By Melinda Herman
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s seminal essay The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception analyses the relationship between 20th century capitalism, its manifestation in the media industry, and modern artforms by positioning film and radio as central targets of inquiry. Their account links both artforms to advertising, described largely as a self-supporting, subsumptive extension of the culture industry into society. In the final pages of the essay, the question of linguistic being in modernity is centralised, shifting their discussion of advertising into a distinctly ontological context. This being-related argument hinges on the ramifications of “the layer of experience which made words human […] [having] been stripped away.” [1] In this essay, I will argue that this moment of linguistic turn indicates a deeper relationship between the culture industry and language; in particular, one that can be extended to account for the position of literature within the modern culture industry. To do so, I begin with a close analysis of the theoretical background of advertising in Culture Industry, as tied to the relationship between the instantiation of universality and particularity in art, and its position as a consumptive object under modern capitalism. I then use this to motivate an argument that Culture Industry’s description of advertising can be expanded to form the basis of a philosophy of language, one that depicts language as hollowed out under the culture industry’s specific form of meaning-related reification. Finally, I integrate a relatively obscure essay by Adorno, The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel, as a means of linking my analysis of language to Adorno’s conception of the novel’s formal function. Given this excavation of language within the theoretical framework of Culture Industry, I aim to prove that the immediate ramification for literature is a loss of formal function, incapability to meaningfully describe lived reality, and a collapse into hollow representationalism.
Adorno and Horkheimer’s Culture Industry centralises itself around a diagnosis of cultural sameness, described as a “[crystallisation of living cells] into homogenous, well-organised complexes”[2] directed by the culture industry’s ideological ubiquity. This characterisation is intrinsic to Adorno’s discussion of advertising and language. In Adorno’s analysis, cultural sameness lends itself to a biopolitical reduction of discrete individuals into a self-supporting replication of capitalist ideology. Biopolitics, on this reading, refers to the culture industry’s self-maintenance through ideologically instantiated control over its audience’s lived, physical being. The culture industry weaponizes the artforms it controls to influence audience’s subjective relationships to mass media and art more broadly. To do so, itreduces human subjectivity in its audience to an “exhaustive formula”[3] where individuals are treated merely as “intersections of universal tendencies:”[4] a form of control rooted in behaviourist logic. That is, the culture industry relies on generalisations of audiences’ affective responses to mass media to gauge an artwork’s usefulness to its social control. This formulaic reduction manifests itself in what Adorno refers to as a “false identity of universal and particular.”[5] By treating the audience’s general behaviour and personal relationship to the media as homogenous, the culture industry monopolises affective subjectivity as a pillar of capitalist ideological dominance. The intersection of the culture industry’s biopolitics and behaviourism results in the audience’s particularity – the lived uniqueness and specificity intrinsic to living individuals –becoming replaced by homogenous formulae. This universalising tendency, the subsumption of subjectivity under general, functionally idealised norms, is linked by Adorno to an historically traceable epistemology of domination, rooted in Enlightenment modes of teleological rationality. Thus, the culture industry’s ideological dominance manifests itself in a universal replication of its preferred mode of being, across society itself, and in spite of the particularity of the people living under it.
The culture industry’s ubiquity, the infective sameness in question, manifests itself in dominion over media by executive-economic powers, facilitating a “common determination […] to let nothing pass which does not conform to […] their concept of […] themselves.”[6] The homogeneity implied in this goal, wherein the culture industry forces conformity to its own constitutive principles, drives an otherwise diverse cultural landscape into repetitive sameness. Diversity of artistic mode, method, and intent become rigid under the culture industry’s influence, and the subject implicit in artistic expression becomes an object of capitalist consumption. Subjectivity in both artistic intent and the audience’s relationship to artwork itself must, under modern capitalism, conform to the culture industry’s preferred type of being, meaning that truly individualistic and subjective expression is suppressed under the culture industry’s control. If the culture industry has the final decision on what media and narratives are conveyed and released as cultural artifacts, and they act to force hegemonic conformity through art, then the artists involved in its creation cannot create freely. Following from this, as a supportive pillar of the culture industry’s dominion, art is translated into a mode of ideological instantiation. Audiences consume media and internalise only a specific, highly regulated ideology. Art is transformed from a subjective expression of lived particularity into a universally consumable product of capitalist hegemony. Furthermore, by linking artistic purpose to behavioural outcomes, the culture industry forces a reduction of conceptual depth and meaning. Instead of acting to convey the intricacies of being through artistic expression, artforms become hollowed out until only a material signification between art and behaviour remains. Thus, by acting consumptively on art, the culture industry reduces artforms to objects instead of loci of intersubjective meaning.
