[p2p-research] Theodore Adorno's work (open thread)

[marc fawzi]

This is a thread where I'll post excerpts from Adorno's Culture Industry, a
book which I had read about 5 years ago and was mesmerized by the rhythm
implicit in his writing, and shocked by how extreme his views were, and
still not comfortable with his over abundance of precision.

Feel free to ignore, reply to, or just glance thru.

Here is the first excerpt:

"

This is the result not of a law of movement in technology as such but of its
function in today’s economy. The need which might resist central control has
already been suppressed by the control of the individual consciousness. The
step from the telephone to the radio has clearly distinguished the roles.
The former still allowed the subscriber to play the role of subject, and was
liberal. The latter is democratic: it turns all participants into listeners
and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs which are all
exactly the same. No machinery of rejoinder has been devised, and private
broadcasters are denied any freedom. They are confined to the apocryphal
field of the “amateur,” and also have to accept organisation from above.

But any trace of spontaneity from the public in official broadcasting is
controlled and absorbed by talent scouts, studio competitions and official
programs of every kind selected by professionals. Talented performers belong
to the industry long before it displays them; otherwise they would not be so
eager to fit in. The attitude of the public, which ostensibly and actually
favours the system of the culture industry, is a part of the system and not
an excuse for it. If one branch of art follows the same formula as one with
a very different medium and content; if the dramatic intrigue of broadcast
soap operas becomes no more than useful material for showing how to master
technical problems at both ends of the scale of musical experience – real
jazz or a cheap imitation; or if a movement from a Beethoven symphony is
crudely “adapted” for a film sound-track in the same way as a Tolstoy novel
is garbled in a film script: then the claim that this is done to satisfy the
spontaneous wishes of the public is no more than hot air.

We are closer to the facts if we explain these phenomena as inherent in the
technical and personnel apparatus which, down to its last cog, itself forms
part of the economic mechanism of selection. In addition there is the
agreement – or at least the determination – of all executive authorities not
to produce or sanction anything that in any way differs from their own
rules, their own ideas about consumers, or above all themselves.

"


-- 

Marc Fawzi
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