Page 81 - Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction

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The Frankfurt School 65

It is not difficult to think of examples of this process (whether or not we read them in
quite the same way, leftist or neo-conservative). In the 1960s, a bedsit without a poster
of Che Guevara was hardly furnished at all. Was the poster a sign of a commitment to
revolutionary politics or a commitment to the latest fashion (or was it a complicated
mixture of both)? Bennett (1977) provides a telling example of an advertisement
inserted in The Times in 1974:

an advertisement which consisted of a full page colour reproduction of Matisse’s
Le Pont, below which there appeared the legend: ‘Business is our life, but life isn’t
all business.’ Profoundly contradictory, what was ostensibly opposed to economic
life was made to become a part of it, what was separate became assimilated since
any critical dimension which might have pertained to Matisse’s painting was
eclipsed by its new and unsolicited function as an advertisement for the wares of
finance capital (45).

We might also think of the way opera and classical music is used to sell anything
from bread to expensive motorcars (for examples see Table 4.1). Is it possible, for
instance, to hear the second movement from Dvoqák’s New World Symphony, without
conjuring up an image of Hovis bread?
It is not that Marcuse or the other members of the Frankfurt School object to the
‘democratization’ of culture, only that they believe that the culture industry’s ‘assimila-
tion is historically premature; it establishes cultural equality while preserving domina-
tion’ (Marcuse, 1968a: 64). In short, the democratization of culture results in the
blocking of the demand for full democracy; it stabilizes the prevailing social order.
According to the Frankfurt School, work and leisure under capitalism form a com-
pelling relationship: the effects of the culture industry are guaranteed by the nature of
work; the work process secures the effects of the culture industry. The function of the
culture industry is therefore, ultimately, to organize leisure time in the same way as
industrialization has organized work time. Work under capitalism stunts the senses;
the culture industry continues the process: ‘The escape from everyday drudgery which
the whole culture industry promises . . . [is a] paradise ...[of] the same old drudgery . . .
escape ...[is] predesigned to lead back to the starting point. Pleasure promotes the
resignation which it ought to help to forget’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979: 142). In
short, work leads to mass culture; mass culture leads back to work. Similarly, art or
‘authentic’ culture circulated by the culture industry operates in the same way. Only
‘authentic’ culture operating outside the confines of the culture industry could ever
hope to break the cycle.
To make more concrete these general points, I will now examine a specific example
of the Frankfurt School’s approach to popular culture – Adorno’s (2009) essay, ‘On
popular music’. In the essay he makes three specific claims about popular music. First,
he claims that it is ‘standardised’. ‘Standardisation’ as Adorno points out, ‘extends from
the most general features to the most specific ones’ (64). Once a musical and/or lyrical
pattern has proved successful it is exploited to commercial exhaustion, culminating
in ‘the crystallisation of standards’ (ibid.). Moreover, details from one popular song