“The neon signs which hang over our cities and outshine the natural light of the night with their own are comets presaging the natural disaster of society, its frozen death.”
– Theodor W. Adorno
“The culture industry is not the art of the consumer but rather the projection of the will of those in control onto their victims. The automatic self-reproduction of the status quo in its established forms is itself an expression of domination.”
– Theodor W. Adorno[i]
Introduction
Culture is a term that one uses in everyday life and evokes strong feelings in contemporary times. It is also a term difficult to define. Scholars also approach culture as a society’s “way of life”. Anthropologist E.B. Tylor referred to culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by a man as a member of society”.[ii] Debates on culture have been to central sociology, social anthropology and cultural studies. More recently, we have witnessed debates on high culture and popular culture.
One does not engage with this entire gamut of issues here. The focus is limited to the term Culture Industry in this essay. While much of sociology and social anthropology focus on culture and its many interpretations, the term Culture Industry and discussions on the Frankfurt School from where this term gained currency has received less attention in Indian Sociology and Social Anthropology. A brief introduction of the key thinkers and the context they wrote in is therefore in order here.
A Brief Outline of the Context
Theodor W. Adorno was one of Germany’s most influential philosophers and social critics after World War II. Adorno left Germany in the spring of 1934 and resided in the USA during the Nazi era. He wrote several books for which he later became famous, including Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Philosophy of New Music (1949), The Authoritarian Personality (1950), and Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951).
It is from these years come his provocative critiques of mass culture and the culture industry. Returning to Frankfurt in 1949 to take up a position in the philosophy department, Adorno quickly established himself as a leading German intellectual and a central figure in the Institute of Social Research. Founded as a free-standing centre for Marxist scholarship in 1923, the Institute had been led by Max Horkheimer and thus began what has come to be known as the Frankfurt School.
While there was much that they drew from Marx, there was an attempt in Adorno’s social theory to make Marx’s central insights applicable to “late capitalism.” Although in agreement with Marx’s analysis of the commodity, Adorno felt his critique of commodity fetishism did not go far enough. Significant changes had occurred in the structure of capitalism since Marx’s day. The dialectic between forces of production and relations of production had changed, as did the relationship between state and economy, the formation of classes and the expansion of a sizeable middle class in a very prosperous West Europe in the years following World War II. Likewise, the emphasis on consumption and an ideology of consumerism had redefined the nature and function of ideology.
Culture Industry
With its emphasis on marketability, the culture industry, Adorno argues, dispenses entirely with the “purposelessness” that was central to art’s autonomy. Once marketability becomes a total demand, the internal economic structure of cultural commodities shifts. Instead of promising freedom from societally dictated uses, and thereby having a genuine use-value that people can enjoy, products mediated by the culture industry have their use-value replaced by exchange value: “Everything has value only in so far as it can be exchanged, not in so far as it is something in itself. For consumers, the use-value of art, its essence, is a fetish. The fetish – the social valuation which they mistake for the merit of works of art – becomes its only use-value, the only quality they enjoy” (DE 128). Hence the culture industry dissolves the “genuine commodity character” that artworks once possessed when exchange value still presupposed use-value (DE 129–30). Adorno’s main point is that culture-industrial hyper-commercialization evidences a fateful shift in the structure of all commodities and, therefore, in capitalism’s structure.
India, in the first decades of independence, followed an import-substitution economic development. The state occupied a visible role and presence. Indians brought up in those years would recall that many consumer goods that were available in our neighbouring countries were absent in what were very basic markets here in India. This storyline changed after 1991 with India’s shift to a new economic policy of greater integration with global capitalism, withdrawal of restrictions to many consumer goods. Many of the points that the Frankfurt school theorists made became more obvious. New images entered our lives, often propelled by the fast-expanding media.
The transformation of the media with exceptional growth in advertisement ushered in new images and heralded new ideas of a good life and the good Indian as a ‘consumer citizen’. The stress was on success, an exclusive and glamorous lifestyle that effectively displaced the more extensive Indian men and women from public discourse. This was when new words such as ‘celebrity ‘, glam quotient and ‘page 4’ came into circulation. Within this context, the Indian woman learns that ‘thrift’ is no longer a virtue, and ‘shopping’ is a legitimate pleasure, while Indian men learn that looking good is not a woman’s privilege. In this entire process of recasting the ‘nation’, the constituent elements of Indian nationalism were reconfigured, as a choice rather than constraint and extravagance rather than thrift became the new rhetoric of globalization (Chaudhuri 2017:7).[iii]
A close look at advertisements in India shows how conspicuous consumption became a legitimate lifestyle, a source of pleasure and willing compliance with the system. In India, we saw that while many continued to live in poverty, this story of glamour and consumption was dominant. If we follow the media images carefully, we see how goods are advertised to push the market into rural areas and even target people who can ill afford them.
