Page 82 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Theodor Adorno and the culture industry 67
it renounces seductive consonances and desires itself even as a
concept’ (Kracauer 1995: 180). In Adorno and Horkheimer’s similar
terms: ‘Thinking objectifies itself to become an automatic, self-
activating process; an impersonation of the machine it has produced,
so that ultimately the machine can replace it’ (Adorno and Hork-
heimer 1997: 25). In this respect, Enlightenment thought is not the
triumph of the individual reason (as it is often thought) because the
individual itself undergoes a dialectical development – the instru-
mental reason that grants dominion over the realm of objects, does
so only to the extent that the subject is also transformed: ‘the
individual is reduced to the nodal point of conventional responses’
(Adorno and Horkheimer 1997: 28). The transcendental subject
supposedly realized in the Enlightenment is thus reduced to a
constellation of pre-encoded responses: ‘reason itself has become the
mere instrument of the all-inclusive economic apparatus’ (Adorno
and Horkheimer 1997: 30). Reason, which would recognize its own
limitations and transform itself in response, is artificially arrested
and rendered as debased rationality. Here Adorno and Horken-
heimer can be seen as developing the distinction Kracauer makes
between Ratio as a distorted form of reason and genuine reasoning
(Vernunft) of a liberated consciousness.
At this point it is worth emphasizing that what may appear to the
reader as a discussion of abstruse philosophical issues actually forms
the theoretical basis of critical theory and its subsequent application
to the cultural impact of media technologies. The instrumental
reason that characterizes the Enlightenment is commensurate with
the consolidation of capitalism. Both commodification and utilitar-
ian, instrumental reason involve a decontextualization of the particu-
lar and its reduction to interchangeable units. This results in an
exhaustion of what is potentiality inherent in the non-identical. The
limits of what is possible become defined as limits of the established
order (a weakness underpinning much of cultural populism). Thus,
at the cultural level, the totalizing nature of the new myth of
capitalist instrumental reason – the unknowable and all other social
values are commodified. The media act as technological vessels
reinforcing such commodity values (for example, it is difficult to see
how the Nike swoosh could exist as a brand in the absence of media
technologies of reproduction), and only that which pre-exists within
the media is granted attention. This confirms Adorno’s claim that
‘Mass culture is a system of signals that signals itself’ (Adorno, 1991:
71) – a perspective that has been variously re-described in notions
such as: Boorstin’s pseudo-event, Debord’s society of the spectacle,
Lowenthal’s idols of consumption (celebrities), and Baudrillard’s
conception of the tautological circulation of hyperreal signs.

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