Page 98 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

JOBNAME: McGraw−TaylorHarris PAGE: 22 SESS: 9 OUTPUT: Mon Oct 8 09:03:55 2007 SUM: 500DCFA8
/production/mcgraw−hill/booksxml/tayharris/chap03

Theodor Adorno and the culture industry 83
the profound contempt it displayed when it portrayed them on the
screen. Intellectuals and artists were represented as effeminate, weak
or morbidly sensitive, as the antithesis of the decisive, upright,
square-jawed man of action: television drama ‘glorifies the virile
man … and insinuates that all artists are in fact homosexual’
(Adorno 1998: 64). Similarly it policed expressions of female subjec-
tivity, vilifying the ‘good time girl’ and the over-assertive ‘shrewish’
self-directed women, upholding a traditional image of women as
subordinate. Talking of television farce or situation comedies (sit-
coms), Adorno identifies a structural reconciliation to the violence
of late capitalism. Broadly stated, this can be understood in terms of
an objectively exploitative or immiserized situation, within which the
characters both struggle to survive and escape. Humour is generated
from their attempts at doing this (we might think for example of the
Trotter family in the classic British sit-com Only Fools and Horses who
each week appear to have found a means to escape their poverty but
who at the end of each episode are firmly relocated in their
position, with humour and family ties held up as compensation).
For Adorno the ideological message of such farces was the
absolute futility of challenging the objective structure. Put simply,
one might as well laugh because structural change is an impossibility.
In this fashion, television drama both exposed and concealed the
underlying logic of capitalism; indeed through it, late capital, like a
tyrant that homeopathically eliminates the threat of poisoning by
immunizing themselves through the consumption of small doses of a
given poison, absorbs and neutralizes discourses and desires that
threaten to challenge the status quo. This is most clearly revealed in
the case of psychoanalysis, which had at the time of Adorno’s studies
made considerable inroads into the American cultural landscape,
acting as an explanatory device for the motives of characters and
providing a thematic framework in Hollywood films. Adorno argued
that this adaptation of psychoanalytic themes and theories served the
purpose of conjuring away the threat that it might otherwise
constitute. This was achieved through the presentation of superficial
psychoanalytic motifs whose aim was their subsumption within tradi-
tional notions of identity and morality: ‘The psychological process
that is put on view is fraudulent … psychoanalysis … is reduced and
reified in a way that not only expresses disdain for this type of praxis
but changes its meaning into its very opposite’ (Adorno 1998: 65).

Conclusion
This chapter has demonstrated how Adorno and Horkheimer’s
Dialectic of Enlightenment provides a solid theoretical foundation for a
critical account of the mass media, one which locates the latter

Kerrypress Ltd – Typeset in XML A Division: chap03 F Sequential 22

www.kerrypress.co.uk - 01582 451331 - www.xpp-web-services.co.uk
McGraw Hill - 152mm x 229mm - Fonts: New Baskerville