CC- Dispair with Adorno and Horkheimer

I’ve been known to be quite a pessimist at times, but Horkheimer and Adorno have me beat in that arena. Though I can be a raging naysayer, there was definitely a time when naivety crept in enough to give me some optimistic thoughts. One of the most solid of those thoughts being that art can wake people up, cause a ruckus, and eventually change a failing cultural consciousness. Well, thanks postmodernism for depressing me once again! Not to say that whatever these men say goes, but they make a sound argument as far as I can see. It’s terrifying to think that this argument was laid out over sixty years ago and it still fits, in fact, it fits much better. Hollywood, television, and all parts of the culture industry are hegemonically keeping us in our places. Almost every film and/or movie we can “choose” to go see these days has one main purpose, to teach us how to be better consumers. Consumers of fear, goods, desire, you name it- as long as consumption is involved, and lots of it!
The most startling part of this argument wasn’t really this notion that art is dead because of the culture machine (anyone with the power for the slightest observation can see that). Instead, what really got me is the authors’ notion of the avant-garde (yet again). Whereas Habermas kind of stated that the avant-garde was ineffective and then just let the idea kind of swim around above our heads, Horkheimer and Adorno really flush this notion out in a way that gives me goose bumps. According to these men, even if an artist attempts to break the labels and pigeonholes that the culture industry leaves us to work with she/he is still playing right into the hands of the system! There is no way out kids, throw away your pens and brushes, get on your knees and hail the culture machine. It was a dark thirty pages this week. Furthermore, there is no illusion. “Those in charge no longer take much trouble to conceal the structure, the power of which increases the more bluntly its existence is admitted” (42). Well, I take that back. There IS illusion, but the only illusion is that A is different somehow from B. I’ll go shop at this store because it’s my style and you go shop at that store over there because it is your style. The culture industry keeps us saturated with limitless choices so that are heads spin and we begin to think we are thinking for ourselves. We come to believe that we “discovered” a neat new author, restaurant, movie or whatever when, in fact, it was perfectly placed there for us to consume according to research about what demographic would enjoy this form of entertainment, where can we trap them, where are they centralized in the town, state, country…. You get the picture.
So now what? We are blind sheep reaching our hands out for the new and exciting item which is presumably no different than the new and exciting item from 1944. Everything we consume that we think is “unique” and everything we create that we think is going to make some kind of difference, all of this is precategorized there is a place for everything within the system, a place for everything except change (or so it seems). Once again I’ve become frustrated. Not because I don’t agree, but because I DO agree with a large portion of this argument. I see it unfolding in front of me everywhere I go. Is it really enough just to be aware of this? I can’t help but want to find a loophole in the system, a safe place where art isn’t tainted entirely by capitalism. Today I feel like the ant squished under someone’s shoe, I feel like we are all those ants.
The other day a good friend of mine told me he was having a conversation with a friend of a friend and she said, “I think Saved by the Bell was the best representation of cultural diversity, don’t you?” We talked for a while about this woman’s belief, we both disagreed. Thinking about it now, I see Adorno and Horkheimer’s thesis at work in her naivety. Another example would be the BET station. An isolated white person in, I dunno, Arkansas can make all of his/her assumptions about black culture based on watching BET, a station that simply perpetuates ONE and only ONE stereotype of black American culture, you must like rap music. There are even white artists on BET, because as long as they are performing rap music… well, then it must be part of black culture (but you will hardly ever see a black rock music performer or even jazz for that matter!!). The Culture Industry creates these stereotypes, perpetuates them, and leaves little room for “real” culture so that people don’t run around saying things like “Saved by the Bell is a perfected example of cultural diversity.” Sigh. But who knows, maybe the girl is right. Maybe things just have accelerated to that point of high terror where the only hope we can have for a real cultural diversity or a true artistic expression must come from an awfully crude representation of society through a cancelled television sitcom from the 1980’s…. excuse me, I have to put the flames out that are consuming my head.