Re: Kulturindustrie - the relationship between aesthetics and ps

[Gelder@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

"Kulturindustrie" and the "Mass culture" debate.

The thesis is this: there's a *connection* between social psychology
on the one hand, popular art forms (film, music) distributed by the
mass media on the other - a connection which, when probed
systematically, provides crucial insights into the mechanisms of
exploitation and control within late Capitalism.  One could carp
with the terminology ('capitalism' is getting a bit threadbare;
'systematically' is close to the sociologese which I dislike as much
as Dumain does) but the above is not a bad way of describing the
assumptions underlying all of Adorno's work, and in one way or
another it is shared by all of the authors we lump together with the
term 'Frankfurter Schule'.

Why did they all share this thesis? Because it expresses a shared
historical experience: (a) the murderous transformation and collapse
of the institutions of the bourgeois state from 1914 onwards, and (b)
the conviction that an understanding of what it was that was taking
place should be  based on the most advanced scientific and cultural
insights of the time. ('Understanding' here is not meant in the
bourgeois-liberal, contemplative - 'academic' - sense of 'theory',
but in Lenin's sense: "Was tun?" A "theoretical analysis with
practical intent", in Habermas' terminology.)

What was it then that was taking place, that was absorbing all of
the energies of this group of intellectuals? 'It' was the
organisational and social-psychological reasons for the success
which the Nazi party had in bullying and cajoling a majority of the
electorate into voting their own executioners into power. A success
based (c.f. Neumann's *Behemoth*) on two factors: mass organisation
and a clearly visible scapegoat group to channel the powerful,
collectively pent-up aggressions which had accumulated since the
Versaille treaty of 1918, through to the Depression a decade later.
The Horkheimer group turned to the newly emerging discipline of
Psychoanalysis (together with the Gallup Poll methods imported from
the US) to probe the subjective reasons for the success of Nazi
propaganda, because they saw here the point where Marxism had failed
them.  (The best bibliographic overview of the whole debate in
Christopher Lash: *The Minimal Self*, p. 263 onwards; *Mass
culture*.)

The crux, as they saw it, was that the new mass communication and
organisation methods (no Internet, yet) enabled something which Marx
and the 'enlightenment' thinkers a century earlier could not have
foreseen: that the 'public sphere' could be 'structurally changed'
to the point that it itself could become an instrument of domination
and repression.

How do you turn a voter into a maniac screaming for someone else's
blood? The Nazis had shown that it could be done, and that it *could*
be done was the nemesis which haunted the Horkheimer group in the
refugee years in the USA. Benjamin had been hounded to his death,
Andries Sternheim (from the Geneva office of the IfS) and Karl
Landauer (Horkheimer's psychoanalyst) murdered in Nazi concentration
camps. Countless friends, family, colleagues forced to flee. The USA
studies of the Horkheimer group hence all revolved around a central
theme: what is the connection between Psychology (as a description
of subjective states of mind) and politics? Could studies which
highlight this connection help counter the spread of Nazi-type
politics to the rest of the industrialized world? (Quite different
from Goldhagen's ideas, the Frankfurt group never believed for a
moment that 'eliminatory anti-semitism' was somehow unique to
German culture, or that it would miraculously disappear after 1945)

As far as academic politics was concerned (for anything
approaching *real* politics they lacked the resources) it was always
a battle on two fronts: against an Anglo-saxon 'positivist'
establishment which held that only those disciplines which based
their methodological principles on the natural sciences could count
for anything, and against a Marxist orthodoxy which regarded anything
that undermined 'the struggle' as treasonable. Hence this uneasy
balancing act "between science and politics" (Habermas) that is
characteristic for all of the USA studies - starting with *The
Authoritarian Personality*. The titles speak for themselves:
*Prophets of Deceit - A study of the Techniques of the American
Agitator* (Lowenthal and Guterman);  *Anti-Semitism and Emotional
Disorder - A psychoanalytic Interpretation* (Ackerman and Jahoda);
"Freudian Theory and the pattern of Fascist Propaganda" (Adorno);
*Studies in Prejudice* (the general title of the whole program,
edited by Horkheimer and Samuel Flowerman); *The psychological
technique of Martin Luther Thomas' Radio Adresses* (Adorno: an
analysis of the rhetoric of a radio agitator); "The Stars Down to
Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column" (Adorno).
*Psychoanalysis and Politics*. (Marcuse: written a decade later)