The culture industry in this consumption-driven form acts with one primary goal: an inescapable reproduction of its particularity, universalised in human beings through the culture industry’s dominating whole. Interestingly, this act blurs the line between universals and particulars; the culture industry is a manifestation of a highly particular mode of domination, one which acts to instil a universalised homogeneity on culture, thereby reducing the particularity of its audiences to behavioural universality. Because of the strict ideological conformity the culture industry exerts, it acts both as a particular and universal, while reducing human particularity to its highly specific homogeneity. Adorno’s approach, thus, becomes tied to analysis of the relation between particulars and universals, as manifested in the simultaneous rigidification and collapse of concept-thing or subject-object dichotomies. Concepts are reduced to things, and subjects – both of art and society – become objectified under the culture industry’s hegemony. Adorno’s staunch opposition to this universalising sameness can be further linked to humanity’s relation to material reality. Cultural harmony – which is, according to Adorno, most strongly manifest in the technological mediums of film and radio – acts to superimpose a false sense of catharsis onto audiences. This false catharsis is a central ideology “[participating] in the maintenance of capitalism through the neutralisation [of emancipation from cultural sameness and domination].”[7] Thus, one of the central diagnostic purposes of Culture Industry is to delimit the boundaries of the culture industry’s reach, while assessing the subsumption of the individual into a universalised particularity. Furthermore, this tension between particulars and universals acts most strongly in a reproductive, biopolitically reductive manner; conceptual expression and heterogenous reality become homogenised along with human particularity. Thus, sameness as an object of capitalism, the ‘thing’ being produced under the culture industry, takes over from the human as a subjective agent and, correspondingly, shatters conceptual depth in artistic expression.
Adorno extrapolates from this notion of culture – entirely bound to capitalism’s commercial use – to develop his understanding of advertisement, from which he derives his understanding of language’s collapse into referentialism. Culture’s commodification becomes paradoxical insofar as its position as an object of exchange and use becomes so exhausted that it is “no longer exchanged […] [and] can no longer be used.”[8] If the sameness of media becomes totalising, as Adorno argues, then the function and use of those technical artforms becomes void. Any particularity within film or radio, after a given period, turns formulaic, and the pleasure the culture industry promotes itself through is relegated to “mere promise, […] [a homogenous] inability to please.”[9] Because technical artforms, in this sense, are unable to promote themselves based on intellectual, artistic, or experiential merit, “advertising [becomes the culture industry’s] elixir of life”[10] and the only means of justifying artistic output. Advertising is, therefore, a negative principle – its pervasiveness effectively disguises its purpose and masks its position as the foundational “blocking device”[11] that regulates ideological content released under the culture industry. However, to act effectively as both a blocking device and means of justifying the culture industry’s output, advertising necessarily relies on cross-cultural reach, invading as many aspects of society as it can. The culture industry’s homogeneity, thus, becomes visibly manifest in advertising.Advertising promulgates an invisible domination over expression, positioning itself evenly throughout the visual landscape of reality. This totality – “advertising for advertising’s sake, the pure representation of social power”[12] – thereby makes the visual distribution of reality a means to an end: architecture and public spaces become the unwitting canvas of advertising’s symbolic domination. The ubiquity of film and radio under the culture industry thus extends itself outwards into every facet of life, as tied to the industry’s “organisation of living cells” and universalising homogeneity. Advertisement’s capacity to invade public space, along with its use as a means of securing mass media’s cultural power, links it to the culture industry’s use of biopolitical, behaviourist modes of social control. It acts as the first step in the culture industry’s ideologically suppressive catharsis – the means through which culture becomes rigidly tied to mass media. Advertising, as the culture industry’s regulating force, becomes an uncontrollable means of cultural dominion.
