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Theodor Adorno and the culture industry 81
candidate. As noted above, Adorno saw the culture industry as a
form of ‘psychoanalysis in reverse’ and the theorists of the Frankfurt
School attempted to adapt Freud’s insights regarding the structure
of the individual psyche for a better understanding of mass-media
culture. In contradistinction to psychoanalysis, the culture industry
sought to construct and install complexes within the audience’s
unconscious: ‘the psychoanalytic concept of a multilayered personal-
ity has been taken up by the culture industry … in order to ensnare
the consumer as completely as possible and in order to engage him
psychodynamically in the service of premeditated effects’ (Adorno
1991: 143).
Adorno believed television to be particularly powerful in this
regard, since it raised the creation and control of the collective
unconscious to a new level. This was the result of its status a visual
medium, which bypassed ‘the mediation of the concept’ and acted
directly upon its audience’s subconscious. Adorno countered the
objection that since television is an amalgam of sound and image it
cannot be said to entirely bypass the verbal, by arguing that speech
as rendered on television was effectively subordinated to the image;
it was nothing more than ‘a pure appendage of images … a
commentary on the directives that issue from the image’, its
function comparable to that of the speech balloon in comics
(Adorno 1998: 53). The affective power of the visual hinders
attempts to apprehend the television’s specific influence because
viewers when questioned will always offer rationalized, verbal
responses, for instance, declaring it mere ‘entertainment’. In this
manner, the true consequences of television are literally unspeak-
able. Television’s scopic regime is infantilizing, it induces a literal
regression in the viewer, and in the collective, which is returned to
the darkest and most impulsive strata of the group mind. Television
lulls the viewer with its play of images into a condition of passive
receptivity. It is in every sense the ‘boob tube’ or ‘glass teat’ at which
the infant-viewer suckles in unthinking dependency: ‘Addiction is
regression. The increasing dissemination of visual products plays a
decisive role in regression’ (Adorno 1998: 53). Here Adorno sug-
gests a psychoanalytic source for the often observed parallel between
television and various substances of abuse, such as that made by
Winn:
Not unlike drugs or alcohol, the television experience allows
the participant to blot out the real world and enter into a
pleasurable and passive mental state. … [But] it is the adverse
effect of television viewing on the lives of so many people that
defines it as a serious addiction. … it renders other experiences
vague and curiously unreal while taking on a greater reality for
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