Page 92 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Theodor Adorno and the culture industry 77
is taken up by the culture industry results in the description of the
latter as ‘psychoanalysis in reverse’. While psychoanalysis engaged in
the identification and integration of unconscious mechanisms with
the aim of healing the individual, the culture industry, through the
capacity of cultural forms to influence the unconscious, identified
the same mechanisms but sought to obscure their processes and
draw upon their power in order to produce more compliant
consumers. In this regard, the provision of culture was only part of
the industry’s output, it also manufactured the public that consumed
them, and in doing this served to replicate and consolidate the
system as a whole. It was for this reason that Adorno did not share
Benjamin’s hope in the possibility of an autonomous mass culture.
Adorno believed that the mass was a product of the culture industry,
and that the culture it consumed was simply a consequence of the
kind of individual it created. Thus the industry was disingenuous in
claiming that it did nothing more than give its audience what it
desired: it had created that audience, down to the level of the
individual’s affective responses and aesthetic sensibility. This was true
of both consumer and producer: those who worked in the culture
industry were incapable of genuine creativity, because their own
sensibilities had been programmed to the dictates of the industry
long before they entered its service.

Adorno applied: radio and television

Radio

Like much of his media theory, Adorno’s observations on radio issue
from a particular historical context, vividly evoked in the following
passage:

The radio becomes the universal mouthpiece of the Fuhrer; his
voice rises from street loudspeakers to resemble the howling of
sirens announcing panic – from which modern propaganda can
scarcely be distinguished anyway. The National Socialists knew
that the wireless gave shape to their cause just as the printing
press did to the Reformation. The metaphysical charisma of the
Fuhrer invented by the sociology of religion has finally turned
out to be no more than the omnipresence of his speeches on
the radio. The gigantic fact that the speech penetrates every-
where replaces its content.
(Adorno and Horkheimer 1997: 159)

Having left Nazi Germany, where radio had become an important
instrument in the dissemination of propaganda, Adorno was

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