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Genesis of “The Culture Industry”

15 January, 2016 - 09:14

In order to understand the creation of the idea of the culture industry as well as its reception the concept can be examined chronologically, from its pre-conditions, through its generation, to its subsequent impact. The idea of the culture industry grows out of a concern with culture, is developed through insights into the mechanical reproduction of culture, and is ultimately generated in opposition not only to popular music, but also to Hollywood movies. That this is so grows out of a number of historical contingencies.

Theordor Wiesengrund enrolled at the University of Frankfurt in 1921 not only to study philosophy, but music. Wiesengrund published in the 1920s and early 1930s under the name Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno, and later took the name Adorno, which had been his mother’s maiden name. According to Thomas Mann, Adorno refused to choose between music and philosophy throughout his entire life, believing that he was pursuing the same objective in two disparate fields (Jäger, 2004, p. 31). Although he wrote his doctoral thesis on Husserl, and a postdoctoral thesis on Kierkegaard, Adorno moved to Vienna to study music composition with Alban Berg. Most of Adorno's music was written between 1925 and 1930, though he continued to compose music for the rest of his life. In addition to composing, Adorno was a music critic and editor of Musikblatter des Anbruch from 1928 to 1932. As a composer and music critic Adorno was aware of conditions relating to the production and dissemination of music in the 1920s and 1930s. This aspect of Adorno’s career is important in understanding his subsequent approach to culture. Because he had a profound knowledge of art, which is great part of culture, his belief what the real art should be like influenced on his criticism against culture industry. To Adorno, the gist of real art is autonomy. Both of the production and the consumption of cultural product should be originated by autonomy which arouses uniqueness of real art. According to Adorno, culture industry which products and consumes the mass cultural product is not based on autonomy but passivity so that it never seeks for uniqueness of real art or culture.

Adorno was introduced to Walter Benjamin in 1923, and the two theorists became friends. Since Benjamin never received a degree that would allow him to teach at a university, according to Hannah Arendt, Adorno became in effect Benjamin's only pupil. After Benjamin’s death it was Adorno who then introduced a rationalized version of his ideas into academic philosophy. (Jäger, 2004, p. 65-6). The relationship with Benjamin had an impact on the development of Adorno's thought during this period.

Returning to Frankfurt, Adorno began teaching at the Institute, and published articles in the Zeitschrift fur Socialforschung (Journal for Social Research) that had been set up by the Institute in 1932. Adorno lost his right to teach in September 1933 due to the rise to power of the Nazi party. Horkheimer had already set up a branch of the Institute in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Institute began operating there. The Nazis' rise to power not only meant that Adorno lost his job and would eventually force his departure from Germany, but also affected his philosophical thought. As Jürgen Habermas would later note, the fact that labor movements were co-opted in the development of fascist regimes was one of the historical experiences influencing the development of critical theory, the others being Stalinist repression and the production of mass culture in the United States (Morris, 2001, p. 48).

Adorno was at Oxford from 1934 to 1938, where he worked on a manuscript on Husserl. He was considered an outsider, never integrating into the British academic mainstream, and he looked forward to joining his Frankfurt School colleagues, many of whom had in the meantime moved to the United States.

Already in the late 1930s Adorno evidenced little hope for mass culture. As propaganda and entertainment increased during the 1930s, Benjamin and Adorno debated mass culture, since film and radio became the two most popular means to disseminate propaganda under the fascist and Stalinist dictatorships. The essay translated as “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression in Listening” is in effect a pessimistic reply to Walter Benjamin’s more optimistic essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Brunkhorst, 1999, p. 62). A primary problem for Adorno lay in the fact that instead of being enjoyed in a concert hall, symphonic works could now be heard over the radio, and could be reproduced on phonograph records. The result was inferior to the original, and Adorno was emphatic in his condemnation of the mechanical reproduction of music: Together with sport and film, mass music and the new listening help to make escape from the whole infantile milieu impossible (Adorno, 2001b, p. 47). While Benjamin regarded the destruction of aura by photograph or film as the emancipation from hierarchical tastes tied to class, to Adorno, the aura of the original artwork was the essential of the artistic authenticity. To Benjamin, the mechanical reproduction was the challenge against the authority of Platonic order from the top-the original or Idea- to down of layers of imitations; to Adorno, mass production was nothing but the destruction of the authenticity. The general attitude of the Frankfurt school was that of Adorno.

In 1938 Max Horkheimer, who had succeeding in establishing a relationship for the Institute of Social Research with Columbia University that enabled the Institute to continue working in New York, obtained a position for Adorno at the Princeton Radio Research Project, run by Paul Lazarsfeld. Adorno, anxious to leave Britain in the hopes of being with other members of the Institute, accepted the position, although he later claimed that he did not know what a “radio project” was. For his part, Lazarsfeld looked forward to working with Adorno, whom he knew to be an expert on music. Adorno wrote for the Project’s journal Radio Research in 1941, reiterating his position that radio was only an image of a live performance. In addition, he questioned the claim by the radio industry that the medium was bringing serious music to the masses (Wiggershaus, 1994, p. 243). While working at the Princeton Radio Research Project Adorno became shocked at the degree to which culture had become commercialized in the United States. Commercialization of culture in the United States had gone far beyond anything he had seen in Europe. Further, the prevalence of advertising in the United States was something with no correlative in Europe. The closest thing in Adorno’s experience to the advertising industry in the United States was fascist propaganda (Jäger, 2004, p. 122).

Adorno was later to allude to his experience with the Princeton Radio Research Project in the essay on the culture industry by noting the statistical division of consumers, and stating that he saw this research as being indistinguishable from political propaganda (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, p. 97). It became obvious that Lazarsfeld and Adorno did not agree on the value of empirical studies, and Adorno left the project. Adorno’s dissatisfaction with the work of the Princeton Radio Research Project would eventually motivate him to further develop the idea of the culture industry.

Because of the relationship between the Institute for Social Research and Columbia University, Horkheimer, who had already moved to California, could not bring Adorno to the West Coast until November 1941. When Adorno was finally able to relocate, he joined an expatriate community that included Fritz Lang, Arnold Schoenberg, Hans Eisler, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Alfred Döblin, and Bertolt Brecht, several of which found work in the Hollywood movie industry. The fact that Adorno was part of this intellectual community whose members were involved in the production of Hollywood movies must have had some influence in developing his thoughts on culture, since the Hollywood system inhibited the creative freedom that many of the expatriates had enjoyed in Weimar Germany.

According to Douglas Kellner, Max Horkheimer wanted to write a “great book on dialectics,” and Herbert Marcuse, who had been admitted to the Institute in 1932, was eager to work on the project. While Horkheimer (and later Adorno) moved to California, Marcuse went to work for the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency), and later the State Department. Thus it was Adorno and not Marcuse who became Horkheimer’s co-author on the project on dialectics (Kellner, 1991, p. xviii). The work that resulted was The Dialectic of Enlightenment, with its section titled “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” drafted by Adorno.

These preconditions—Adorno’s interest in music, his friendship with Benjamin, and his work on the Princeton Radio Project, as well as involvement with the expatriate community in California and the relationship of several of these to the Hollywood film industry—are all important to an understanding of his concern for the idea of the culture industry.