Page 63 - Cultural Theory

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••• Douglas Kellner •••

as the close-up that fetishized certain stars or images via the technology of the cinema.
He also emphasized the atrophy of experience in the modern world due to the effects of
media and technology, that overwhelmed the subject, created fragmentary experience,
psychic shocks, and, in the case of war and other lethal technology, produced death
(Benjamin, 1969: 83ff.). Benjamin was thus one of the first radical cultural critics to look
carefully at the form and technology of media culture in appraising its complex nature
and effects. Moreover, he developed a unique approach to cultural history that is one of
his most enduring legacies, constituting a micrological history of Paris in the eighteenth
century, an uncompleted project that contains a wealth of material for study and reflec-
tion (see Benjamin, 2000, and the study in Buck-Morss, 1989).
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno answered Benjamin’s optimism in a highly
influential analysis of the culture industry in their book Dialectic of Enlightenment, which
first appeared in 1948 and was translated into English in 1972. They argued that the sys-
tem of cultural production dominated by film, radio broadcasting, newspapers, and
magazines, was controlled by advertising and commercial imperatives, and served to
create subservience to the system of consumer capitalism. While later critics pronounced
their approach too manipulative, reductive, and elitist, it provides an important correc-
tive to more populist approaches to media culture that downplay the way the media
industries exert power over audiences and help produce thought and behaviour that
conform to the existing society.

The Frankfurt School and Media Culture

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno anticipate the coming of television
in terms of the emergence of a new form of mass culture that would combine sight and
sound, image and narrative, in an institution that would embody the types of produc-
tion, texts, and reception of the culture industry. Anticipating that television would be a
prototypical artefact of industrialized culture, Adorno and Horkheimer wrote:

Television aims at a synthesis of radio and film, and is held up only because the
interested parties have not yet reached agreement, but its consequences will be
quite enormous and promise to intensify the impoverishment of aesthetic mat-
ter so drastically, that by tomorrow the thinly veiled identity of all industrial cul-
ture products can come triumphantly out into the open, derisively fulfilling the
Wagnerian dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the fusion of all the arts in one work.
The alliance of word, image, and music is all the more perfect than in Tristan
because the sensuous elements which all approvingly reflect the surface of
social reality are in principle embodied in the same technical process, the
unity of which becomes its distinctive content … Television points the way to a
development which might easily enough force the Warner Brothers into what
would certainly be the unwelcome position of serious musicians and cultural
conservatives.
(1972: 124, 161)

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