For “Indeed travelers can be blind” (Achebe, 1977).
By living we embark on a versatile journey in producing microscopic bits of what eventually on large scales constitutes culture; by doing our civil share within social communities of practice.
And as travelers on such a journey we are almost always concerned with what confronts us and not with what we confront.
Both of the two texts of “Culture Industry” and “On Jazz”, which I will discuss about shortly, rose out of a common socio-cultural causation aiming at one common goal: to raise awareness of the modern citizens about the ongoing life styles and cultural trends under the capitalist form of economy and how people have become blind to what is happening to them. The novelty of thought in these publications fueled further a practice of giving more of the scholarly attention to Cultural Studies. To respond to these texts, I see fit to start from a big image, first of how I see them merge with the modern culture and secondly of how it emerged from other lines of thoughts that contributed to its preoccupation. To this end, I shall briefly point at how common perceptions of basic ideas (I am thinking here about Plato’s Theory of Forms) impregnate the social relations and cultural perception; in order to both use it as an example and argue that what started as the critique of a capitalist structure cannot blindly be directed at capitalism only. For apart from its historical influences originating from the times of the Enlightenment, the modern culture with its blurry confines can now only exist in a fixed relation with overpopulation; At the end I will also conclude suggesting a possibility to combat the seeming irresistibility of modern cultural vertigo.
There are ideas to which we humans give by nature a certain value and consider metaphysically as humanistic, romantic, epic and laudable such as love, honesty, generosity and sacrifice among others, all which are conceived of as the best of human characteristics through a process of ascertaining their existence either by surviving a direct experiential battle and standing in front of other individuals who were watching us grappling with them or by belonging to or standing within the crowd itself speculating on the societal and interpersonal consequences of such actions. In either case such celebrated traits remain worthy of admiration in their own right and do not need any prerequisite of any kind to win such position. For example, when we hear or read of someone’s sacrifice, we are instantly touched by a positive fit of unquestionable appreciation which we can simply talk of as the pre-existence of the appreciation of an action even before the action took place or takes place the next time. Such relation to human value characteristics, which are marked not only by this reserved pre-existing applause of their happening but also by their subsequent social after-effects, motorizes the mechanics of the cultural productions.
Over the centuries of social interactions and development of collective human intuition, these ideas were forged in ideological ways to make them economically exploitable.
On the other hand, the forces that lead to such ideas or actions of love, sacrifice etc. in first place are oftentimes invisible until they manifest themselves in the consequences. The whole process is repetitive enough to make room for the ‘desired’ exploitation. This foreshadowing, and at the same time overshadowed, obscure and complex pre-phase offers itself for exploitation not through the ignorance of people but rather through reason and rationalization of the actions themselves “by” the people. Over centuries, the ideas rooted in the core of Enlightenment seemed to pay off due, foremost, to rational planning for the myriad achievements it proved to have produced along the course of its ambitions.
This is where critical theory comes in and wages an unrelenting assault on the consciously manipulated undercurrents of modern culture. Critical Theory emerged as a result of the view delineated in the texts that I will be discussing about here, in defiance of the growing need felt in the era of Enlightenment to take resort to reason and intellectualism. It was not until the 19th century, however, that, faced with consequences of the industrialization, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel developed their framework of thought, maintaining that the systems of economy are geared towards making the maximum profit at any cost whereby they proposed ways for subverting such domineering systems based on their philosophy of dialectical materialism.
