culture industry pre blog- fang

After having read Adorno and discussing the culture industry in 100, I was certain that I would get this right away and this would be a breeze reading but I soon learned that I read an excerpt of Adorno and was in way over my head. Adorno seems to be building off of Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” essay in that they both are critiquing the current value and worth of art in our society, they are just much more confusing and dense.

Adorno and Horkheimer are clearly displeased with the current state of “culture” and how it is “infecting everything with sameness” (53). They seem to show that culture as an entertainment industry indoctrinates us with ideology that we passively accept as “the whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry” (56). Like Althusser’s notion of ISAs, culture is putting forth ideas and by choosing to watch movies and listen to hit songs, we engage the ideology that culture puts off. They are also disappointed in the sameness of culture, regardless of the medium. They say, “hit songs, stars, and soap operas conform to types recurring cyclically as rigid invariants, but the specific content of productions, the seemingly variable element, is itself derived from those types. The details become interchangeable.” (55). Adorno and Horkheimer lost faith with the culture industry as it “cheats its consumers out of what it endlessly promises” (62). Their final grievance with culture industry is about how it has distanced itself from reality (kinda like Baudrillard and Zizek) and people use it to escape the less entertaining reality.

Hebidge is a doozy and I can’t even begin to try to blog about it so hopefully class fixes that.