Adorno and Horkheimer criticize the “totality” (lack of detail) of the culture industry that “crushes equally the whole and the parts,” as well as a decrease in imagination on part of the consumer. This would point to a decrease, or even disappearance of hermeneutic activity. The terms ‘part,’ ‘whole’ and ‘imagination’ are reminiscent of theories on hermeneutics, by Gadamer for instance, in which interpretation depends on the interplay of writer and reader, artist and consumer. So, if there is no hermeneutic activity, only distraction, amusement etc., the artist is replaced by the masses and the consumer is also replaced by the same masses. But practically, someone is actually making that mass-produced movie and someone is actually watching it. Considering movies like Marvel that aren’t ‘high art,’ perhaps the ‘artfulness’ of these types of films has shifted to the more technical skills of editing, CGI, costume, casting etc. (I guess these do present the viewer with a more ready-made interpretation). As Jameson reconciles mass and hight art, maybe these mass-movies are ‘part’ of a ‘whole’ in culture, to echo Adorno and Horkheimer’s terms and , of which the other ‘part’ would be lower budget, indie films whose ‘artfulness,’ also by necessity of the lower budget, remains more abstract in terms of writing, acting etc. – this would mean though that the ideas of ‘part’ and ‘whole’ have shifted from a particular artwork as in Adorno and Horkheimer’ view, to a larger cultural context.
What is the relationship between the internet and “the culture industry”? How is the mass culture we have now different from the mass culture Adorno describes? How is it the same?
Adorno writes: “[it is] doubtful whether the culture industry still even fulfills its self-proclaimed function of distraction. If the majority of radio stations and cinemas were shut down, consumers probably would not feel too much deprived” (110-111). To what extent is this statement true of the internet? What are our “rites of initiation” (124)?
I have long understood comedy as a means to skewer systems of power. Does the Frankfurt School critique suggest that this is impossible under the auspices of the culture industry? I wonder how Brechtian comedies like ‘the Rehearsal,’ which I think dramatize our alienation in a jarring way, might be said to have been captured and worked into the schema of the culture industry. Does it acclimate us to our powerlessness?
“Pseudoindividuality is a precondition for apprehending and detoxifying tragedy: only because individuals are none but mere intersections of universal tendencies is it possible to
reabsorb them smoothly into the universal. Mass culture thereby reveals the fictitious quality which has characterized the individual throughout the bourgeois era and is wrong only in priding itself on this murky harmony between universal and particular. The principle of individuality was contradictory from the outset.”
This quote reminded me of the critical discussion around “universal” and “particular” characters in the 18th century as the novel was solidifying as a form. I’m curious how we can apply this quote to characters if we trace the rise of the novel. How precisely are literary characters also victim to “pseudoindividuality,” if at all? If so, which characters best typify this “murky harmony”? Wouldn’t the universal/particular seemingly destroy this binary by simply placing characters in one camp or the other? I’m unsure how literally to take this binary when it comes to literature and if it can be applied to characterhood.
Adorno defines fun as a “medicinal bath which the entertainment industry never ceases to prescribe” [112]; Pirandello in his lectures on humor, identifies in Copernicus one of the greatest humorist, since he took apart “not the machine of the universe” but “the proud image which we had made of it”[On Humor,1908].
It seems to me that the two have an antithetical portrayal of the sociological impacts of humor: is it a “tool” that tames the masses or does it rather tear people’s masks down ?
As I was reading Adorno and Horkheimer’s “The Culture Industry,” I kept thinking about Barbara Johnson’s “The Critical Difference,” in which she explains, through an analysis of Barthes’ S/Z, that “it is the rereading of the same [text] that engenders what Barthes calls the ‘text’s difference'” (4). As “The Culture Industry” focuses on a horizontal, distributed “sameness” across works and forms, Johnson digs through the vertical “sameness” of any one text (94). Directly opposed to Adorno and Horkheimer’s homogeneous unanimity within and across branches of culture, Johnson urges deconstructive criticism as a mechanism to restore “the text’s way of differing from itself” (4).