In Adorno’s analysis, language becomes integral to advertisement’s power, but also irreparably damaged through its subsumption under it. Spoken language is, on one hand, customers’ “own contribution to culture as advertising.”[13] On the other, the more commercialised and directly correlated with advertising language becomes, the “more words change from substantial carriers of meaning to signs devoid of qualities.”[14] Thus, the culture industry neatly ties language to its self-perpetuation, while functionally degrading language’s capacity to mean something. Adorno links this linguistic degradation to the ‘demythologising of language,’ which is a repeated theme in his broader critiques of representationalism: “the idea that language is to be thought exclusively in terms of its ability to accurately represent reality.”[15] When words were ‘magic,’ the word itself and the content implied by saying the word were interrelated, but, importantly, distinct. The example Adorno gives to evidence this collapse of word and meaning is that conceptual words like melancholy, history, and life, which used to be both apprehended and sustained by use of their words are now “banished as unclear and as verbal metaphysics.”[16] Adorno’s examples are notably non-concrete, in the sense that they describe meaningful parts of reality but do not correlate directly to a discrete object. Because of this collapse, signification – the conceptual strength of words, or their meaning-making capacity – is made redundant, and words become bare referents linked only to a material sign. The meaning-making shadow behind words, which adds depth, precision, and richness to linguistic understanding and communication, becomes stripped away, and “everything else [entailed in the word] […] withers in reality also.”[17] In Adorno’s words, “language takes on the coldness […] peculiar to billboards and the advertising sections of newspapers.”[18]
Taken in conjunction with Adorno’s broader linguistic theory – where language is a form of “social production/reproduction, […] always yoked to relations of power”[19] – language’s signifying capacity can be linked to the expansion of sameness under the culture industry. Adorno argues that “all deceiving ontology is especially to be exposed by means of a critique of language.”[20] If language loses its specificity, as manifested through signification, then human beings’ capacity to articulate particularity disintegrates, and humanity’s capacity to understand the culture industry itself, is drastically impinged upon if not outright eliminated. This combined notion of linguistic reduction and bare reference is critical to Adorno’s diagnosis of the culture industry’s power. If the only things that can be described by language are material, then abstract systems of domination, like the culture industry, are inoculated from critique and dissolution. The culture industry’s elimination of meaning within language can be summarised as follows: words become rigidly linked to discrete, material things, and cannot designate meaning, breaking the bond between experience and its meaningful communication through language. This is both the product of and supporting mechanism for advertisement under the culture industry, and, thus, its social domination.