The idealist dialectics of Hegel on the other hand had espoused the possibility of bringing about change without a need for subversion of the system. So long as the Marxist subversive view of the internal workings of economic systems offered a possible absolution that entailed only time, the new observation provided by Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s texts set the fate of the Marxist time-based way-out on completely another course
and, in so doing, provided the fundamental framework for the rise of Critical Theory. The pessimistic works of Frankfurt School, including Culture Industry and On Jazz, ultimately concluded that through industrialization of modern culture, all prospects as to subverting the capitalist economic system have vanished into thin air and that revolutionary movements are no longer possible because “anyone who resists can survive only by being incorporated” (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1947). To further sketch the historical context of these texts and to establish the connection between the what I earlier pointed out as the exploitation of the authentic ideas, I also need to mention the two background concepts which played crucial roles in the works of Adorno and Horkheimer, namely Max Weber’s Instrumental Reason and Georg Lukacs’ Reification. Returning to how cultural humanistic ideas can be exploited by means of reason, we can ask, how one can rationalize an idea which is simply there and does not need any rationalization?
Ideas of any kind are made sense of in a limitless number of ways. Meaning is never established on its own. But to give rationality to the shapeshifting nature of meaning, one needs to manipulate the ways which can lead to establishing that meaning – the pre-establishment phase.
Such manipulation constitutes a tool to imprison and limit the dynamics inherent in a disembodied concept making it, thus, instrumentally manageable towards achieving desired results. This is what Max Weber meant by his influential notion of Instrumental Reason (Zweckrational). “Rational economic action requires instrumental rationality in this orientation, that is, deliberate planning” (Weber, 1978, p. 63). Deliberate manipulation of means to desired ends through representing those ends as reasonable and consequentially giving birth to expectations. George Lukacs employed Weber’s instrumental reason and Karl Marx’s idea of the estrangement of the laborer from the product of his/her labor to synthesize the concept of reification which happens as a result of instrumentally reasoned cultural productions. The answer to the above-mentioned question is, therefore, that by means of instrumental reason any action even ideas and the subjects performing such actions become reified and
through reification they are given a controllable shape and are, thus, inevitably and openly exposed to analyzable exploitation. By reification of ideas or actions, these are reduced to the definition (or the meaning) which has been pre-calculated and ascribed to them and lose most of their authentic force at once.
In their work Dialectics of Enlightenment published in 1947, Adorno and Horkheimer included the essay Culture Industry, Enlightenment as Mass Deception, wherein they demonstrated how popular culture has become a factory producing standardized cultural goods such as film, radio, magazines, media etc. in order to manipulate the mass society and push it into passivity. This invisible and systematic manipulation leads to the emergence of psychological needs which can ultimately be met by using the products of capitalism. Early in the chapter of Culture Industry we are presented with an all-encompassing sentence which contains the core intent of the authors: “Culture today is infecting everything with sameness” (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1947). In this respect, I can also refer to how Adorno and Horkheimer portrayed the permeation of produced culture into the seemingly personal sphere of entertainment. They used the term “the fraying of art” to refer to how amusement has become the extension of labor and the works of art commodified. Industrially produced culture lies in the stark opposition of the authentic cultural experience because it robs individuals of independent thinking. The cultural goods produced are readily offered by culture industry and the only option left is consuming it. The technological-capitalist age, in which culture becomes industrialized, has taken over all individual spheres of action and hails its productions as the achievements of modern human progress. The sacred ideas of humanity like love and sacrifice that I pointed out earlier, are equally subjected to the prevailing exertion of influence of the culture industry by exploiting them in the visual arts and thereby producing skewed representations of their meaning through mass media. According to the text of Culture Industry, the popular culture has become so intensely and dramatically contaminated by the illusional standardizations of values and basic privileges of individuals that there can be no escape from this automated loop retained in form by the integrational endeavors of the state from above and the superb functioning of instrumental reason from the individual perspective. There is nothing left untouched by such enchantment set up towards achieving economic success only. This occurs through what Adorno and Horkheimer term “defrauding of the masses” referring to the culture industry as “a seeming democratic participation”.
