Page 32 - Cultural Theory

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••• Cultural Analysis in Marxist Humanism •••

and the political and economic systems themselves acquire greater power over more
purely ‘social’ and cultural processes. The power relations of the economy and the
state had an objectivity and impersonality that made them appear to be necessary
and inescapable. Acceptance of these reified constraints made the idea of human
freedom appear to be a merely utopian fantasy.
This was the ‘dialectic’ of the Enlightenment. In promising human liberation
through rational knowledge, it had, in fact, produced systems and principles that
denied and undermined real freedom. The Enlightenment project was contradictory
in its consequences, producing a social whole that combined rational technique with
the distortion of human creativity and autonomy: ‘With the extension of the bour-
geois commodity economy, the dark horizon of myth is illumined by the sun of cal-
culating reason, beneath whose cold rays the seed of the new barbarism grows to
fruition’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944: 32).
The Frankfurt Marxist humanists, then, saw capitalism as having developed into a
system that was capable of sustaining growth and full employment and that was less
likely to be undermined by its internal economic contradictions. Even Marcuse was
pessimistic about the likelihood of spontaneous change in the short or medium term.
Through the capitalist consolidation of instrumental rationality, he argued, techno-
cratic forms of consciousness were coming to prevail. People believed that their actions
were governed by technical necessity – by ‘laws’ – but this was simply a reification:
power relations appeared as relations between things that are subject to objective and
impersonal laws. Under these circumstances, there is little likelihood that people will
develop any critical consciousness of their own subjection (Marcuse, 1964a).

The Culture Industry

Horkheimer and, especially, Adorno saw music as central to contemporary and his-
torical cultures, and they felt that an analysis of the state of musical production and
consumption would say a great deal about wider social conditions. Lukács, it will be
recalled, saw literature in much the same way, and there are many parallels in their
concerns. Adorno’s earliest works in this area drew on his own experiences in study-
ing and composing music. He saw music, like all forms of art, as social production
that originates in particular social classes. In capitalist societies, the prevailing musi-
cal forms were bourgeois products, and Adorno, using ideas from Schönberg,
extended this simple Marxian insight.
It was Schönberg’s view that music is a rational, intellectual articulation of objec-
tive cultural truths; it is not a mere expression of subjective emotions. Musical intel-
lect is exercised through its specific forms of expression, and musical creativity
involves the use of the ‘grammatical’ forms of a particular musical language in inno-
vative ways. The musical forms of a society change over time, and Schönberg, in his
own compositions, sought to go beyond the long-established classical forms and to
develop and work within new, atonal forms. Adorno suggested that the classical
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