Adorno on TV

["L Spencer" <L.SPENCER@xxxxxxxxxx>]

As someone who teaches a "media theory" to pretty unsophisticated
undergraduates I constantly come across crude summaries of the
Frankfurt School position on the mass media and on popular culture.

Again and again Adorno and Horkheimer are taken as the prime
exemplars of theorists who saw the mass media as wholly pernicious
and, by implication, saw audiences as being duped, mislead,
depoliticized, anaetheticized and at the same time injected with a
good deal of awful media content... They are seen as equating the
media with its propagandistic content and having a wholly dismissive
attitude towards media audiences.

Deborah Cook's book "The Culture Industry Re-visited" is a creditable
attempt to show that Adorno's position is far more nuanced and less
utterly pessimistic than is generally allowed.

Now, the tragic, despairing note struck by Horkheimer and
(especially) Adorno is certainly not one with which it is easy today
to feel comfortable. The collection of pieces on "The Culture
Industry" published a few years ago by Routledge ends with Adorno's
answer to the charge that the logic of his whole position leads to
"Resignation" (the title of his essay).

But re-reading the pieces included in that Routledge volume this
weekend I was struck by the fact that in key passages the mass media
are treated as an expression and an integral part of society. Its
stupidities are treated as OUR stupidities. The media are treated as
part of the way in which we make ourselves more stupid (as opposed to
informing ourselves and developing our culture). If this is just as
bleak a description of the mass media it does at least not treat
audiences as wholly passive.

There is in the essay translated as "The Schema of Mass Culture" the
outline of an anthropology of TV viewing (or other mass media
equivalents) whereby we allow such things as genre, format, the
"image" of our favourite stars to act in ways analogous to Kantian
categories, pre-figuring our perception, stimulating our interest,
provoking our identifications...

The essay on "The Fetish Character of Music and Regression in
Hearing" really stands out as a superb piece of analysis and
provocation. And can be fully appreciated by any fan of Miles Davis
or John Coltrane just as much as by those committed to older
traditions of auratic art.

I am not sure how many of my students would make much headway with
Adorno's excellent essay on watching television. Not dissimilar
positions have been argued in more accessible language by Neil
Postman in "Amusing Ourselves to Death".

Yes, there are many passages of Adorno where he seems to me simply
handicapped by his over-ornate Baroque writing style. And then there
are passages when it all seems worth it because it allows for writing
that is simultaneously incredibly subtle and deeply penetrating.

Lloyd