In an earlier essay in 1936 called On Jazz Theodore Adorno had provided a portrayal of the emerging musical form ‘jazz’, as a perverted product of culture industry. By stating that “syncopation is its rhythmic principle” (Adorno, On Jazz, 1936), he claimed in detailed fashion the musical form to be variations of the ‘real’ music which was welcomed and endorsed as a cultural production under the capitalist economic system. Jazz, according to Adorno, is more a mass commodity than individual taste or individual spontaneity and by hiding this commodity character seeks to increase its marketability within the culture of bourgeoisie and, on the other hand, the dependent lower classes identify themselves with the upper class through their reception of jazz. Adorno, as Jimmy Baikovicius pointed out, had unjustifiably believed to originate from the oppression caused by capitalism, when it was rather related to the oppression by racism: “The function of jazz is thus to be understood as above all one which is relative to the upper class” (Adorno, On Jazz, 1936, p. 49). A few pages later he repeats this assertion: “Today, in any case, all of the formal elements of jazz have been completely abstractly pre-formed by the capitalist requirement that they be exchangeable as commodities” (Adorno, On Jazz, 1936, pp. 52, 53)“. Another very important aspect of Adorno’s perspective is that jazz music is the product of an alienation caused by bourgeoisie. He clearly defines jazz as a ‘false amalgam of march and salon music’ and this amalgam is the product of objectification of masses of people. By this he means people’s sense of subjectivity in exerting their social power is stolen from them by means of a cultural acceptance of such ‘hot’ music. Finally, he comes to conclude that jazz seeks to “characterize a subjectivity which revolts against a collective power which it itself is” and that it is paradoxically ridiculous to consider this as a form of revolt. A revolt that boomerangs back out ourselves, eliminates our subjectivity and turns us into objects.
Given the earlier publication of Adorno’s essay On Jazz, we can see how his attitude could have greatly foreshadowed his later work with Max Horkheimer. Both were deeply focused on the consumerist workings of capitalism and were bent on isolating the cultural products of capitalism and giving shape to new meaning of such consumptions. As the culmination their thought in Frankfurt School, the essay Culture Industry, however, does a great a job of forking out the dark side of the evolving culture under capitalist influence like the invisible hands of Adam Smith. What is darker, I argue, is left unnoticed.
A flawed system engages the logical mind in direction of finding the flaws in the system perpetuating its logic in full distraction.
In my opening paragraph I quoted from Chinua Achebe who had launched a harsh critique of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in one of his essays that “Travelers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves…indeed travelers can be blind” referring to the fact that Marco Polo in his book Description of the World, an account of 20 years of his travels in the Far East in 13th century, inexcusably failed to include two of most notable features which were in full bloom within the eastern culture: first, the printing technology which preceded its European counterpart by over a Century and secondly, the four thousand mile Great wall of China which was a thousand years old prior to the arrival of Marco Polo. Before my studies reached the strands of contemplation developed in Critical Theory with Frankfurt School providing its platform, I was very pessimistic towards the path the modern culture in its entirety had set its foot upon and observed its interconnected institutional roots in all scientific and non-scientific fields and spheres of human life with a degree of suspicion regarding the uncertainty that I might have missed some perceptions or that there must be a perspective of some sort that would manifest the whole matter more positively, otherwise in what way could progress and the modern culture reach today’s level of laudability under the plurality of economic systems and a recorded history of their successes and failures? However, when I studied the key essay of the inaugurating work of Frankfurt School, I made sure I need no more suspicion than a belief that the very culture industry has as well besieged the intellect of its critics if not possessed. By the quote, I hoped, in this essay, to refer to the fact that the pioneering work of Frankfurt School, Dialectics of Enlightenment developed against the backdrop of the rising capitalism while both Adorno and Horkheimer were in exile and settled in California (Jones, 2013). Disappointed by the evil manifestation of communism and working hard to glean the flaws out of the capitalism they, I argue, failed to deem the contextualizing elements of capitalism as having been turned into a vast progressive system whose vastness reached only the extent of the number of people who bore ambitions of the capitalist structure on their shoulders. They were among those people under the yoke of a functioning economic system. They looked back and saw how communism fell prey to totalitarianism; they looked ahead and saw the success of capitalism. Although I believe they were absolutely right in isolating the problem by launching the critique of instrumental reason put at work by the capitalist enterprise, I equally believe in arguing that their liberationist thinking was buried in the dualism of capitalism and non-capitalism and their intellectual scrutiny dug deeper into such dichotomy.
