Page 36 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Genealogy of Political Economy 25

and hence this practice can be understood as affirming Adorno’s essential po-
sition: “The successful adoption of a lifestyle is only possible, only recogniz-
able as such on the basis of conformity,” Crook writes. Indeed, he goes fur-
ther to suggest that “postmodernizing change might be seen as intensifying,
rather than relaxing, pressures toward dependency and conformism through
the demand for information.” 72
For Adorno, the culture industry has become a “totality” through which
“the whole world is made to pass,” 73 so much so that it now controls both
“high” and “low” art, obscuring or effacing demarcations that for centuries
had delimited the two. 74 In previous eras, according to Adorno, high art
served the noble function of critique by providing “negative knowledge of
the actual world.” 75 (Prime examples of this, one might interject, were the
Dadaist painters and sculptors of the 1920s in Weimar Germany, prior to the
tight state control of art for propagandistic purposes. ) Fulfilling the impor-
76
tant role of critique was possible, according to Adorno, only because and to
the extent that artists were free from pressures to conform. To be sure, in both
the Middle Ages and the Renaissance there had often been a “unity of style,”
as influenced by the respective structures of social power. Nonetheless,
Adorno insisted, the truly great artists frequently transcended conformist
pressures. However, contemporaneous with the rise of mass media, which is
to say with the birth of the culture industry, “high art” became transformed.
Retaining still perhaps vestiges of its venerable critical function, high art now,
for the most part, reveals “obedience to the social hierarchy;” it has become
77
little more than mere style. Contemporary high art is renowned less for its
“autonomous essence,” or for its “own specific content and harmonious for-
mation,” than for its money value attributable to its role as status symbol. 78
Adorno and Horkheimer summarized: “The prestige seeker replaces the con-
noisseur. . . . No object [today] has an inherent value; it is valuable only to the
extent that it can be exchanged.” 79
“Low” or popular art likewise is diminished, in Adorno’s view. No longer
the authentic voice of working people, low art has been taken over and com-
modified by the culture industry. Through easy replication, mass distribution,
and centralized administration, mass culture is packaged “as a commodity for
narcissistic consumption,” 80 depriving individuals “from coming to con-
sciousness of themselves as subjects.” 81

Dialectic of Art
Music, like all art, for Adorno, is intrinsically dialectical. On the one hand,
music is “the immediate manifestation of impulse;” on the other, it is “the lo-
cus of its taming.” By expressing impulse, for instance, impulse is “tamed.”
82