Page 95 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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80 Then
ment, he and Horkheimer wrote in anticipation of television (as
opposed to reflecting on a established medium) and described it in
terms of a monstrous realization of Wagner’s dream of the Gesa-
mtkunstwerk – the ultimate fusion of all the arts in single work:
Television aims at a synthesis of radio and film, and is held up
only because the interested parties have not yet reached
agreement, but its consequences will be … that by tomorrow
the thinly veiled identity of all industrial products can come
triumphantly out into the open.
(Adorno and Horkheimer 1997: 124)

While his comments on radio reflect its golden age and grant it a
centrality it has not held for more than half a century, Adorno’s
later observations on television (Adorno 1998) date from the early
days of American broadcast television, and as a result are either
speculative or confirm the general tenor of his vision of the culture
industry. Given this, we cannot realistically expect Adorno’s analysis
to conform to today’s multi-channel, narrowcast televisual ecology;
nevertheless he did identify a number of trends that have proven to
be enduring characteristics of the medium. He glimpsed in the
advent of television the dimension of the ‘spectacle’ or ‘hyperreality’
that later media theorists were to develop. In keeping with his and
Horkheimer’s prognosis, Adorno argues that television does not
disrupt or alter in any significant way the culture industry but,
rather, it occupies the place this industry has prepared for it.
Indeed, Adorno seems to question whether it is even possible to
differentiate television’s characteristics or qualities from the media
that pre-date it: ‘one should not exaggerate the specific character of
television productions … their similarity to films attests to the unity
of the culture industry: it hardly makes any difference where it [the
culture industry] is tackled’ (Adorno 1998: 60). Whatever factors
may be attributed to television alone in fact have their origin in the
latter’s position within the culture industry.
From this perspective, television’s significance resides in its revela-
tion of the fundamental trajectory of the culture industry, namely,
‘to transform and capture the consciousness of the public from all
sides’ and so ‘approach the goal of possessing the entire sensible
world … in a copy satisfying every sensory organ’ while ‘inconspicu-
ously smuggling into this duplicate world whatever is thought to be
advantageous for the real one’ (Adorno 1998: 49). Television’s
particularity is elusive because it represents a new threshold in the
operations of the culture industry as a whole – the fusion of media
and environment, or what Debord would come to describe as the
society of the spectacle. If we are to identify an individual trait or
function for television in Adorno’s account, it seems that its relation-
ship with the individual and collective unconscious is the best

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