The culture industry and digitalization
Frankfurt thinkers pointed out that far advanced and updated mass culture items or culture industry products exist in today’s time. Radio, music and film that Horkheimer and Adorno described as culture industry has acquired new forms today. Horkheimer and Adorno (2002) argued that mass culture or culture industry is not art but business.Mass consumption of culture industry products in India has increased on a massive scale with the initiation of digitalization. Still, the issue is the culture industry’s contribution to creating superficial modernity that is perceived as real modernity. As Dipankar Gupta[iv] (Gupta 2000) said, India is not yet modern because people here perceive the mere predominance of technology is the requirement of modernity and ignore other universalistic values such as democracy, equality and rights that define modernity.
Indian digitalization journey began with the unlimited internet data plan launched by Reliance Jio in the year 2015. Reliance Jio was followed by other telecom companies like Airtel, Vodafone and others to establish the same plan. The interesting point is that after the unlimited internet data plan launched, various platforms for exhibiting culture industry products developed or updated, such as social media and OTT (over-the-top) for advanced smartphone, Multiplexes for new style malls (booking of tickets through applications) and also a television for home.
The mass production and consumption of social media contents and OTT contents and music and films in Indian society are in trend based on the notion of ‘free time’. Horkheimer and Adorno (2002)[v] called it a new form of suppression by the advanced industrial world through the culture industry. Masses are not just using ‘free time’ but also creating free time to adjust with all culture industry products; the capitalists and producer of the culture industry are busy making innovative ideas to capture more audience. So ‘free time’ for producers and capitalists is capital and a source of advancement in production or maximization of production. In contrast, free time for the masses is entertainment and enjoyment with culture industry products. This is how our free time is preoccupied in the era of advanced industrial society, which is repressive in actual situations. Still, this repressive force is rationalized, so it doesn’t appear as dominating. It is transformed as a matter of choice and a sign of advancement and modernity.
Digitalization has created an age of information, in which information has turned into a form of commodity, a commercialized entity. People consume them even if they can understand their commercial function. It has invested another level in the degree of rationality – coding for kids. Its advertisement is undertaken throughout the television, social media and electronic media so that parents from affluent sections are drawn to it. The story of the less privileged gets invisibilized. Even during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in India, we have witnessed this skewed focus on consumption and the tragic story of the migrants. Commentaries have suggested that we are seeing a particular ‘spectacle of disaster’ (to borrow Baudrillard’s[vi] phrase) that makes us experience fear – simulated and real. While media visuals of migrants walking back home, hungry and exhausted, reached us:
the same television distracts us with the glamour of reality shows, award functions, and seductive commercial ads. It is a schizophrenic moment. Looking at the advertisements, one could see how the crisis is being appropriated: Vicks candies could kill germs. Dominoes promise safe distance delivery of Pizzas and other brands that tell us how much they care[iii]. Not that they are not true. But was wondering how much of it is marketing prudence and how much it is sheer opportunistic persuasion. [vii]
As the culture industry today encompasses social media, films and music, various other fields of consumption flourishes, and so does the platform of commerce. Our everyday lives are saturated with images, products, and experiences marketed by the culture industry. Party (destination party, weekend party, birthday party, anniversary party, corporate party and so on) holidays in resorts, hill stations or any other destinations governs our lives and imagination.
[i] Adorno, Theodor. (2001). The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. 2nd edition. Routledge.
[ii] Tylor, E. B. (1871). Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. Cambridge University Press.
[iii] Chaudhuri, Maitrayee. (2017). Refashioning India: Gender, Media and a Transformed Public Discourse. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan.
[iv] Dipankar Gupta. (2000). Mistaken Modernity: India Between Worlds. HarperCollins Publishers India.
[v] Horkheimer. Max and Theodor Adorno. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford University Press.
Horkheimer. Max. (2002). Critical Theory Selected Essays. Continuum Publishing Company.
[vi] Baudrillard, Jean. (1994), Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
[vii] https://doingsociology.org/2020/05/25/media-in-pandemic-times-fear-discipline-and-commercial-breaks-by-saravanan-velusamy/, accessed on 5th March 2020.
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Mahmudul Hasan Laskar is working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Science and Technology (USTM), Meghalaya.