TyG – Horkheimer & Adorno – 60 years makes a big difference

“Culture today is infecting everything with sameness” claim H & A in their long diatribe, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (41). Seen from their view in the mid-forties, after watching the German nation’s culture, arts, and hopes of world domination come crashing down to ruin, it probably did seem as though the impurity of the predominantly American film industry was spreading like an uncontrollable disease. And the oft-mentioned evil, jazz music, the first truly American art form, seems in their writing like so much yucky byproduct of said disease.

As we’ve discussed in class, it’s true that American culture has become nearly ubiquitous and has redefined the illness of “consumption” from its old meaning of tuberculosis to a new concept of “dying through buying.”

But a chicken in every pot, four televisions in every home, and a Chevrolet in every driveway is simply the latest manifestation of colonization – a hundred-fifty years ago this phenomenon was seen in “God Save the Queen” and “The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire.” Globalization, while chiefly American in its initial expression, does seem to be gaining a multi-cultural mind of its own; Bollywood films are a good example of this fusion, mixing old, British colonial elements, the unique mélange of India, and an unhealthy dose of good, old, American clap-trap.

Again, the only thing new about the spreading effects of conquest is that the American model has been (mainly) an economic rather than a literal war, accelerated by the new technologies available. But the “law of unintended consequences” seems to be taking hold, as those same technologies are creating never-before-seen business models (“The Long Tail”) and offering new artistic outlets for “the little guy” that are so dramatic that we see ridiculous over-reactions like the entertainment industry’s DMCA.

The virus has escaped the lab and is mutating. No one really knows how this will end.