Can we apply deconstruction — through its constant re-readings, re-interpretings, re-signifyings — as a force against the passive “sameness” of “The Culture Industry”?
Despite my newfound distaste for the idiosyncratic style and tone of The Culture Industry, which I found to be that haughty, smug-yet-puerile invective that smacks of adolescent rebellion (I chuckled at “Satanically”), they just seem to be right. I would even go so far as to contend that much of modern “cultural criticism” is just reinventing the Adornian wheel. For instance, this passage:
The withering of imagination and spontaneity in the consumer of culture today need not be traced back to psychological mechanisms. The products themselves, especially the most characteristic, the sound film, cripple those faculties through their objective makeup. They are so constructed that their adequate comprehension requires a quick, observant, knowledgeable cast of mind but positively debars the spectator from thinking, if he is not to miss the fleeting facts. This kind of alertness is so ingrained that it does not even need to be activated in particular cases, while still repressing the powers of imagination. Anyone who is so absorbed by the world of the film, by gesture, image, and word, that he or she is unable to supply that which would have made it a world in the first place, does not need to be entirely transfixed by the special operations of the machinery at the moment of the performance. The required qualities of attention have become so familiar from other films and other culture products already known to him or her that they appear automatically. The power of industrial society* is imprinted on people once and for all. The products of the culture industry are such that they can be alertly consumed even in a state of distraction. But each one is a model of the gigantic economic machinery,* which, from the first, keeps everyone on their toes, both at work and in the leisure time which resembles it.
This is the N+1 article about Netflix reorienting their modus operandi to create the film/television equivalent of elevator music. Then I read this passage:
Amusement congeals into boredom, since, to be amusement, it must cost no effort and therefore moves strictly along the well-worn grooves of association. The spectator must need no thoughts of his own: the product prescribes each reaction, not through any actual coherence-which collapses once exposed to thought-but through signals. Any logical connection presupposing mental capacity is scrupulously avoided. Developments are to emerge from the directly preceding situation, not from the idea of the whole. There is no plot which could withstand the screenwriters’ eagerness to extract the maximum effect from the individual scene. Finally, even the schematic formula seems dangerous, since it provides some coherence of meaning, however meager, when only meaninglessness is acceptable. Often the plot is willfully denied the development called for by characters and theme under the old schema. Instead, the next step is determined by what the writers take to be their most effective idea. Obtusely ingenious surprises disrupt the plot. The product’s tendency to fall back perniciously on the pure nonsense[…], emerges most strikingly in the less sophisticated genres.
This is about The White Lotus season finale. Both their prescience and the density of their prose makes me feel as though all contemporary attempts to further refine their insights by examining particular cultural artifacts do little to further our understanding of how the material conditions precipitated by capitalism have contributed to the commodification of aesthetics and the aesthetification of everything.
Then the people’s champion Jameson comes in and cleans up everything. I think he astutely adumbrates what may be Horkheimer and Adorno’s most glaring shortcoming, namely their reliance on the stabilizing oppositional function of so-called high art/culture which fails to account for their dialectical interdependency. However, I am even skeptical of Jameson’s implication that there is much work to be done in the field of cultural studies. Reductively, I can’t help but see his comparative, two-pronged readings of ideological and transcendent functions to merely echo the method of Mythologies. And perhaps overly cynical, I return to a similar thought I had regarding the critical methodologies of last week’s readings regarding their inexhaustibility, or perennial necessity, while the selfsame structures of oppression remain extant. I suppose the question would still be the same one: Can we move beyond feminist readings, deconstructive readings, Barthesian demystifying readings while still subject to the same influences of industry? Or is the fact that capitalism persists reason enough to seek alternatives? Basically, I think Holland’s model is compelling, and sure, there is probably a faint and feeble sense of the ineradicable drive towards collectivity present in all works of contemporary culture, but is writing about it going to bring about the self-constitution of a new and organic group whereby the collective breaks through the reified atomization of capitalist social life? Or in other words, what’s a literary critic gotta do to get some class struggle over here?
