Page 85 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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70 Then
greater standardization and homogeneity; ‘films, radio and maga-
zines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every
part’. This uniformity is replicated in the relation of the culture
industry as a sector to the industrial system in its entirety, resulting
in a ‘striking unity of microcosm and macrocosm [that] presents
man with a model of their culture: the false identity of the general and
the particular’ (1997: 120–1; emphasis added).
Adorno and Horkheimer describe culture in industrial terms not
only because of its technological infrastructure, but also because of
its totality. This results in a fundamental tautology with regard to its
contents: advertising, celebrity, news, entertainment, all merge seam-
lessly and unobtrusively:
… the culture industry no longer even needs to directly pursue
everywhere the profit interests from which it originated. These
interests have become objectified in its ideology and have even
made themselves independent of the compulsion to sell the
cultural commodities that must be swallowed anyway. The
culture industry turns into public relations … each object of
the culture industry becomes its own advertisement.
(Adorno 1991: 86)
This tendency has become increasingly pronounced in the interven-
ing decades, and today, phenomena such as product placement,
corporate sponsorship of cultural events, and advertising campaigns
in which the promotion of a ‘lifestyle’ or ‘brand’ is given greater
priority than that of any particular product’s concrete qualities, bear
witness to the triumph of the spectacle over its composite forces.
Adorno’s recognition of this growing environmental dimension of
the culture industry led him to argue that its analysis demanded a
certain circumspection on the part of the critical observer. If its
pervasiveness and centrality to the life of the masses precluded the
kind of retreat to elitist cultural values that Adorno’s critics have
often levelled against him, this should not be taken as an invitation
to become complicit with that cultural industry and its identity
thinking. Cultural studies, for example, has tended to abandon the
patrician contempt that characterized the first intellectual reaction
to the emergence of mass culture (embodied in figures such as
Leavis and Arnold), only to replace it with a largely unreflective and
uncritical celebration of the industry’s output.
For Adorno, the products of popular culture are distinguished by
their lack of autonomy. Unlike truly artistic creations, they cannot be
approached as self-contained entities that nevertheless encompass
creative tensions that point outside their own particular orbit. Art is
based upon a productive friction between an artistic format’s general
rules and the particularity of the individual artwork. From this
perspective micro-analyses aimed at uncovering critique or ironic

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