Page 33 - Cultural Theory

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••• John Scott •••

forms – principally tonal composition and the sonata form – had arisen with the
bourgeoisie and that their decline was linked to the transformation of this class.
This analysis of music carried forward the argument of the early Lukács that the
specifically bourgeois literary forms were those of narrative realism and characteriza-
tion found in the novel and modern drama. Adorno added that there were parallel
bourgeois forms in pictorial art – most notably linear perspective and representa-
tionalism. In all areas of culture, Adorno argued, the established bourgeois forms
were disintegrating, and avant garde artists were exploring the possibilities this
opened-up for artistic expression. In music, the progressive avant garde comprised
Schönberg, Berg, Webern, and Mahler; in literature it included Kafka and the ‘stream
of consciousness’ literature of Joyce, Proust, and Woolf; while in art it included
Picasso, Braque, and Kandinsky. Their forms of artistic expression, Adorno claimed,
embodied a critical intent and so could grasp the truth of the subject’s condition
under contemporary conditions.
These progressive features in art music contrasted sharply with the cultural trends
that Horkheimer and Adorno identified in popular music, where the rationalization
of social life had especially marked consequences. These consequences they diag-
nosed in their exploration of what they called the ‘culture industry’. 12 The cultural
sphere is one in which escape from domination should be possible, but it is increas-
ingly subject to the same process of rationalization as all other spheres of social life.
Instead of offering an escape from rational domination, cultural activity was itself
becoming an industrialized process of production that drew people ever more deeply
into the rationalized system and gave them only a false idea of escape and freedom.
Artistic culture was more and more difficult to sustain as an autonomous activity, as
cultural productions were becoming available to people only in commodity form.
In the stage of liberal capitalism, the producers and consumers of popular culture
had retained a degree of autonomy over their own cultural activities. In the monop-
oly stage of capitalism, however, this is no longer the case. Popular culture, as it
developed within monopoly capitalism, is the product of a culture industry that pro-
duces cultural items as commodities. Both leisure and consumption are organized
along capitalist lines: they are locked together with work and production into a sin-
gle system dominated by the instrumental rationality of capitalist production.
Cultural development is not shaped by performers and their audiences, but by the
finance capitalists and managers who run the various branches of the culture indus-
try. They are integral elements within the larger capitalist system. The directors of the
cultural monopolies are fused with company directors and owners in steel, petro-
leum, electricity, chemicals, and banking as part of a single system of finance capital.
Within this complex, the cultural controllers are a relatively weak and subordinate
part, and the system as a whole is dominated by banking and big business consider-
ations (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944: 122).
Thus, cultural items in modern capitalism are not supplied to meet the sponta-
neous wishes of a public but on the basis of what the culture industry itself wants to
supply to the market. The passive masses are not active producers of the culture that
they consume. 13 The differentiation of cultural commodities is organized around a
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