According to Adorno and Horkheimer, “The triumph over beauty is completed by humor, the malicious pleasure elicited by any successful deprivation. There is laughter because there is nothing to laugh about. Laughter, whether reconciled or terrible, always accompanies the moment when a fear is ended. It indicates a release, whether from physical danger or from the grip of logic. Reconciled laughter resounds with the echo of escape from power; wrong laughter copes with fear by defecting to the which inspire it. It echoes the inscapability of power. Fun is a medicinal bath which the entertainment industry never ceases to prescribe. It makes laughter the instrument for cheating happiness.” (112)
While reading this passage, I started to think about the concept of catharsis in Ancient Greek tragedies. I am assuming that even though the audience was not necessarily laughing at the end of a tragic play, they were experiencing something closely related to that- something that would provide them with this sense of relief, just like the “escape from physical danger or from the grip of logic” mentioned above. Additionally, comedies have also been a thing since antiquity. Are the tragedies and comedies of the Classical period closely related to what the “culture industry” is giving to us today? Were those plays meant to be a mere substitute of happiness?
I had never considered before how the sort of “materiality” of a narrative, story, a poetic sentence, etc. could be read as an exhibition of instrumentality. Note the paradigmatic detective story, per Jameson: “The detective story [is of a materiality which] comes to constitute an end and a consumption-satisfaction around which the rest of the work is then ‘degraded’ to the status of sheer means” (12-13).
I really appreciate this understanding (I just HAVE to dive deeper into Jameson’s corpus at this point), but might there be some cases (not all cases, however) which the material of a certain text that would otherwise be “degraded” actually quite legitimately effects, say, the significance, the meaning, or the “force” of the material that is the “thing consumed,” without which that “thing consumed” might be considered, rather, as insignificant, unmeaningful? “The end of the book” that constitutes the locus of means-end consumption would only betray the fact that all the materiality that led up to it was, rather, entirely crucial, even responsible, for the very fetishism that makes up “the end.” The solving of the crime, for example, only “stands out” (apart from it being chronologically or structurally at the end of the text and thus would be the latest thing read once the reader is finished with it) because it induces or somehow “points toward” the events, happenstances, causes, etc. that led to it. “Without this or that happening, then this ending that I am consuming at the moment would never have occurred to begin with”: such a statement lends meaning to one’s very interpretation of the ending, or to the fetishistic object of concern. It seems, then, that the fetishism at-play here, or the consumerist approach to the literary “peak” of a text, wouldn’t at least NECESSARILY be exhibited “in” the materiality of the text itself (in its narrative, poetic, etc. makeup), but rather would concern extra-material factors.
After deliberation, Jameson comes to the conclusion that contemporary mass culture does manipulate its consumers through a reapplication of the Freudian repression model. Consumer (viewer, reader) participation is essential; anxieties are surfaced and then alleviated within the controlled environment of the artifact. What differences does this audience centered focus offer compared to the ‘consumption’ of art during art’s production as a ‘finality without end.’ What psychological acrobatics were audiences supposed to perform when viewing pre-industrial capitalist cultural artifacts?
The example of the American tourist in Jameson has become ubiquitous. The images online of a thousand people huddled around one painting in a gallery, all taking pictures. Is all photography a form of commodity gratification? Is all image making in contemporary mass culture a form of taking possession?
