Page 87 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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72 Then
surrogate of shocks and sensations … smoothly insinuating them-
selves into the episodic action’ (Adorno 1991: 60). This logic is
identified in all the industry’s various forms, for instance in cinema
where ‘the eye of the camera … has perceived the conflict before
the viewer and projected it upon the unresisting smoothly unfolding
reel’ and so ensured that ‘conflicts are not conflicts at all’, that
nothing will disrupt the resolution of all conflict within a predeter-
mined timeframe. In this fashion, the culture industry banishes any
possibility of real or unpredictable development, thus in popular
music ‘all the moments that succeed one another in time are more
or less directly interchangeable with one another … there is no real
development’ (1991: 61).
This situation reflects the wider conditions of production, which
are those of standardization and optimization in favour of increasing
profit. Thus the culture industry is a celebration of commodification,
it ‘simply identifies with the cues of predetermination and joyfully
fulfils it’. Here sport, whose centrality to the culture industry is
self-evident, proves paradigmatic. With its exaltation of performance
against the clock as an end in itself, it reveals the internal logic of
mass culture. The athlete ‘in the freedom he exercises over his
body … confirms what he is by inflicting upon this slave the same
injustice he has already endured at the violent hands of society’
(Adorno 1991: 77). Thus, the individual sports person embodies the
coercive optimization that capitalism inflicts on society en masse, this
same process is revealed in the gestures of the actor and the
musician, whose virtuosity is seen as the same soulless cultivation of
performance for its own sake: ‘everyone in front of the microphone
or camera are forced to inflict violence upon themselves. Indeed the
most rewarded are those who do not require this violence to be
exercised upon them in the first place’ (Adorno 1991: 77) – an
appropriate evaluation of the cultural impresarios in Banality TV’s
talent shows (for example, American Idol) who sit in judgement upon
the contestants.

False identity and the high/low art distinction
The notion of the false identity between the general and the
particular marks a crucial point in the conceptualization of the
culture industry, particularly the related distinction it makes between
‘high’ and ‘low’/‘popular’ art and culture. This low/high debate is a
perennial one and it is here that basic misunderstandings of
Adorno’s attitudes to art and its political implications are most
2
commonly found . While it is true to say that he was capable of
making rather sneeringly subjective judgements upon the content of
3
art (his critique of jazz being the most notorious example) , and that

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