Page 94 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Theodor Adorno and the culture industry 79
speaker’s word, the false commandment, absolute’ (1997: 122). This
perspective led Adorno to reject as naive any quasi-Reithian notions
that radio could instruct or educate its listeners. This is revealed
most clearly in his work for the Princeton Radio Project on attempts
to introduce the masses to classical music via didactic radio pro-
grammes. Adorno (1994) averred that rather than ‘elevating’ its
audience, these misguided, if not downright cynical enterprises,
served only to degrade classical music. Rather than inculcating its
audiences in the art of aesthetic appreciation, radio essentially
‘processed’ classical music; it celebrated the triumph of the con-
sumer, by consuming (in every sense) the classics.
This involved a transposition of the consumptive practices of the
audience (practices in themselves inculcated by the culture industry)
to the ‘appreciation’ of classical music. As previously discussed,
Adorno felt that what most defined genuine aesthetic experience was
a structural tension between part and whole, a tension whose
resolution could only be experienced through a cogitation on the
unfolding of the whole. This demanded a willingness on the part of
the audience to immerse themselves in the work, to concentrate,to
put aside immediate sensory gratification, and endure dissonance
and aesthetic tension so that the whole of what they were an integral
part of might be apprehended. In contrast the culture industry
traffics in immediate gratification, it abandons the structural inter-
play between part and whole in favour of superficial affects, ‘licks’,
melodies, repetitive choruses, and so on. In order to render classical
music acceptable to a mass audience, radio must, Adorno argued,
reduce it to this schema, promoting a superficial charm allied to a
structural poverty. The classics must be decomposed into a succes-
sion of individual motifs. Individual melodies and so on are singled
out and valorized as the choicest moment, and composers whose
oeuvre comes closest to this debased aesthetic become the natural
favourites of culture industry and its audiences. As always in the
culture industry, these formal modifications of cultural artefacts are
commensurate with wider processes and operations. Thus in promot-
ing classical music it flattered its audience, proffering cultural capital
and exploiting the self-image of the audience (a self-image that
other wings of industry sought constantly to undermine). In this
respect it offers an early example of the sort of consumption of signs
instead of referents Jean Baudrillard described as the hallmark of
postmodernity (see Chapter 8).

Television

Adorno’s views about television are, like his views on radio, heavily
dependent on their historical context. In the Dialectic of Enlighten-

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