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                             82   Then
                                itself. It weakens relationships by reducing and sometimes
                                eliminating normal opportunities for talking, for communicat-
                                ing.
                                                                          (Winn 1977: 24–5)
                             Given that Adorno’s claims are founded on television’s ability to
                             access the optical unconscious, it could be argued that its effect in this
                             regard would be no greater than that of film. Hence the second
                             factor that Adorno saw as facilitating television’s greater capacity for
                             control. Unlike cinema, which required its audiences to enter a
                             space clearly demarcated from the quotidian, television colonizes the
                             domestic sphere. It becomes an electronic hearth of flickering
                             images around which family life increasingly revolves, while provid-
                             ing a pseudo society for those deprived of the real thing. From this
                             position of centrality television entrains in turn the mind of the
                             individual, the behaviour of the family unit and, by extension, the
                             values of society at large. This infiltration of the private sphere by
                             the culture industry builds upon the achievements of radio, which as
                             we have seen installed a ‘voice from on high’ in every household.
                             Thus Adorno speaks of the power television possess to ‘form a
                             community, to bring family members and friends, who have nothing
                             else to say to each other, mindlessly together’ that is at once
                             satisfying a continuing desire for collectivity and ensuring that those
                             aspects of the latter that threaten the hegemony of the culture
                             industry are neutralized. In this manner, television ‘obscures the real
                             alienation between people and between people and things. It
                             becomes the substitute for the social immediacy which is denied to
                             people. It confuses what is thoroughly mediated, deceptively
                             planned, with the solidarity for which they hunger’ (Adorno 1998:
                             52), Adorno’s words being extremely apposite to the Introduction’s
                             critique of cultural populism and its misguided valorization of ersatz
                             sociability. It is now worth, in anticipation of our later analysis of
                             celebrity culture and Reality TV, considering Adorno’s remarks on
                             the presentation of identity and subjectivity on television.
                                His observations on these arose from a study of scripts for
                             television drama that Adorno carried out for the Hacker Foundation
                             in 1952–53. At this stage of television’s development, the majority of
                             schedule time was given over to dramatic entertainment and, in the
                             absence of the technical means to analyse programs themselves, of
                             necessity, Adorno had to confine himself to their scripts. Not
                             surprisingly Adorno claimed that these scripts revealed a systematic
                             promotion of personality traits fitted to the operations of late
                             capitalism, while at the same time stigmatizing those that implicitly
                             challenged its values. For instance he spoke of the ambivalence of
                             television with regard to the figures of the intellectual and the artist,
                             combining a servile respect for high culture and its geniuses with








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