Page 39 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

28 Chapter One

Marienbad, Wag the Dog, The Truman Show, The Matrix trilogy, Pleas-
antville, The Island, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Stranger Than Fiction. On
the one hand, one could argue that in drawing attention to simulations, these
films foster a more critical, more discerning audience, one less likely to be
“duped,” to quote Lawrence Grossberg. Another possibility, however, is that
the films, although undoubtedly amusing and perhaps thought provoking, es-
sentially propagate positions forwarded by scholars like Jean Baudrillard and
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Mark Poster, viz. that since we are now “submerged” in simulations and the
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hyperreal, truth has become an anachronous concept. If this latter interpre-
tation predominates, then the culture industry can be viewed as responding to
audiences’ lingering doubts, which Adorno had noted, by proposing that au-
thenticity itself is a romantic and outmoded concept.
Horkheimer and Adorno suggested also that the leisure industry prolongs
and extends work, because “entertainment” often attunes workers into fitting
the requirements of capitalist society. 100 Adorno gave sports as an example,
speculating that the physical exertion and “functionalization” of the body in
team activity subtly train people into modes of behavior required by the work
place. 101 “Sports,” he wrote, “is not play but ritual in which the subjected cel-
ebrate their subjection; they parody freedom in their readiness for service, a
service which the individual exacts from his own body.” The athlete, he con-
tinued, plays the role of the master by inflicting on his “slave” (his own body)
“the same injustice he has already endured at the violent hands of society.” 102
Sports as indoctrination has been the subject of several studies since the time
of Adorno. 103 More generally, Adorno declared that experiences of mass cul-
ture are “inevitably after-images of the work process itself . . . so profoundly
does mechanization determine the manufacture of leisure goods.” 104
More generally, Adorno claimed that centralized administration had trans-
formed mass culture “into a medium of undreamed of psychological con-
trol.” 105 This it accomplished through positive and negative messages, pre-
scriptions, taboos, schemata, and stereotypes. Stereotypical images and
schematized themes, Deborah Cook explains, enlarging on Adorno, “prevent
individuals from thinking beyond the given.” 106 She claims Adorno was
among the first to compare the products of the culture industry with Nazi
propaganda, arguing that in both cases stereotypes and schemata play upon
the emotions and irrational impulses of mass audiences in order to undermine
their critical and rational thought. 107
For Adorno, products of the culture industry are layered with meanings,
with the hidden layers often being the more important as they bypass the de-
fenses of the consciousness. 108 He wrote: “Probably all the various levels in
mass media involve all the mechanisms of consciousness and unconscious-
ness stressed by psychoanalysis.” 109 Layers of meanings, indeed, constituted