Page 90 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Theodor Adorno and the culture industry 75
low art is this tension that gives the high artwork its power rather
than any easy resolution of the low artwork as a commodity in which
the component parts of the work are merely a microcosm of the
bigger piece and the marketplace beyond it. A specific example of
this would be the way in which the chorus of a pop song tends to
contain the whole song in an abbreviated form and acts as an advert
within the whole song that contains the chorus, but also within the
wider marketing system of adverts and previews that will make use of
that chorus as a sample. What lies behind this tendency of the whole
to be eminently substitutable for the part and vice versa is the status
of low artworks as tensionless commodities from their very origins.

Pre-inscribed commercialism

In stark contrast to high art’s pre-inscribed failure to reconcile the
whole and the part (its inevitably glorious failure to resolve artistic
tension), low art constantly conflates the two by means of the
culturally defining value of the commodity. This condition can be
seen as a cultural expression of the emergence of identity thinking
we have explored above. Thus, just as the potential of the non-
identical is over-coded by equivalence of thought and its object, and
the particularity of the object further subsumed under the concept
of the commodity form, so the artwork and its non-identity (those
aspects of it that challenge and cannot be reconciled with existing
aesthetic forms) is reduced to the predetermined schema of mass
culture. What this process means in current cultural rather than
abstract philosophical terms can be illustrated by the talent-based
television programme American Idol/Pop Idol. Although not strictly
Reality TV, the programme’s ascendancy has occurred with the
context of the former format’s colonization of the screen, the reality
revealed by the various Idol programmes is that of the music industry
and its internal mechanics. It unreservedly wallows in the artifice,
construction and manipulation on which this sector of the culture
industry is predicated, while at the same time democratizing these
techniques, so fusing the ‘reality’ of Reality TV with the realities of
the culture industry. In incorporating the audience within this loop,
Idol shows can be seen as explicit realization of the logic of the
culture industry within a single format. The audience, the per-
former, an apparently minimally mediated ‘reality’ and the industry
are all effortlessly integrated. Here the potential of the non-identical
is not subject to a brutal negation, but to a subtle co-option. In this
fashion, Idol programmes bear witness to the increasingly minimal
space that exists for authentic, spontaneous popular culture. From
hip-hop to the various indigenous musical traditions market brought
under the ‘World Music’ heading, the culture industry is exhaustive

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