Theodor W. Adorno 'The Culture Industry'

This blog entry is looking at Theodor W. Adorno’s essays about mass culture in the book Adorno The Culture Industry (1944). Adorno was hugely influential in this period and was a member of the Frankfurt School who “sought to establish what they termed ‘critical theory’. (p. 189) and according to Bowie (2006) the main premise that “informs Critical Theory’s approaches to modern culture” is to give an impartial report of public occurrences and then for it to be an important factor in altering them. This analysis then endeavours to demonstrate "how it can negatively effect people’s ability to think critically about their actions and evaluations, and suggests ways of thinking about positive alternatives to the existing state of society" (p. 189).

  

In his book Adorno discusses the role of the media and the impact and the effect it has on society and the way we see the world. He endeavours to alert American society that they are being indoctrinated and that they are constructed by the way the media influences the public who then proceed to reproduce or play out the ideas that they see and hear.

Adorno is talking about genres and making a point about romanticism in this article and it is clear he favours individualism when he argues that the work itself once expressed an idea but having a good idea has become secondary to the effects and the technical detail.            

He is saying that it is an appalling thing that the consumer’s, powers of imagination and spontaneity are stunted and that independent, continuous thought is out of the question if the viewer is not to miss the unrelenting rush of facts from the media of the sound film.

In his essay Chapter 6 “How to Look at Television” in the same book, my understanding is that he means that with the relentlessness of television advertising for example we have no mental space whatsoever and we become complicit. He adds that because of the culture industry as a whole we are becoming moulded or controlled by these forms and I believe he is intimating that the mass media is a form of simplified entertainment that could be a type of social control to keep society passive.

In a further chapter of the book Adorno The Culture Industry (1991), Chapter 3 Culture Industry Reconsidered Adorno expresses his concern with a warning:

In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects (p. 106)

Adorno’s is a useful critic when looking at P. K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep as his theories here link and could help the reader understand what Dick is doing.

           

References

Adorno, Theodor W. (1944) Adorno The Culture Industry. London: Routledge.

Bowie, A. (2006) Adorno and the Frankfurt School. In: Waugh, P. Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pope, R. (1998) The English Studies Book: An Introduction to Language, Literature and Culture. 2^nd edition. Oxon: Routledge.