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208 Critical Theories of Mass Media
historical process–aprocess which is itself a product of bourgeois
society’ (Adorno in Jameson 1980: 123). In his contrasting account
of the culture industry, the autonomous work of art and the mass art
of mechanical reproduction do not exist as historically successive
periods. Rather, they are inextricably intertwined: ‘Both are torn
halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up’
(Adorno in Jameson 1980: 123). Benjamin posits a succession, in
which the auratic artwork immured in repressive social values, is
replaced by the art of technological reproduction and emancipatory
potential. Opposing this, Adorno argues that there are elements of
traditional art, in particular its indifference to profit principle, whose
continued survival gives high art its radical social value. However,
since the latter cannot communicate with the masses, its impact is
necessarily limited. Thus for Adorno high and popular culture both
contain progressive elements and factors that preclude their full
realization – the components of a genuinely emancipated culture are
scattered across these divergent forms.
The overt ideology of fascism that so troubled Benjamin now
reappears as a subtler form of ideology in the guise of the
pseudo-satisfaction of consumption. The ‘omnipresence of the stere-
otype imposed by technical skill’ (Adorno, in Duttmann 2000: 40;
also cited in Chapter 2) is a serviceable summary of Hollywood’s
commodified output. Within the logic of the culture industry thesis,
the predominant vehicle for Jameson’s ‘further intensification of the
forces of reification’ are these means of promulgating the increas-
ingly pervasive influence of the commodity ethos. Moreover, its
spread is abetted by the adroit co-optation of any resistance that
arises to it. This can be seen in the way in which aesthetic forms that
initially arise as a form of resistance (such as that of modernism)
have become co-opted as a mainstay of contemporary advertising –
as Jameson notes ‘our entire system of commodity production and
consumption today is based on those older, once anti-social modern-
ist forms’ (Jameson 1998: 149). In recent decades this process has
grown ever more exacting and vigilant, stalling any potential empow-
ering dialectical response to the remorseless reification of the
contemporary mediascape that might have originally been identified
in Benjamin’s analysis. The recuperative power of the commodity
form now typically continues to frustrate attempts to challenge the
totalizing logic embodied in the culture industry thesis then. For
example, the urban fashion of alienated African American youth
originally based upon an aesthetic reaction to profound social
inequality is quickly packaged and marketed as a ‘look’ or a ‘sound’
1
to be consumed in the shopping malls of the white suburbs . Unlike
Benjamin, the inherent properties of media technologies can be

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