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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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