Page 69 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

Culture industry: The notion of the ‘culture industry’ is associated with the work of
the quasi-Marxist Frankfurt School and their version of critical theory. Indeed,
Adorno and Horkheimer wrote a famous essay called ‘The Culture Industry –
46 Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, a title that sums up their line of thinking on the
matter. Published in 1946, the essay argues that culture is dominated by the
commodities produced by the culture industry and that these commodities, while
purporting to be democratic, individualistic and diversified, are in actuality
authoritarian, conformist and highly standardized. Thus the culture industry
impresses the same stamp on everything and produces an apparent diversity of
products only so that ‘none may escape’.
For example, Adorno regarded the popular music of the 1940s as stylized, lacking
in originality and requiring little effort by its audience. For Adorno, the aim of
standardized music is standardized reactions that affirm life as it is, including the
structuring of the human psyche into conformist ways. He argued that the culture
industry, in tandem with the family, produces ‘ego weakness’ and the ‘authoritarian
personality’. By contrast, critical art is said by Adorno to be a form of expression that
is not oriented to the market but which challenges the standards of intelligibility
of a reified society. Thus Adorno contrasts what he thinks of as the critical music of
Schoenberg with the alleged conformism of jazz.
A more contemporary use of the term ‘culture industry’ may not necessarily refer
to the work of the Frankfurt School but more simply to the production of popular
music, film, television and fashion by transnational capitalist corporations. Here
one is concerned with the political economy of culture. That is, with issues of who
owns and controls the institutions of economy, society and culture and the way in
which the corporate ownership and control of the culture industries moulds
contemporary culture. In this sense the study of the culture industries forms a
necessary part of cultural studies. Nevertheless, many cultural studies writers have
wanted to argue that the meaning of culture cannot be reduced to a concern with
political economy but must also focus on the domain of consumption where
consumers generate their own meanings. Thus, consideration of culture as an
industry raises a series of questions about cultural materialism and the
commodification of culture but also about creative consumption and the dangers
of reductionism.
Links Circuit of culture, commodification, cultural materialism, political economy,
reductionism