Jameson suggests “that the works of mass culture cannot be ideological without at one and the same time being implicitly Utopian . . . they cannot manipulate unless they offer some genuine shred of content as a fantasy bribe to the public about to be so manipulated . . . such works cannot manage anxieties about the social order unless they have first revived them and given them some rudimentary expression”(29). In one sense, this type of approach to culture most broadly has become completely naturalized in the academy with the existence of disciplines (descendants of cultural studies) that take as their starting place that culture is political. Rather than view culture as leisure, entertainment, and escape— all that was not “real life”— Jameson writes, “Culture, far from being an occasional matter of the reading of a monthly good book or a trip to the drive-in, seems to me the very element of consumer society itself. . . . Everything is mediated by culture, to the point where even the political and the ideological ‘levels’ have initially to be disentangled from their primary mode of representation which is cultural” (22). The evocation of this “real life,” then, reminds me of another strain of politics that is prevalent today, one that I’ll call “red pill politics” after the Matrix, a kind of politics of “waking up.” In the name of historicism, I’m wondering why Jameson and Hall got such traction in the 1980s and why we see this resurgence of the “wake up” rhetoric, as though mass culture is putting us to sleep and we must see past its ideology to exist in the realm of the real.
I really love Jameson’s intervention into Adorno and Horkheimer’s mass culture issue, and his prediction that:
“indeed, fragmentary and as yet undeveloped tendencies in recent art production––hyper- or photo-realism in visual art; “new music” of the type of Lamonte Young, Terry Riley, or Philip Glass; post-modernist literary texts like those of Pynchon––suggest an increasing interpenetration of high and mass culture” (14).
Do we think that Jameson was right about the direction of these trends in cultural production? Are “high culture” and “mass culture” getting more closely (dialectically) entagled?
Thinking about his examples of “new music,” for example– as a fan of ambient music, I have seen a trend in which artists are using more and more field recording samples. There is one album, called “Takeaway Loops” by Gavin Vanaelst, that makes me think of this in particular, as the artist uses field recordings taken while delivering food for a delivery company called Takeaway, and meshes them into his compositions.
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13 Comments
Joanna Ligon
Adorno and Horkheimer criticize the “totality” (lack of detail) of the culture industry that “crushes equally the whole and the parts,” as well as a decrease in imagination on part of the consumer. This would point to a decrease, or even disappearance of hermeneutic activity. The terms ‘part,’ ‘whole’ and ‘imagination’ are reminiscent of theories on hermeneutics, by Gadamer for instance, in which interpretation depends on the interplay of writer and reader, artist and consumer. So, if there is no hermeneutic activity, only distraction, amusement etc., the artist is replaced by the masses and the consumer is also replaced by the same masses. But practically, someone is actually making that mass-produced movie and someone is actually watching it. Considering movies like Marvel that aren’t ‘high art,’ perhaps the ‘artfulness’ of these types of films has shifted to the more technical skills of editing, CGI, costume, casting etc. (I guess these do present the viewer with a more ready-made interpretation). As Jameson reconciles mass and hight art, maybe these mass-movies are ‘part’ of a ‘whole’ in culture, to echo Adorno and Horkheimer’s terms and , of which the other ‘part’ would be lower budget, indie films whose ‘artfulness,’ also by necessity of the lower budget, remains more abstract in terms of writing, acting etc. – this would mean though that the ideas of ‘part’ and ‘whole’ have shifted from a particular artwork as in Adorno and Horkheimer’ view, to a larger cultural context.
Serena
What is the relationship between the internet and “the culture industry”? How is the mass culture we have now different from the mass culture Adorno describes? How is it the same?
Adorno writes: “[it is] doubtful whether the culture industry still even fulfills its self-proclaimed function of distraction. If the majority of radio stations and cinemas were shut down, consumers probably would not feel too much deprived” (110-111). To what extent is this statement true of the internet? What are our “rites of initiation” (124)?
Is art possible after Auschwitz—or Gaza?
Dana Burns
I have long understood comedy as a means to skewer systems of power. Does the Frankfurt School critique suggest that this is impossible under the auspices of the culture industry? I wonder how Brechtian comedies like ‘the Rehearsal,’ which I think dramatize our alienation in a jarring way, might be said to have been captured and worked into the schema of the culture industry. Does it acclimate us to our powerlessness?
