“The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities.”
– Karl Marx, Das Kapital
Introduction
The Dialektik der Aufklärung by Adorno & Horkheimer is, for the greater part, a powerful critique of bourgeois culture. It is written in a language of aesthetic indignation, an lashing-out against spoilers and manipulators, a reaction of the kind one might expect if one were to throw paintbombs into a professor’s library. And Adorno & Horkheimer’s criticism of modern society is indeed one that mainly laments the loss of hochbürgerlich culture and the ideals of Bildung. For what happened? A society of the culture industry has come into being, a society in which cultural goods have become mass-produced, standardized commodities, sold at competitive prices to any and all buyers. With the development of modern, Enlightened society knowledge has at the same time become more than ever a means to control and engineer rather than the possibility of liberation; and this knowledge has put itself at the service of consumer society, in the shape of technology. Eventually, so reasons the chapter on the culture industry of the Dialektik, a system emerges of competitive individualism and loss of meaning, a system in which Enlightenment’s destruction of the yoke of religion and tradition has robbed man of his true individual character, by controlling and pacifying where it should create the opportunity for real human advancement.(1)
This view of modern society, whose reproduction as such is directly dependent on the production and sale of commodities at an immense scale and for which every human being is equal as individual but nonexistent as part of a community, finds an immediate parallel in the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Their critique of the capitalist mode of production as the treason of human ingenuity in the field of technology and of production of all goods imaginable against that very humanity, which is sacrificed to it, is better known than that of Adorno & Horkheimer. But it is also older and aimed against a society that, on the surface, is much less like ours than the society Adorno & Horkheimer agitate against. For this reason, it is worthwhile to see to what degree the Marxist critique of capitalist production can be a complement to the aesthetic-philosophical critique of the Dialektik. Where necessary, we will contrast the Marxist critique with that of Adorno & Horkheimer and consider which pair has understood the nature of modern society better.
The subjective experience of modern consumer society
What is consumer society? For Adorno & Horkheimer, consumer society is the face of Enlightenment. Their concept of Enlightenment is, in the chapters on the culture industry, very interchangeable with that of capitalism, although they prefer the use of the former; probably because their criticism is mostly an attack on liberal ideology and its manifestations in modern society rather than the political-economic fundaments of that society. (2) Precisely because Marx and Engels focused mostly on the latter, an analysis of the Marxist view by way of comparison to Adorno & Horkheimer can be fruitful.
In the chapter on the culture industry, Adorno & Horkheimer begin by posing the culture industry as an industry that makes all men identical. (3) This forms the theme of the entire chapter, from the dissection of Hollywood movies to the stricture against jazz and genre novels: consumer society is a society in which the culture industry has canalized the diversity of man into a monotone equality, which serves to render possible the uninterrupted sale of consumer goods. Technology is the rationality of this control, but this is explicitly not because of anything inherent in technology as such, but because of the role technology plays in the larger constellation of social relations. (4) Adorno & Horkheimer give many examples of their subjective experiences of these effects of the culture industry and the role of technological instrumental rationality in it. Application of increasingly advanced technology in movies leads to the experience of the real world as an extension of the world of the Hollywood movie; the beatings Donald Duck receives in cartoons serve to reconcile citizens with the beatings they receive themselves; the quantitative density technology grants to the ‘false’ experiences of consumption leads to forgetting the possibility of a different world, etc.
Most people will have known moments of such subjective experience of the products of technological applications as blunting and numbing (such as commercials). At the same time capitalism cannot do without the sale of commodities to consumers, and this leads to the liberal illusion of the market as a basically reactive social relation: the market only follows demand. The implication of this phrasing is of course that any criticism of the functioning of this market can only be possible in the manner of altering an individual’s demand within it: if you do not like it, do not buy it, or the phenomenon of a boycott. Marx and Engels have, however, opened the door for a fundamental critique of the market as such with their examination of this political economy, and also destroyed the notion of the market being a spontaneous order deriving from the interaction of individuals. In so doing, they pave the way for an objective evaluation of the causes of subjective these negative experiences (which are different for everyone; some would consider jazz and modern music a liberation from ‘bourgeois’ classical music!). For how does the market work from the standpoint of consumption?
