Page 83 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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68 Then
The significance of the above for the key themes of this book lies
in the critical insights Adorno’s work offers into the disempowering
features of the media-based culture industry. Repetition of this phrase
risks numbing the reader to its oxymoronic status. Culture has
historically referred to those areas of social activity unconcerned with
the needs of subsistence and commerce. This is a form of culture we
shall discuss shortly in terms of ‘high culture’ which, despite the
often repeated accusations that such a phrase contains a strong
element of elitism, is used in Adorno’s work not so much as a value
judgement about the better quality of its content (although this may
be at times implied) compared with ‘low culture’, but rather to
distinguish high culture’s autonomous status from mass culture’s
manipulated and manufactured nature (its negative quality of being
heteronomous – that is, influenced by factors beyond its internal
requirements, such as the profit motive which according to Adorno
is more important than any previous historical distinctions to be
made between high and low cultural forms. The philosophical
history of instrumental reason that Adorno and Horkheimer provide
is essential to understanding the otherwise seemingly natural opera-
tions of the culture industry. The Dialectic of Enlightenment provides
an account in cultural terms of the profound mediations of a society
of the media. We later demonstrate in our examination of McLu-
han’s work how instrumental reason becomes an automatic mecha-
nism of order through the operation of media whose true effects are
under-appreciated because we receive the message without fully
recognizing the profoundly formative impact of the medium by
which the message is delivered.
The recent history of instrumental reason has been manifested in
the role media technologies have played in the ‘late’ phase of
capitalism. These technologies have emerged as both the material
consequences and further cause of the extirpation of the non-
identical. Part 2’s examination of Banality TV demonstrates how,
behind seemingly politically and philosophically neutral categories,
instrumental thought is alive and flourishing. An ironical develop-
ment within this history of instrumental reason is that just as
instrumental reason had its origins as a practical response to the
unknowable nature of myth that dictated the fates of men, so this
reason in turn becomes a myth of its own. Celebrity and Reality TV
become aspects of new myths by which people are either manipu-
lated unconsciously or with their full uncritical compliance. Our
technological systems come to represent a ‘second nature’ or what
Marcuse refers to as ‘bad immediacy’ whereby our cultural surround-
ings appear to be natural and therefore immune to critique. Adorno
and Horkheimer suggest that this second nature (like the first of
more technologically primitive societies) appears implacable, but

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