Horkheimer/Adorno, Benjamin, Lowenthal Each of the Writers

Horkheimer/Adorno, Benjamin, Lowenthal

Each of the writers in this week's readings -- Horkheimer and Adorno in their essay "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," Walter Benjamin in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," and Leo Lowenthal in his essay "Historical Perspectives of Popular Culture" -- are writing from a mid-twentieth-century perspective on what new media are doing to "culture" overall. To a certain degree we could summarize their perspectives by suggesting that Horkheimer and Adorno, as well as Benjamin, take an overall pessimistic stance, while Lowenthal takes a moderately more optimistic stance. But in all cases, the issues raised by these authors still seem to be with us more than half a century later.

Horkheimer and Adorno begin with their provocative title, "The Culture Industry." Their purpose is to demonstrate that cultural products have become subsumed in a capitalist -- which is to say industrialist -- paradigm. Their concern is that this new paradigm -- which is concerned with large-scale production and mass consumption -- has replaced the older system of what was called "art." They challenge the notion that popular art -- for example, Hollywood cinema -- is popular because it is in any way good or valuable art. Instead they see it as eliminating all elements of conflict (where the industrial products of Hollywood might in some way challenge their audiences or present difficult ideas, concepts, or arguments) and instead have replaced older forms of art (which did include such difficulties) simply because of their integration with existing means of industrial mass-production, and the near-total control of Hollywood studios over the production and distribution of films. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the dominance of Hollywood is close to the dangerous alliance between national ideology and capitalist-industrial production in a society like Nazi Germany: the passive consumption of Hollywood products conceals a goal of "obedience to the social hierarchy" (131), and they compare Hollywood to explicitly Nazi policies where "advertising becomes art and nothing else, just as Goebbels -- with foresight -- combines them, l'art pour l'art, advertising for its own sake, a pure representation of social power" (163).

Benjamin has a similar critique, but he focuses less on the concealed ideology of mass-produced art (as Horkheimer and Adorno do), and instead focuses on the technological changes. For Benjamin, art once had an "aura" which comprised both a sense of uniqueness but also a sense of authenticity. As the invention of photography starts to have an effect on the art of painting, however, it becomes clear that the "aura" of art has become threatened -- in Benjamin's words, "the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice -- politics" (226). Thus, the mechanically reproducible media like film and photography instead start to contain a political or ideological content. But for Benjamin, the mechanically-reproducible art also summons up the spectre of Nazi Germany because the Nazis aestheticized culture and politics both -- Nazism, in his reading, is itself a kind of mass-producted artistic phenomenon, which conceals its true purposes behind artistically well-produced and emotionally appealing mythology.