Consumer society objectively assessed
Das Kapital gives a technical but clear analysis of the foundations of consumer society. The capitalist mode of production is characterized by free labor, that is to say that each worker does not possess anything but his labor power to sell, and that the market for this labor power is free and competitive, with little or no restriction on the mobility of labor (in contrast, for example, to feudal societies where serfs are enjoined from leaving the lands of their lord and so on). The capitalist possesses capital in the form of money, and with it buys labor power and means of production, and with these produces commodities. During this process of production, the value of labor power is remunerated to the laborer in the form of wages, but the difference between the value of the products and the value of the labor power goes to the capitalist in the form of surplus value. However, the capital invested plus surplus value only exists yet in the form of commodities. Only if these are sold, that is that capital again takes the form of money, (hopefully) enhanced with the surplus value which then (in a complex manner which I cannot fully go into here) takes the form of profit, can capital accumulate. The essential point here is valorization, i.e. the transformation from commodity capital to money capital, but obviously more money capital than in the initial phase. Without the valorization, the invested capital is lost. Because of this, everything in capitalist society is aimed at making the sale of goods as easy and frequent as possible. Standardization, commercials, warehouses, all of the surface appearances of modern capitalism are immediate consequences of this necessity. This is consumption seen from the standpoint of capital. (5)
But to fully understand the latent potential of Adorno & Horkheimer’s culture critiques it is necessary to view consumption from the standpoint of the consumer. Adorno & Horkheimer strongly stress, as we have seen, certain subjective negative experiences of consumers, and on the falsehood of the positive experiences of the same. Although, as cited, they also see the connection to the concrete production process of these consumer goods, this is not systematically elaborated, giving their critique an excessively aesthetic nature. Because the subjective experiences of consumer society are different for everyone, even allowing for cultural determination of taste and preferences, the critical character of Adorno & Horkheimer’s work loses much of its power and impact.
Consumption, Culture and Capitalism
Because of this, we must first look at what consumption is as such for the consumer. It is important to separate analytically two aspects of the procedure of sale and consumption. The one is the concept of exchange value, i.e. the relative value of a product expressed in other products. This takes the form of price, and is perhaps the most studied aspect of the capitalist economy. The other is the experience of the buyer of his own product, in all aspects of utility, pleasure, etc. This is use value. In this much less generally studied fact lies the key to a strong foundation of a culture critique. I think we can identify two important facets of use value which play an important role in the work of Adorno & Horkheimer: the cultural meaning of a commodity, and the physical and technical properties of a commodity. Both are obviously an inseparable part of the understanding of the commodity as such.
Adorno & Horkheimer seem to consider the first aspect as having analytical priority. The analysis of the culture industry is often phrased in terms like: “the more strongly the culture industry entrenches itself, the more it can do as it chooses with the needs of consumers” (6), “it is (…) the standardized mode of production of the culture industry which makes the individual illusory in its products” (7) and “the landscape becomes a mere background for signboards and symbols“. (8) This is probably a direct result of the essentially idealist philosophical method which underlies the chapter on the culture industry. Enlightenment, not capitalism as such but her ideology, is presented as navigating dialectically between the liberation from old myths and the evil genius of modern myths. Within the culture critique, they conceive in the same way of dominating power in modern society as taking the form of the ideological pretension of instrumental reason which gives a justification to consumer society, and not primarily as residing in the process of production of consumer goods as such. This is also why they are both forced into an aesthetic hochbürgerlich attack on massiveness and cheapness, which could as well be interpreted in a reactionary manner (although I do not think it intended in that way) as it can be seen as a progressive critique. (9)
Most modern Marxist analysis of the use value side of consumption places analytical priority in the sphere of production, parallel to how it also gives priority to concrete production as causal over its ideological formulations, such as Enlightenment. Haug for example calls the latter in an effective phrase “the aesthetic illusion”. The capitalist must, to be able to sell his product, make his good appear desirable. (10) But at once the way in which they do this is limited by the physical properties of the product itself: one cannot use a razor for a vacation and one cannot drive in a radio. The sphere of production is also characterized by competition, which enforces upon it certain concrete necessities which affect the aesthetic illusion: think of the need to make production cheaper to be able to lower prices, and so stay competitive. According to Haug this leads to a need to change the aesthetic illusion surrounding the product, because cheaper production lowers the quality. Suddenly simplicity and frugality become a virtue, so fast food trumps delicatessen as the most important aesthetic of modern capitalism. (11) Ben Fine, who gives an excellent modern Marxist analysis of consumption in his The World of Consumption, has also emphasized the importance of what is called “planned obsolescence”, which is the need for capitalists to make their products wear out faster, to force the consumer to keep re-buying the product. (12) Here also we find concrete economic causes for numbing, wasting and deterioration. The complaint that “things just aren’t made as they used to be any more” has by now become a comical cliché. The connection between this statement and the subjective experience of indistinguishability and sameness within the culture industry is nothing but the possibility capitalists perceive to posit a ‘universal good’ which all their products, whatever their concrete properties, possess. This good must be something that appeals directly to instincts present in all people: sexuality, wanderlust, need for novelty and the desire for relaxation and excitement. All of these real experienced emotions, which until the advent of the culture industry had a power for escape and change, and which were liberated from religious repression by the Enlightenment, are so taken from humanity as authentic feelings and sold back to them in the shape of consumer goods. (13) That is the intuition which gave Adorno & Horkheimer the motive for their critique, but it cannot be grasped without an understanding of capitalist production.
