Sunday, September 12, 2004
(11:18 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Culture Industry
From the back of the lovely Routledge edition of The Culture Industry, a collection of Adorno's essays critiquing mass culture:The creation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory in the 1920s saw the birth of some of the most exciting and challenging writings of the 20th century. It is out of this background that the great critic Theodor Adorno emerged. His finest essays are collected here, offering the reader unparalleld insights into Adorno's thoughts on culture. He argues that the culture industry commodified and standardised all art. In turn this suffocated individuality and destroyed critical thinking. At the time, Adorno was accused by his many detractors of everything from overreaction to deranged hysteria. In today's world, where even the least cynical of consumers is aware of the influence of the media, Adorno's work takes on a more immediate significance. The Culture Industry is an unrivalled indictment of the banality of mass culture.I only know Adorno at second hand as of yet, but that paragraph is -- a triumph. The emergence of a document such as The Culture Industry, promoted by such a paragraph, must form the basis of any future critique of the culture industry.
As with the promotional materials of every book of "continental thought," we have the suggestion that if you've ever been curious about Thinker X, this is just the introduction for you -- although this phenomenon is more pronounced in the ever-increasing number of volumes chopped out of Wittgenstein's notebooks, where each new "introduction to Wittgenstein's thought" is better than the last, it is basically universal. The assumption is basically that one will only buy a token volume by a thinker, and if this happens to be the only volume one stumbles across, one must be convinced that it is the "right" one, that it will look good on the shelf. Paired with the sense that one never gets beyond an introduction is the marketting of every volume as a guide to the thought of Thinker X (à Gauche has addressed this problem vis-à-vis Derrida, for whom it is arguably most pronounced). Certainly part of this marketting strategy is the peculiar name-dropping decadence of continental thought itself, but why couldn't we be offered "unparalleld insights into ... culture" rather than "unparalleld insights into Adorno's thoughts on culture"? After all, we finally only care about Adorno's thoughts on culture insofar as they give us insights into culture, rather than insights into Adorno.
We are given self-contained names, and names that are important because they influenced later names, and names that critique names -- certainly it's all very interesting as a literary exercise, but I sometimes wonder how it became possible that the most radical thought could be nicely packaged and defused as a collection of guides to radical opinions other people held, to be studied so that we can impress others (either in academic settings or informally) with how well-acquainted we are with what other people have thought -- as if our books could believe on our behalf.
