Page 91 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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76 Then
both in its pursuit of novelty, and in its elimination/commodification
of any lingering trace of potential resistance.
It has been observed that Adorno and Horkheimer’s vision was
formulated as an indirect rebuttal of Benjamin’s Essay. Benjamin
talked of the extirpation of ‘aura’ (and an elitist order that sustained
itself, in part, by reference to its authority) as a result of technical
media, and believed this to represent the conditions for the advent
of an authentic popular culture, made for the masses by the masses.
In contrast, Adorno argued that, rather than a release from aura,
the culture industry and its technologies resulted in culture’s total
fetishization, resulting in the triumph of a false reality. The culture
industry is no liberation, it is not a mass culture in the sense of an
authentic expression of the desires and dreams of the masses, but
rather a determining system that directs the nature of these desires.
It is even able to attempt to redefine for commercial purposes reality
itself – this is the root of Reality TV and the seemingly natural way
it commodifies more and more aspects of social life without ever
appearing to be doing so as a deliberate ideological process:
Reality becomes its own ideology through the spell cast by its
faithful duplication. This is how the technological veil and the
myth of the positive is woven. If the real becomes an image
insofar as in its particularity it becomes as equivalent as to the
whole as one Ford car is to all the others of the same range,
then the image, on the other hand, turns into immediate
reality.
(Adorno 1991: 55)

This ‘technological veil’ whose final realization is the virtual reality
of the mass-media spectacle is the result of the ongoing concretiza-
tion of identity thinking in the form of technology. The ‘excess
power which technology as a whole, along with the capital that
stands behind it, exercises over every individual thing’ (Adorno
1991: 55). The principle that serves to align the sphere of culture
with the large changes brought about by synergistic operation of
technology and capital is standardization.
For Adorno and Horkheimer, standardization is the culture indus-
try’s primary characteristic. It is a process of unification which
eliminates the particularity of a multitude of individual cultures and
aesthetic traditions, in order that they may pass into the circuits of
distribution and consumption. Since culture in all its forms can be
seen as mediating between the microcosom of the individual subject
(either as a creative artist or as a member of an audience) and
society as whole (in the form of the materials and traditions or as
the audience to which any given work of art is directed), it is of vital
importance in consolidating the grip of industrial capitalism. Cul-
ture’s status as the interface between the individual and society as it

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