Despite the deeply important role language plays in Culture Industry, related to both advertisement’s perpetuation of culture and a degradation of meaning-making within lived reality, Adorno’s in-essay discussion of modern artforms does not include literature. However, by extrapolating outwards from the position of language in Culture Industry through comparison to a later essay by Adorno – The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel – the linguistic conclusions drawn can be directly applied to Adorno’s conception of literature in the 20th century, allowing for the development of a theory of the culture industry’s impact on literature. The first, most immediate, link between Adorno’s stance in Culture Industry and Position of the Narrator is that, as the literary form “specific to the bourgeois age, [the novel’s primary function is] […] the artistic treatment of mere existence.”[21] Thus, it deals directly with the focal point of analysis in Culture Industry: the particularity of human existence as unique. Implicitly, this corresponds to the aforementioned tension between universals and particulars, translated into an artform whose functional structure derives itself from lived reality. Adorno’s primary argument, based on this understanding of the novel, is that narrational position is, in the 20th Century, marked by a paradox: “it is no longer possible to tell a story, but the form of the novel requires narration.”[22] If novels rely on narration to convey an artistic interpretation of existence, but novels are unable to tell this story, then Adorno’s conception of literature positions it as at risk. Adorno extrapolates outwards from this position in Position of the Narrator, arguing that in modernity, the “identity of experience […], a life that is articulated and possesses internal continuity […] has disintegrated,”[23] marking the decline of the “only thing that made the narrator’s stance possible.”[24] Adorno explicitly links this decline to the “administered world,”[25] along with the “universal alienation and self-alienation”[26] intrinsic to modernity. Alienation in this sense is definable as a cultural separation from lived particularity. By reducing culture to a homogenous self-repetition, the culture industry acts to reduce the meaning and phenomenological importance of intersubjective, interpersonal experiences to mere behavioural output. Its reification of meaning in language, as well as meaning in art, translates into the loss of the ability to articulate specificity in abstract terms. This then translates into a reduction of social bonds – often described in conceptual and non-concrete language – into strictly objectified relations. On Adorno’s account, modernity’s unique mode of alienation puts the specificity of lived being into conflict with the culture industry’s universalising and dominating tendencies. These characterisations link firmly to Adorno’s Culture Industry, implicitly invoking the loss of meaning derived from advertising, and the ubiquity of sameness enforced by mass media which characterises his diagnosis.Thus, the collapse of Enlightenment-era teleologies, institutionalisation of sameness under the culture industry, and, moreover, advertising, has drawn the content and form of the novel into disarray and superficiality. The position of literature in modernity is thus characterised by the same forces of cultural domination that influenced the decline of language, making explicit an avenue through which to link the two arguments.
Language within the novel, if subject to the same meaning-making decline as broad language in Culture Industry, will find itself capable only of describing things, and not experiential, non-discrete reality. The ramifications of this extension of the Culture Industry onto the novel form is bleak. The immediate linguistic breakdown is clearly evidenced in Position of the Narrator, with Adorno arguing that “the novel’s rebellion against realism [manifests in] rebellion against discursive language”[27] – mirroring Adorno’s critique of representationalism. Through the culture industry’s destruction of meaning in language, the narrative’s collapse into representationalism, and hierarchy imposed by things over concepts, pushes the tenuous position of novel form into an abolition of the “difference between the real and the imago […] in principle.”[28] The imago, as conveyed in novel form, becomes synonymous with the real – words’ loss of signification translates to literature’s subsumption into strict representationalism. Both the narrator and audience are forced to acknowledge the “superior strength of the world of things,”[29] if only because language becomes unable to contain anything more. When considered in conjunction with the loss of identity described by Adorno in both Position of the Narrator and Culture Industry, the narrator’s capacity to describe “human beings as we find them”[30] is fractured. This, according to Adorno, leads to a paradox. The novel, unable to convey meaningful reality, gives itself over to the study of ‘essence.’ Essence in this context relates to the false catharsis of the culture industry, transposed onto the novel’s inability to deliver its formal requirements. Therefore, just like film and radio rely on advertisement to justify their products, the novel loses its purpose and artistic justification when situated under the culture industry. Effectively, literature’s signifying capacity, along with its ability to convey a particular meaning to an audience who, themselves, have their own particularities, hinges on the status of language. Thus, when language becomes unable to convey the necessary content of novels, the novel itself collapses into the same false promises of radio and film in Culture Industry.The culture industry’s ubiquity and sameness, therefore, functions to impinge on the very heart of literature’s form and purpose – reducing it to another culturally ubiquitous, homogenous form of media and domination under modern capitalism.
In conclusion, Adorno’s Culture Industry essay intrinsically involves language, with the sameness instituted by mass media and cultural ubiquity of advertisement acting to degrade its signifying capacity. When language loses its meaning-making capacity, it becomes limited to a representationalist expression of things, not reality. This can be translated into a diagnosis of literature’s position under the culture industry, through integration of Adorno’s conception of the novel in Position of the Narrator. Ultimately, the novel loses its formal capacity to convey an artistic expression of lived reality, thereby marking it with a hollowness similar to that of film and radio; we see the realised ramification of the culture industry’s ubiquity and universalising sameness.
