.  However, their argument that this tendency is not
> merely a partially or even mostly instantiated tendency but is completely
> realized in each and every product of popular culture, is an implausible,
> untenable,  and even preposterous claim.  It reflects I think their
> frightened response as European intellectuals to the alien atmosphere of
> American gigantism.  To be fair, H & A are hardly complacent about the
> tradition of European high culture they inherited: they subject it to
> social criticism as well and even suggest, contrary to the accepted wisdom
> that American lags behind Europe, that Europe's cultural institutions
> in  modern capitalist society are archaic compared to the United States.
>
> So while the general mechanisms described in this book are important to
> understand, the book totally fails to convince me once it enters into the
> particulars of its time.  The authors' specific judgements are preemptory
> and off-base: I am unconvinced by a single remark of theirs on Donald Duck,
> Benny Goodman, or a host of other specific examples.  Ultimately, there is
> no accountability for assertions about specific cultural products or the
> general assertion that the general mechanisms of cooptation and control are
> 100% efficacious.  This deficiency of their argument is enabled by a lack
> of empirical specificity on their part.
>
> This is not to reject their negative view of the products of the culture
> industry with the opportunistic celebration of popular culture now in
> vogue.  (This opportunism shows itself, for example, in the simultaneous
> snobbish embrace of European cultural theory and the gullible and racially
> mystified acceptance of the demonstrably degenerate culture of
> hiphop.)  Rather, their methods are useful as a guide to the pernicious
> mechanisms at work now as then, with the twist that the culture industry no
> longer presents its conformist world view by means of the laundering of
> brutal social realities as it did in the 1940s but has successfully
> sublated all the countercultural and protest impulses of the 1960s and '70s
> and has made them part and parcel of the system, to a degree unimaginable a
> quarter century ago.  The repression of individuality, even with the
> breaking of old taboos and the untrammeled display of freakish behavior
> that once was never tolerated, is more extreme now than it ever was, the
> more so because of its cynical premises.
>
> Now back to a general problem with this book, especially the chapters on
> the culture industry and anti-semitism: the attempts to tie all these
> otherwise valuable analyses to the Enlightenment do not work, except under
> the strained analogy with positivism that surfaces here and there.  And as
> usual, the stray remarks on science and mathematics are all wrong.
>
> The most general inadequacy of the book is indicated in its title.  The
> title is incomplete, for the dialectic as I see it is the dialectic of
> enlightenment and something else.  Or perhaps the dialectic of the hidden
> contradictions in Enlightenment thinkers.  But I don't see a true
> dialectical understanding of Enlightenment here.  As I've said, in other
> works A & H show great perspicacity in their grasp of the
> positivism-lebensphilosophie dichotomy.  As I understand D of E so far, I
> believe they got it wrong.  Irrationalism is blamed on the dark side of the
> Enlightenment, but I see it differently: rationalism and irrationalism
> coexist in a contradictory ideological and social totality. Enlightenment
> is only one half of the equation, not an appropriate label for the
> ideological dynamic as a whole.
>
>