[As I type this onto a screen, one floor down from where Adorno
wrote his *Aesthetische Theorie*, I have in front of me an
unpublished IfS manuscript from the New York years, (dated
1944/1945) entitled *Studies in Antisemitism*. Three volumes, close
to 1000 pages.  I don't think the table of contents is published
either in Jay or Wiggershaus, or anywhere else, so here it is, an
original research contribution:

I. *The Danger.*
The Unique character of Antisemitism as an Instrument in Domestic and
Foreign Politics.
Deterioration of the Economic Position of the Jews in Capitalist
Development.
Notes on the Image of the Jew in Modern Civilization.
Joseph E. McWilliams: An American Discipline of Adolf Hitler.
Antisemitism as a Possible Political Instrument in Postwar America.

II. *The German Experience.*
A. The Struggle.
Situation of the Jews in Germany prior to National Socialism.
Analysis of *Central-Verein* Policy in Germany.
Dynamics of Nazi Antisemitism.
The "Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage".

B. *Attitudes of the German People*.
The Institute's Contest on the German People and Antisemitism under
Hitler.
American and British Sources on German Attitudes towards Nazi
Antisemitic Policy.
Attitudes of Civilians toward Nazi Antisemitic Policy, Personal
Observations in a Penitentiary, in a Concentration Camp, in a
Contractor's Shop and in Berlin Discussions. (1933-1939)

III. *American Antisemitic Agitators and their Followers.*
Martin Luther Thomas.
George Allison Phelps.
Conversations with Antisemites.

IV. *Potential Allies.*
Potential Foci of Resistance.
Catholicism and Antijudaism.
The Policy of the Catholic Church toward the Jews.
Labor and Antisemitism.

V. *Laboratory of Defense.*
On Content Analysis.
Sample of a Preparatory Study for a Manual of Hate Propaganda.
On Quantitative and Qualitative Research Methods.
A Scale for the Measurement of Antisemitism.]

i.e. the Frankfurt group entered the debate about popular culture
with the conviction that a day could come when the Hate Propaganda of
the Nazis could be replaced - in the industrialised West, starting
with the Anglo-Saxon countries - by more subtle mechanisms which
would have the same emotional and psychological effect, and that this
would play a major destabilising role within the democratic process,
comparable in some ways to what had happened in Weimar. Anyone who
thinks that this is such a farfetched idea should read Douglas
Kellner's *Television and the Crisis of Democracy*, Russel Jacoby's
*The Last Intellectuals*, (or his "Narcissism and the Crisis of
Capitalism", in *Telos* 44), or Christopher Lash's *The Minimal
Self*. (As I write this, I note that President Clinton, in his
remarks on the Colerado school killings, makes an explicit reference
to the "responsibility of the media". Perhaps there's a copy of the
*Dialektik der Aufklaerung* in the White House?)

What does all this have to do with aesthetics and music? Adorno had
entered the debate as early as 1938 with his "On the
Fetisch-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening". (Can be
read up in Arato and Gebhardt: *The Essential Frankfurt School
Reader*) In it he analyses a complex of problems which was to
preoccupy him for the rest of his life, and which is usually
discussed under the heading of 'Ende des Subjekts'. (End of the
Subject). I've lost track of what is and what is not available in
English, so I refer anyone who is unfamiliar with this kind of
argumentation to a section of Lash's *Minimal Self*: it's called *The
Minimalist Aesthetic: Art and Literature in the Age of Extremity*,
and it's an exemplary analysis of the interconnectedness of
psychoanalytic, aesthetic and political themes.

Whatever else it does, it could free one from the attitude
of finger-wagging indignation which pervaded some of the posts on
Bloch and Jazz. One starts to see a medium like MTV in a new light.
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Dr. Frederik van Gelder
Institut fuer Sozialforschung
Frankfurt University
Senckenberganlage 26
60325 Frankfurt am Main

Gelder@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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