Page 80 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Theodor Adorno and the culture industry 65
Adorno and Horkheimer’s account of the history of reason is
crucial to our account of critical theories of mass media because it
provides a context with which to understand how the particular
attributes of reason, as they have developed under the dual influ-
ence of both capitalism and the various media technologies that
consolidate its illimitable dominion, dominate ever more areas of
life. The Dialectic proposes three phases of this domination:

+ Domination over the self; self-identity is not something given but
rather emerges out of instrumental reason
+ The domination of labour; understood as the control of subjects,
their conversion into labouring subjects
+ The domination of nature (including human nature) via science
and technology.

Throughout this book it is argued that, in the context of a
capitalist society, mass-media technologies restrict the independence
of the individual in all three of these forms. The individual thus
becomes subsumed, just as the particular is under the concept of a
general identity, within a life-defining system of commodities
whether they be: basic commodities (objects); images (brands);
people (celebrities as human brands); environments (shopping malls
and themed urban centres); or processes (for example the purchas-
ing of an education with the student reconstituted as customer).
Adorno and Horkheimer believe that man’s original relation to
nature is one of ‘angst’. Nature is perceived as hostile and unpre-
dictable, and in order for the human race to survive (thought’s
primordial function being utilitarian) it must be disciplined. In the
first instance this is achieved through myth understood as the first
dialectic turn in the evolving relation between subject and object (a
relation in which both terms evolve): ‘Myth intended report, the
narration of the Beginning: but also presentation, confirmation,
explanation; a tendency that grew stronger with the recording and
collection of myths’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997: 8). Myth
abstracts, it presents the world as something other than its immedi-
ate presentation, thus it is the first step in the substitution of a
system of manipulable symbols for the particularity of the real:
‘language embodies the contradiction that something is itself and at
the same time something other than itself, identical and non-identical’
(1997: 15; original emphasis).
However, individual mythologies are parochial. Under pre-
technological regimes of mythic signification the dialectic of identity
and non-identity is under-determined and restricted by locality and
ethnicity. In Kracauer’s previously discussed terms, while falsely
concrete and excessively socially determining, myths in pre-
technological societies do not have the falsely abstract qualities that

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