Page 35 - Cultural Theory

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••• John Scott •••

12-bar and 16-bar structures and song forms of popular music are obscured by minor
variations in vocal styling, instrumentation, recording effects, and so on.
Even art music is not immune to these cultural trends. Adorno would, no doubt,
see the recent trend of packaging certain forms of classical music for radio perfor-
mance and CD compilation (‘Beethoven’s Greatest Hits’) as a further sign of com-
modification, but he recognized a deeper impact of rationalization on serious music.
He had initially seen Schönberg’s music as expressing the modern condition and pos-
ing a challenge to it, as standing in the same relation to the bourgeois musical forms
of classicism as his own philosophy stood in relation to bourgeois philosophy. In his
later work, however, he saw Schönberg’s chromaticism as overly rationalized and as
destroying the possibility of individual expressivity (Adorno, 1962a).
The cultivation of individual expression through serious music – something that
Adorno tried to pursue in his own compositions – should be a form of critique, a
search for truth that poses a political challenge to rationalization and to the culture
industry that it has spawned. What is apparent here, in Adorno’s emphasis on ‘truth’,
is his cognitive or intellectualist view of artistic expression. He saw music, like phi-
losophy, as an attempt at a cognitive or intellectual understanding of the world,
albeit in non-verbal form. There is no recognition of any cathartic or emotional role
for music that is not tied to ideological distortion and its orientation to rationalized
domination. Emotionality in music is a manifestation of alienation and a denial of
its progressive, critical role in social life.
In the sphere of popular culture and all that comes within the orbit of the culture
industry, genuine artistic expression is extinguished and individuals are subjected
ever more deeply to oppression and alienation. Their oppression takes a cultural
form, as ideological domination. This undermines their ability to act as autonomous
subjects by manipulating their desires and channelling them around the false needs
whose pursuit sustains the capitalist system. Culture, then, becomes central to the
reproduction of capitalism through encouraging the consumption of commodities
and through forming a standardized mass consciousness.
Adorno’s aesthetic rejection of popular cultural products and his view of the
masses as oriented by false needs did not lead him to see consumers as mere dupes
of the culture industry. They are its victims, but they are victimized by a lack of
choice rather than by a false consciousness: ‘The triumph of advertising in the cul-
ture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even
though they see through them’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944: 167)
Just as popular music adopts standardized forms that inhibit thought and restrict
people to false pleasures, so other aspects of popular culture move in the same direc-
tion. Film stunts the imagination because movies are so designed that the need to
follow the plot rules out any sustained thought. Writing in the 1940s, when televi-
sion was in its early stages, Horkheimer and Adorno saw it as bound to intensify this
process. These cultural trends reinforce social authority by eliminating alternative
viewpoints. Immediate wishes linked to consumption and emotional desires are eas-
ily fulfilled and channelled into safe forms of expression, and any drive to challenge
or to alter things is defused. Potential opposition is defused and depoliticized.
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