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October 12, 2010
In Adorno and Mass Culture: Autonomous Art Against the Culture Industry in Thesis Eleven August 2006 György Markus says that in the early twentieth century the phenomenon of particular artistic forms – photography, film and jazz – evoked a broader cultural resonance beyond the art institution.
He says these forms are actually the kinds of cultural production that originated as popular or as mass cultural forms, but ultimately either split apart into artistic versus commercial kinds or, like jazz, demarcated in an appropriate way, crossed over to high art. This development was a long drawn-out process, achieving completion only in the late 1940s or 1950s. Or the 1970s for photography with respect to aesthetic modernism.
He then says that there is a rather direct continuity between the representatives of high culture from Matthew Arnold through Eliot and Ortega y Gasset, the Leavises and Greenberg to Dwight MacDonald and Adorno (to mention only the most familiar names in the critique of modernity and market-based culture). In these theories the relation appeared as that between universal human/aesthetic values of high art and the worthless, the trashy, or even destructive counter-value of mass culture. Markus adds:
This was not a matter of inherent conservatism, it followed from the way they understood the character and function of high art and the situation of contemporary culture in general. The assumption that film in general is capable of becoming authentic art would have contradicted their premises concerning the destiny of high art in our times. It was a diagnosis of an encompassing cultural (and social) crisis that oriented their aesthetic analyses and evaluations, including the rejection of mass culture in general.
What initially was regarded as aesthetically worthless, one of the minor symptoms of the ills of modernity, increasingly became conceived as a weighty, not merely cultural, but also moral and/or political counter-value, to some degree itself responsible for these ills, or at least significantly contributing to their preservation.
The analysis is based on an assumed dichotomous contrast between authentic art and mass culture, or in Adorno's case the culture industry. The negative characteristics of mass culture are negations of the basic traits of the ‘classical’, organic work of art which, was understood as a dynamic totality, the unity of expression and construction and whose whose serenity prefigures utopian happiness.
Adorno makes a fundamental distinction between pleasure and happiness that underpins the relation between mass culture and authentic art, legitimating the unreconcilable opposition between them:
Objects of the culture industry promise pleasure that always means the satisfaction of some pre-existent need. They are presented as objects of enjoyment, amusement, delight. In fact this very promise is mendacious. Its illusion is actually based on the surface similarity of such products with works of art (from which all their devices are borrowed), but works of art as they are misunderstood (as usual in our society) in a philistine way or artistically misused in the pursuit of popular success... The pleasure always on offer by the ‘goods’ of the culture industry also fails to materialize; they merely provide a momentary distraction, which inadvertently discloses the true social meaning of the pleasure principle itself.
In contrast works of art do not offer thoughtless pleasure:
What they offer is – according to Adorno’s beloved Stendhalian-Baudelairean formula – the promesse du bonheur. This happiness not only differs from, it is fundamentally opposed to pleasure....The happiness promised by the authentic work of art lies beyond the satisfaction of all real or imagined needs with their attendant pleasures; it means emancipation from a life governed by the pursuit of such a ‘fulfil- ment’, a liberation from all the compulsions dictated by self-preservation.
Markus comments that Adorno both overburdens the ‘culture industry’ serving as the ‘cement’ for a system of impersonal domination, and overburdens high art with a task, which as art, as the source of aesthetic experience, it cannot fulfill at all today.
What is lacking here with Adorno is the aestheticization of the commodity world that Walter Benjamin explored in his unfinished Arcades Project. Art, once it had submitted to industrial production and been appropriated by advertising, could and did reappear, transformed, in design and aesthetic consumption.
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