Francesca
“Pseudoindividuality is a precondition for apprehending and detoxifying tragedy: only because individuals are none but mere intersections of universal tendencies is it possible to
reabsorb them smoothly into the universal. Mass culture thereby reveals the fictitious quality which has characterized the individual throughout the bourgeois era and is wrong only in priding itself on this murky harmony between universal and particular. The principle of individuality was contradictory from the outset.”
This quote reminded me of the critical discussion around “universal” and “particular” characters in the 18th century as the novel was solidifying as a form. I’m curious how we can apply this quote to characters if we trace the rise of the novel. How precisely are literary characters also victim to “pseudoindividuality,” if at all? If so, which characters best typify this “murky harmony”? Wouldn’t the universal/particular seemingly destroy this binary by simply placing characters in one camp or the other? I’m unsure how literally to take this binary when it comes to literature and if it can be applied to characterhood.
Irene
Adorno defines fun as a “medicinal bath which the entertainment industry never ceases to prescribe” [112]; Pirandello in his lectures on humor, identifies in Copernicus one of the greatest humorist, since he took apart “not the machine of the universe” but “the proud image which we had made of it”[On Humor,1908].
It seems to me that the two have an antithetical portrayal of the sociological impacts of humor: is it a “tool” that tames the masses or does it rather tear people’s masks down ?
Alice Ascoli (she/her)
As I was reading Adorno and Horkheimer’s “The Culture Industry,” I kept thinking about Barbara Johnson’s “The Critical Difference,” in which she explains, through an analysis of Barthes’ S/Z, that “it is the rereading of the same [text] that engenders what Barthes calls the ‘text’s difference'” (4). As “The Culture Industry” focuses on a horizontal, distributed “sameness” across works and forms, Johnson digs through the vertical “sameness” of any one text (94). Directly opposed to Adorno and Horkheimer’s homogeneous unanimity within and across branches of culture, Johnson urges deconstructive criticism as a mechanism to restore “the text’s way of differing from itself” (4).
Can we apply deconstruction — through its constant re-readings, re-interpretings, re-signifyings — as a force against the passive “sameness” of “The Culture Industry”?
Alex Lleras
Despite my newfound distaste for the idiosyncratic style and tone of The Culture Industry, which I found to be that haughty, smug-yet-puerile invective that smacks of adolescent rebellion (I chuckled at “Satanically”), they just seem to be right. I would even go so far as to contend that much of modern “cultural criticism” is just reinventing the Adornian wheel. For instance, this passage:
The withering of imagination and spontaneity in the consumer of culture today need not be traced back to psychological mechanisms. The products themselves, especially the most characteristic, the sound film, cripple those faculties through their objective makeup. They are so constructed that their adequate comprehension requires a quick, observant, knowledgeable cast of mind but positively debars the spectator from thinking, if he is not to miss the fleeting facts. This kind of alertness is so ingrained that it does not even need to be activated in particular cases, while still repressing the powers of imagination. Anyone who is so absorbed by the world of the film, by gesture, image, and word, that he or she is unable to supply that which would have made it a world in the first place, does not need to be entirely transfixed by the special operations of the machinery at the moment of the performance. The required qualities of attention have become so familiar from other films and other culture products already known to him or her that they appear automatically. The power of industrial society* is imprinted on people once and for all. The products of the culture industry are such that they can be alertly consumed even in a state of distraction. But each one is a model of the gigantic economic machinery,* which, from the first, keeps everyone on their toes, both at work and in the leisure time which resembles it.
