Adorno and Horkheimer - The Culture Industry

Theorist: Adorno and Horkheimer /Frankfurt School

Origin: Germany

Influences : Marx

Peers: Marcuse

Elements:
Standardisation - Standardization was a species of technical rationality, in which culture was purged of all spontaneity AND novelty. Intrinsic worth was calculated in advance for the sole purpose of achieving maximum profitability. Eliminates originality, challenge and authenticity in its products.

Pseudo individualization- Pseudo- individualization is a phenomenon he saw of mass-produced culture to be a danger to the high arts which is more difficult to understand. This false needs in the culture industries was created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs are freedom, creativity or genuine happiness. Marketing industry refers this term as "product differentiation". Something provided for all.

Commodity fetishism - commodity fetishism tends to replace inter-human relationships with relationships between humans and objects: for example, the relationship between producer and consumer is obscured. The producer can only see his relationship with the object he produces, being unaware of the people who will ultimately use that object

Cultural Dupes Key to the concept of the culture industry in relation to media is the idea of a passive audience, Adorno’s assertion that through false individualism, and standardised products, we are a ‘cultural dupe’: an irrational slave to the trivial, material desires, who can be manipulated into mass conformity; a fool seduced by advertising and fashion




Concepts of the culture industry:

• Adorno’s theory of the culture industry being used by the ruling class to lull the masses into a false sense of individualism in which they are passive receivers

• it operates to channel and subvert oppositional conciousness of the working class, thereby eliminating any threat to capitalism
  
• Culture industries may cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, or genuine happiness.
  
• Top Down Culture created and manufactured by the ruling class to be consumed by the proletariat.
  
• media culture by and large keeps individuals gratified and subservient to the logic and practices of market capitalism, that the culture industry has become thoroughly commodified and absorbs and deflects all oppositional culture to subservient ends
• Boiled down to its most obvious modern-day application, the argument would be that television leads people away from talking to each other or questioning the oppression in their lives. Instead they get up and go to work (if they are employed), come home and switch on TV, absorb TV's nonsense until bedtime, and then the daily cycle starts again.
  
  
  

Art:

• works of art are ascetic and unashamed; the culture industry is pornographic and prudish.

• Art pushing the conventions, self creating , not predetermined

Theory - Structuralism

Description
Structuralism assumes that things are the sum of their parts and the relationships between the parts, which are assembled into the larger structure.
Thus it combines separation and creation of a distinct part with relational combination of parts into a greater whole.
It seeks to describe meta-languages that describe the systems under scrutiny.
Structuralism rejects the purposeful human agent as the key force in history.


Discussion

Structuralism aligns with the positivist viewpoint, but not with postmodernism.
For parts to be identified, they must have boundaries that separate them as unities.
In psychology, structuralism started with William Wundt, who sought to break consciousness down into its constituent parts.
In anthropology, meaning seen to be produced and reproduced through practices, phenomena and activities which act as systems of signification.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, analyzed cultural phenomena including mythology, kinship, and food preparation. He rejected the purposeful human agent as the motivating force in history.
In linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure used structuralism in his analysis of language and signs, creating Semiotics and his idea of parole (talk) and langue (underlying structured system). He argued that meaning is created inside language in the difference between words.

Karl marx - Alienation

Marx's Theory of Alienation is the contention that in modern industrial production under capitalist conditions workers will inevitably lose control of their lives by losing control over their work. Workers thus cease to be autonomous beings in any significant sense. Under pre-capitalist conditions a blacksmith, e.g., or a shoemaker would own his own shop, set his own hours, determine his own working conditions, shape his own product, and have some say in how his product is bartered or sold. His relationships with the people with whom he worked and dealt had a more or less personal character.

Louis Althusser

Ethnicity: French.

Discipline: Structuralist Theorist / Structuralist Marxism

Writings: For Marx (1965) / Reading Capital (1975)

Influences: Lacan

Analysed the links between the structures of the economy state, and ideology in relation to material conditions of production that were ' in the last instance' the determining forces of all domains of social life.

