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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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