This is the N+1 article about Netflix reorienting their modus operandi to create the film/television equivalent of elevator music. Then I read this passage:
Amusement congeals into boredom, since, to be amusement, it must cost no effort and therefore moves strictly along the well-worn grooves of association. The spectator must need no thoughts of his own: the product prescribes each reaction, not through any actual coherence-which collapses once exposed to thought-but through signals. Any logical connection presupposing mental capacity is scrupulously avoided. Developments are to emerge from the directly preceding situation, not from the idea of the whole. There is no plot which could withstand the screenwriters’ eagerness to extract the maximum effect from the individual scene. Finally, even the schematic formula seems dangerous, since it provides some coherence of meaning, however meager, when only meaninglessness is acceptable. Often the plot is willfully denied the development called for by characters and theme under the old schema. Instead, the next step is determined by what the writers take to be their most effective idea. Obtusely ingenious surprises disrupt the plot. The product’s tendency to fall back perniciously on the pure nonsense[…], emerges most strikingly in the less sophisticated genres.
This is about The White Lotus season finale. Both their prescience and the density of their prose makes me feel as though all contemporary attempts to further refine their insights by examining particular cultural artifacts do little to further our understanding of how the material conditions precipitated by capitalism have contributed to the commodification of aesthetics and the aesthetification of everything.
Then the people’s champion Jameson comes in and cleans up everything. I think he astutely adumbrates what may be Horkheimer and Adorno’s most glaring shortcoming, namely their reliance on the stabilizing oppositional function of so-called high art/culture which fails to account for their dialectical interdependency. However, I am even skeptical of Jameson’s implication that there is much work to be done in the field of cultural studies. Reductively, I can’t help but see his comparative, two-pronged readings of ideological and transcendent functions to merely echo the method of Mythologies. And perhaps overly cynical, I return to a similar thought I had regarding the critical methodologies of last week’s readings regarding their inexhaustibility, or perennial necessity, while the selfsame structures of oppression remain extant. I suppose the question would still be the same one: Can we move beyond feminist readings, deconstructive readings, Barthesian demystifying readings while still subject to the same influences of industry? Or is the fact that capitalism persists reason enough to seek alternatives? Basically, I think Holland’s model is compelling, and sure, there is probably a faint and feeble sense of the ineradicable drive towards collectivity present in all works of contemporary culture, but is writing about it going to bring about the self-constitution of a new and organic group whereby the collective breaks through the reified atomization of capitalist social life? Or in other words, what’s a literary critic gotta do to get some class struggle over here?
Paraskevi Gkana-Alberico (She/Her)
According to Adorno and Horkheimer, “The triumph over beauty is completed by humor, the malicious pleasure elicited by any successful deprivation. There is laughter because there is nothing to laugh about. Laughter, whether reconciled or terrible, always accompanies the moment when a fear is ended. It indicates a release, whether from physical danger or from the grip of logic. Reconciled laughter resounds with the echo of escape from power; wrong laughter copes with fear by defecting to the which inspire it. It echoes the inscapability of power. Fun is a medicinal bath which the entertainment industry never ceases to prescribe. It makes laughter the instrument for cheating happiness.” (112)
While reading this passage, I started to think about the concept of catharsis in Ancient Greek tragedies. I am assuming that even though the audience was not necessarily laughing at the end of a tragic play, they were experiencing something closely related to that- something that would provide them with this sense of relief, just like the “escape from physical danger or from the grip of logic” mentioned above. Additionally, comedies have also been a thing since antiquity. Are the tragedies and comedies of the Classical period closely related to what the “culture industry” is giving to us today? Were those plays meant to be a mere substitute of happiness?
Alex Riedel
My apologies for such a late response!
I had never considered before how the sort of “materiality” of a narrative, story, a poetic sentence, etc. could be read as an exhibition of instrumentality. Note the paradigmatic detective story, per Jameson: “The detective story [is of a materiality which] comes to constitute an end and a consumption-satisfaction around which the rest of the work is then ‘degraded’ to the status of sheer means” (12-13).
