Politics, literature, and the arts

¶ … public sphere and the culture industry: has the former been fundamentally corrupted through the latter? Are there new possibilities that the culture industry has to offer politics?

The public sphere of artistic discourse is one in which, according to Theodor Adorno, the culture industry sells its commodity goods that masquerade as truth and art. Where the media and world of art should speak to a kind of anti-structured and individualistic discourse, according to Adorno, allowing the words of the artist to rally against the common and stereotyped patterns that are tempting for citizens to fall into, instead the culture industry merely reaffirms and panders to these preexisting tropes, and makes viewers feel comfortable with what they consider to be the truth, although these truths are often of a nature that 'America is good,' or 'America is beautiful.' Adorno's student Habermas, although less skeptical of the Enlightenment than his founding teacher, would suggest that cultural warriors and thinkers as well as artists should rally to the truth rather than to empty cliches.

Both Adorno and Habermas would agree that the culture industry corrupts the public sphere by not simply refusing to encourage thought in the interests of capitalism, but actually stifling the expression of individuals who would think and speak in new ways. In other words, by stuffing the ears, eyes, and minds of the public discourse with sentiment, the public's energies are directed away from real works of art and the real truths of science and politics. In a place where time and money are finite, commodity goods become attractive to consumers' time, and are bought in shows of superficial cultural display, or as manufactured displays of wealth, bought for show or exhibiting one's wealth's sake alone ('Look how much I spent on a movie ticket! But the film won an Academy Award! The critics loved it!) People consume culture with an interest in the commodity, rather than what the artistic products actually say in and of themselves, or what the products reveal about society in a critical fashion.

Thus in his essay upon "The Culture Industry Reconsidered" Theodor Adorno puts forth the thesis that the culture industry and modern life remains a relatively corrupt institution, in terms of its ability to impinge upon the artistic freedom and creativity of modernist music, art, and filmmaking. Yet the documentary on Vietnam directed by Peter Davis "Hearts and Minds" was an Academy Award-winning work (a commodity-generated award ceremony that is a product of modern Hollywood and fuels the media machines of money that fuels Hollywood) that confronted rather than endorsed the United States' involvement in Vietnam. The film was designed to make the viewer uncomfortable rather than comfortable in his or her sense of being an American.

Rather than manufactured sources of media production, Davis deployed real life interviews and newsreels to create a montage of documentary footage that presented an anti-heroic portrait of the conflict. The documentary used real life rather than false life to suggest to audiences watching the film from home that the American ideals of freedom were bankrupt. The title of the film came from a quote from Lyndon Johnson, designed for media propaganda but ironically deployed in the film: "The ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people who actually live out there." The President's statement gives the film its title also parodies war rhetoric in general.