Melinda Herman is a 3rd year undergraduate Advanced Humanities student at UQ, completing an Extended Major in Philosophy. Her philosophical interests include the philosophy of language, metaphysics, Kant studies, and French feminism. She’s a current recipient of the Vincent and Carmel Forgione Memorial Scholarship in Philosophy, a past recipient of the UQ Ramsay Undergraduate Scholarship, and was awarded the ACU Liberal Arts Prize in 2022.
Featured image: Tyler Callahan via Unsplash.
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor W. Notes to Literature: Combined Edition. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann Translated by Shier. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholson With a new introduction by Paul Kottman. Columbia University Press, 2019.
Adorno, Theodor W. “Theses on the Language of the Philosopher.” In Adorno and the Need in Thinking, edited by Donald Burke, Colin J. Campbell, Kathy Kiloh, Michael Palamarek, and Jonathan Short. University of Toronto Press, 2007. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/50/edited_volume/book/104179.
Gandesha, Samir. “The ‘Aesthetic Dignity of Words’: Adorno’s Philosophy of Language.” New German Critique, no. 97 (2006): 137–58.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. “The Culture Industry: Englightenment as Mass Deception.” In Dialectic of Enlightenment, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noeri, translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford University Press, 2002. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uql/detail.action?docID=5406369.
Müller, Harro, and Susan H. Gillespie. “Mimetic Rationality: Adorno’s Project of a Language of Philosophy.” New German Critique, no. 108 (2009): 85–108.
Phelan, Shane. “Interpretation & Domination: Adorno & the Habermas-Lyotard Debate.” Polity 25, no. 4 (1993): 597–616. https://doi.org/10.2307/3235124.
[1] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Englightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noeri, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford University Press, 2002), 69, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uql/detail.action?docID=5406369.
[2] Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry,” 41.
[3] Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry,” 58.
[4] Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry,” 63.
[5] Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry,” 42.
[6] Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry,” 43.
[7] Shane Phelan, “Interpretation & Domination: Adorno & the Habermas-Lyotard Debate,” Polity 25, no. 4 (1993): 600, https://doi.org/10.2307/3235124.
[8] Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry,” 68.
[9] Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry,” 68.
[10] Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry,” 68.
[11] Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry,” 68.
[12] Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry,” 69.
[13] Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry,” 69.
[14] Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry,” 69
[15] Samir Gandesha, “The ‘Aesthetic Dignity of Words’: Adorno’s Philosophy of Language,” New German Critique, no. 97 (2006): 139.
[16] Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry,” 69.
[17] Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry,” 69.
[18] Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry,” 70.
[19] Harro Müller and Susan H. Gillespie, “Mimetic Rationality: Adorno’s Project of a Language of Philosophy,” New German Critique, no. 108 (2009): 93.
[20] Theodor W. Adorno, “Theses on the Language of the Philosopher,” in Adorno and the Need in Thinking, ed. Donald Burke et al. (University of Toronto Press, 2007), 39, https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/50/edited_volume/book/104179.
[21] Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature: Combined Edition, ed. Rolf Tiedemann Translated by Shier, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson with a new introduction by Paul Kottman (Columbia University Press, 2019), 53.
[22] Adorno, Notes to Literature, 53.
[23] Adorno, Notes to Literature, 54.
[24] Adorno, Notes to Literature, 54.
[25] Adorno, Notes to Literature, 54.
[26] Adorno, Notes to Literature, 55.
[27] Adorno, Notes to Literature, 54.
[28] Adorno, Notes to Literature, 57.
[29] Adorno, Notes to Literature, 57.
[30] Adorno, Notes to Literature, 54.
EXORDIUM 