Page 222 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Conclusion 207
For Adorno, distraction … is simply an index of capitalist
domination; it is not linked with genuine enjoyment and
pleasure, but signifies only the demise of the subject’s capacity
for real happiness; it is devoid of critical potential … distraction
is a symptom of, not a solution to prevailing conditions … Far
from … engaging in the ‘tactile appropriation’ of artworks, the
distracted audience is a consequence of the monotonous,
mind-numbing routine of mechanized labour under capitalism.
Distraction in the cinema is merely the corollary of alienation
and exploitation in the factory and the boredom, apathy and
atrophied sensibilities of the modern city … Distraction involves
only a weary satisfaction with the banalities of the ‘culture
industry’ … ‘The laughter of the audience at a cinema … is
anything but good and revolutionary; instead, it is full of the
worst sadism’.
(Gilloch 2002: 192–3)
Adorno argues that this misguided faith in distraction has its roots in
another romantic assumption: that the media of mechanical repro-
duction are intrinsically progressive. But for Adorno the opposition
Benjamin erected between the auratic work of art and the output of
the media of mass reproduction is invalid. Adorno saw ‘true’ art in
terms of autonomous work, an autonomy largely absent in the
products of the new media. Thus, in failing to incorporate this
quality of autonomy in his analysis of the traditional work of art,
Benjamin overestimates the so-called ‘art of the masses’ while
ignoring the radical innovation of purportedly elitist high art.
Adorno argues for a re-examination of high art that would do full
justice to its emancipatory content. Similarly he notes that cinema
(the repository of Benjamin’s highest hopes as we have seen), when
produced for mass entertainment, contrives to minimize the very
techniques that gave Benjamin such hope: ‘When I spent a day in
the studios of Neubabelsberg … what impressed me most was how
little montage and all the advanced techniques that you emphasize
are actually used: rather, reality is everywhere constructed with an
infantile mimetism and then photographed’ (Adorno, cited in
Jameson 1980: 124; emphasis in original).
Benjamin’s identification of traditional aura’s diminishment (‘like
water pumped out of a sinking ship’) can be reinterpreted in
practice as a pumping out of the grounds necessary for even the
possibility of producing truly critical understandings. Tradition is
replaced by the tautological predictability of the culture industry. For
Adorno, Benjamin’s characterization of tradition as reactive, and
mass culture as progressive, is an insufficiently dialectical polariza-
tion of the situation. It rests upon ‘the anarchistic romanticism of
blind confidence in the spontaneous power of the proletariat in the

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