Louis Althusser - Interpellation

Althusser proposed that "individuals are transformed into subjects through the ideological mechanism" of interpellation (Chandler 181). He explained that interpellation works primarily through language and occurs when we are hailed by a message. To illustrate hailing in the most straight forward way, Althusser offered the following example: when a policeman calls out, Hey, you there!, most people within hearing distance will immediately assume that they are the ones being summoned, even if they have done nothing wrong. This reaction positions the individual as a subject in relation to the general ideological codes of law and criminality (Brooker 122). Althusser believed that the dominant beliefs, values and practices that constitute ideology serve a political function. As we progress through the education system and enter the workforce, ideology works through state institutions to interpellate or construct us into particular subject positions in which our work and lifestyle benefits those who control the processes of production (Smith 208). The subject positions which are most prevalent configure us in terms of commercial culture - as consumers, taxpayers, employees, automobile drivers, homeowners, or parents. For instance, come election time, politicians continuously address their audience in their speeches as voters or taxpayers, thereby referring to the subject positions which most benefit them in their capacity as political leaders.
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We are interpellated, or 'hailed' into subject positions. Thus a policeman who calls to us is interpellating us into a subject position of subjugation by the state. For this to work, we must recognize and accept this subject position.

The process of identification thus creates identity. You identify me and I become that me that you have identified.
A strange fact is that we seem to recognize ourselves when we are hailed. I know that it is me who is being called as I unconsciously accept the subject position. It is as if we had always-already been there. The apparent freedom with which we accept the position only serves to cement us further into it.
Interpellation can be considered as 'recruitment' as it invites a person into a subject position. When they do so, the consistency principle then leads them into a cycle of investment whereby they bond their sense of identity both to the subject position and also the underlying ideology.
Discussion
Interpellation was described by Althusser in his reinterpretation of Marxism and the position of the subject. He explained how Ideological State Apparatuses interpellated the subjects into ideological positions.
This interpellation is a form of misrecognition, as in Lacan's mirror phase, where an externalized image is perceived both as the self and an 'other'.
The position we take is relative to a more significant, superior and central 'Other Subject', whether it is the state, God or some other ultimate authority. The person-as-subject is thus defined by the other and the person recognizes themselves as an image or reflection of the Other. This allows the person to claim the quality of the Other but also requires subjugation to the Other. To deny the Other is to deny one's own existence.
Thus we are become trapped within an ideology that creates an Other and hence the person.
Althusser uses Lacan's mirror phase to highlight how subjects are interpellated, but does not recognize the critical misrecognition that Lacan highlights. Althusser has also been criticized for how his subject is magically created of nowhere (what is there before the subject?).

Althusser, L. (1989). 'Ideology and ideological state apparatuses' in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays. London: New Left Books pp 170-86

Antoni Gramsci - Hegemony

HEGEMONY (hegemonic): The processes by which dominant culture maintains its dominant position: for example, the use of institutions to formalize power; the employment of a bureaucracy to make power seem abstract (and, therefore, not attached to any one individual); the inculcation of the populace in the ideals of the hegomonic group through education, advertising, publication, etc.; the mobilization of a police force as well as military personnel to subdue opposition.

Jowett and O'Donnell - Propaganda and Persuasion

Jowett and O'Donnell Definition:

- Understand and analyse Propaganda and find the distinction between propaganda and persuasion, propaganda as a sub category of persuasion.
- “Propaganda is the deliberate and systematic attempt to shape persceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behaviour to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist”
- The last words are key to the definition, the one who benefits from the audience response, if the response is the desired on, is the propagandist and not necessarily the members of the audience

Propaganda and Persuasion
- Studied as a purveyor of ideology – how dominant ideological meanings are constructed within the mass media
- Study of propaganda as a type of communication
- Propaganda employs persuasive tactics but is different from persuasion in purpose
Looking at the role of propaganda as a part of communication, and social religious and political systems historically and contemporarily



Meanings of Propaganda:
- Viewed by some scholars as inherent thought and practise in mass culture
- To disseminate or promote particular ideas
- To propagate or to sow
- Often viewed negatively, as organised mass persuasion by a large organisation or group
- Ellul – identified potency and pervasiveness of Propaganda, said it was instantaneous and destroyed a persons sense of history and disallowed critical reflection
- Pratkanis and Aronson – propaganda as the abuse of persuasion and recognised that propaganda is more clever than deception. Mass suggestion or influence through the manipulation of symbols and the psychology of the individual.
- Pratkanis and Turner – separated persuasion and propaganda – Persuasion is debate and discussion and consideration of options for better solutions but Propaganda is manipulation of the mob by the elite