I really appreciate this understanding (I just HAVE to dive deeper into Jameson’s corpus at this point), but might there be some cases (not all cases, however) which the material of a certain text that would otherwise be “degraded” actually quite legitimately effects, say, the significance, the meaning, or the “force” of the material that is the “thing consumed,” without which that “thing consumed” might be considered, rather, as insignificant, unmeaningful? “The end of the book” that constitutes the locus of means-end consumption would only betray the fact that all the materiality that led up to it was, rather, entirely crucial, even responsible, for the very fetishism that makes up “the end.” The solving of the crime, for example, only “stands out” (apart from it being chronologically or structurally at the end of the text and thus would be the latest thing read once the reader is finished with it) because it induces or somehow “points toward” the events, happenstances, causes, etc. that led to it. “Without this or that happening, then this ending that I am consuming at the moment would never have occurred to begin with”: such a statement lends meaning to one’s very interpretation of the ending, or to the fetishistic object of concern. It seems, then, that the fetishism at-play here, or the consumerist approach to the literary “peak” of a text, wouldn’t at least NECESSARILY be exhibited “in” the materiality of the text itself (in its narrative, poetic, etc. makeup), but rather would concern extra-material factors.
Peter
After deliberation, Jameson comes to the conclusion that contemporary mass culture does manipulate its consumers through a reapplication of the Freudian repression model. Consumer (viewer, reader) participation is essential; anxieties are surfaced and then alleviated within the controlled environment of the artifact. What differences does this audience centered focus offer compared to the ‘consumption’ of art during art’s production as a ‘finality without end.’ What psychological acrobatics were audiences supposed to perform when viewing pre-industrial capitalist cultural artifacts?
The example of the American tourist in Jameson has become ubiquitous. The images online of a thousand people huddled around one painting in a gallery, all taking pictures. Is all photography a form of commodity gratification? Is all image making in contemporary mass culture a form of taking possession?
Jodie Kahan (she/her)
Jameson suggests “that the works of mass culture cannot be ideological without at one and the same time being implicitly Utopian . . . they cannot manipulate unless they offer some genuine shred of content as a fantasy bribe to the public about to be so manipulated . . . such works cannot manage anxieties about the social order unless they have first revived them and given them some rudimentary expression”(29). In one sense, this type of approach to culture most broadly has become completely naturalized in the academy with the existence of disciplines (descendants of cultural studies) that take as their starting place that culture is political. Rather than view culture as leisure, entertainment, and escape— all that was not “real life”— Jameson writes, “Culture, far from being an occasional matter of the reading of a monthly good book or a trip to the drive-in, seems to me the very element of consumer society itself. . . . Everything is mediated by culture, to the point where even the political and the ideological ‘levels’ have initially to be disentangled from their primary mode of representation which is cultural” (22). The evocation of this “real life,” then, reminds me of another strain of politics that is prevalent today, one that I’ll call “red pill politics” after the Matrix, a kind of politics of “waking up.” In the name of historicism, I’m wondering why Jameson and Hall got such traction in the 1980s and why we see this resurgence of the “wake up” rhetoric, as though mass culture is putting us to sleep and we must see past its ideology to exist in the realm of the real.
Elizabeth Alsop (she/her)
Adding Peter’s slides here…
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-VZrtNc8fZPAvaeJ2EIPn36qxGdDbAjM1eeBFtizvMc/edit?usp=sharing
Coco Fitterman
I really love Jameson’s intervention into Adorno and Horkheimer’s mass culture issue, and his prediction that:
“indeed, fragmentary and as yet undeveloped tendencies in recent art production––hyper- or photo-realism in visual art; “new music” of the type of Lamonte Young, Terry Riley, or Philip Glass; post-modernist literary texts like those of Pynchon––suggest an increasing interpenetration of high and mass culture” (14).
Do we think that Jameson was right about the direction of these trends in cultural production? Are “high culture” and “mass culture” getting more closely (dialectically) entagled?
Thinking about his examples of “new music,” for example– as a fan of ambient music, I have seen a trend in which artists are using more and more field recording samples. There is one album, called “Takeaway Loops” by Gavin Vanaelst, that makes me think of this in particular, as the artist uses field recordings taken while delivering food for a delivery company called Takeaway, and meshes them into his compositions.
https://deejaycharme.bandcamp.com/album/takeaway-loops-2