Today it is no more a hidden fact to acknowledge the growth of population across planet earth due to the advances in technology, communications and medicine to name a few.
The progress and comfort brought with them an increasing overpopulation which entailed new forms of governance and power structures within functional confines of economic systems.
On the other hand, it is within an equilibrium of some sort that life can exist both in physical and figurative form and culture as the embodiment of the actions and interactions of people who live, is no exception to this basic rule. Now, to keep the topic close to the concept of culture to elucidate my point, I would say, either a natural equilibrium comes in force which allows for authentic cultural experiences or an artificial equilibrium must be sought to conceive an image of culture. There can be no third way. And what we observe in the modern culture is the result of the latter; the cultural equilibrium that we live in is put in place as an image of what would otherwise be in its more genuine Gestalt simply because we have taken a leap into overpopulated societies run by bureaucratic state powers. When we deal with numbers, we are forced to start calculating. Calculation entails logic and reason to stand its firm ground. And the promising prospects of boastfully ‘Enlightened knowledge’ drive such calculation into progress and scientific advances.
Overpopulation subverts the natural order of cultural experiences by its internally eviscerating forces which evade observation and analysis through the very humanistic ideas that gave rise to its acceptance.
These forces challenge us to come up with ways to live peacefully and to inscribe new guidelines in our cultural perceptions to uphold such as human rights. Even this treatment of peace is as well conceived of industrially as it distracts us from how hard it increasingly becomes every single day to ‘unsee’ – and remain alienated to – how much we should pay in playing our wider social roles today in contrast to historical epochs when population could not be thought of as overpopulation. Thus, in so far as overpopulation creates a new re-ordered artificial equilibrium to permit the symbiosis and juxtaposition of cultural ‘artefacts’, new ways are produced to adapt to such changes and instrumental reason together with its servitude to the economic system and its wider affiliations is ‘employed’ leaving the modern human intellect perplexed and cast in a labyrinthic maze devoid of authenticity. The predicament of overpopulation along with its myriad baleful ramifications is not only new and virginal because of its comparably recent divergence – since industrial revolution onwards reaching its peak in mid-20th century to present – from its natural balance, but also unprecedented in historical records and, in so being, overpopulated states, with their economic systems looming large over all humankind now, are left to improvise on their feet expedient concepts to preserve their concocted order.
While population enjoys the capacity in bearing constructive competition and the advance of quality scientific achievements along fairer economic conditions, overpopulation corrupts those ends at once by alienating the intersocial relations of masses of people who ultimately come to firmly believe in collectivity, in lumping together of all consequent effects of their labor as not their own. A collective genius emerges, a collective peace, a collective meaning of life that can be only attributed to superstructures such as states and institutional entities which, in return, fuel further the estrangement of the people on whose crucial role they depend. A panacea to the self-repeating conflict in scapegoating capitalist forging of culture over non-capitalist forms should be hitherto, I reckon, rather translucent enough.
The anthropologic urging in upholding humanistic ideas and values on one side of the current battle, and the greed of the institutional modernity with its foundation on economic systems on another, hurl the whole matter of civilization and culture onto a whirling tornado, in the same fashion as a fox turns around amid long grass to make its bed, preparing the deathbed of authenticity of pristine cultural experience.
In this view it is disheartening to witness how many in the modern scholarship in humanities, as women and men of science, representing the wisdom and intellectualism in the attire of humane feats, unanimously embarked on the saddleback of modernity that gallops forth in the name of progress and humanity, and in so doing, shrugging off at once their historically established social role in truth finding.
Overpopulation deserves primarily, if not all, the critique directed towards the modern culture in today’s critical cultural criticism.