Conclusion
l’Art pour l’art, which is still praised by Adorno & Horkheimer, is in this way not resurrected as an aesthetic critique of bourgeois functionalism, but as an endless production of different commodities with the same cultural meanings. Adorno & Horkheimer recognize this in advertising (14), but in fact there are many different channels through which these cultural meanings are reproduced, such as media, the state and the family. (15) The conclusion is in any case that the subjective experience of the culture industry as something which makes life more hollow, flat and false can and must be founded on the imperatives of capitalist production. If one then aims at destroying the real cause of the negative subjective experiences, capitalism itself, it becomes possible to avoid the trap of romantic reactionary critique of culture in the manner of High Church seeking for authenticity and rejection of modernity. And then the way is clear for a critique of culture which is radical and yet based on the daily experience of modern man.
(1) “Pseudoindividuality is a precondition for apprehending and detoxifying tragedy: only because individuals are none but the mere intersections of universal tendencies is it possible to reabsorb them smoothly into the universal. Mass culture thereby reveals the fictitious quality which has characterized the individual throughout the bourgeois era(…)” Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Stanford, CA 2002), p. 125.
(2) Similarly, what they call the ‘culture industry’ is now better known as ‘consumer society’. I will use both terms, but address the problematic of equating them later.
(3) “Culture industry today is infecting everything with sameness.” Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (op. cit.), p. 94.
(4) “Technical rationality today is the rationality of domination. It is the compulsive character of a society alienated from itself. (…) These adverse effects, however, should not be attributed to the internal laws of technology itself but to its function within the economy today.” Ibid., p. 95.
(5) See Karl Marx, Das Kapital (Hamburg 1867), Vols. I and III, cont.
(6) Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (op. cit.), p. 115.
(7) Ibid., p. 125.
(8) Ibid., p. 132.
(9) The communist historian Eric Hobsbawm, for example, presents the culture industry as a positive affair overall; because of it, the worker can for the first time in history afford to take vacations, decorate his home to his wishes, own many different media, etc. Nevertheless, any Marxist will acknowledge the way in which this does not yet lead to truly free expression of human capacities. See for instance Eric Hobsbawm & Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge 1983).
(10) See Wolfgang Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics (Minneapolis, MN 1986).
(11) Ibid., p. 24.
(12) Ben Fine, The World of Consumption (2nd ed.) (London 2002), p. 91-92.
(13) There is here an interesting resemblance to the theories of the late Marcuse. Marcuse also describes Enlightenment rationality as a liberation of sublimated urges, but sees this liberation as something which removes the capacity of those urges to lead to human malcontent. This fits his concept of ‘repressive tolerance’. I cannot go into this in an expansive manner here, but it is enough to remark that it is unfoundedly pessimistic and ahistorical besides to pretend that there are now fewer possibilities for being unhappy than there used to be. On the contrary, people are more critical about their way of life now, and take it less for granted, than in any preceding period. See Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston, MA 1964).
(14) Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (op. cit.), p. 132.
(15) Fine, The World of Consumption (op. cit.), p. 90.
Autogestion 