Simo Pieniniemi University of Vaasa, Department of Communication Studies

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1 1 Simo Pieniniemi University of Vaasa, Department of Communication Studies Dialectical Figures in Adorno s Theory of the Culture Industry Although Theodor W. Adorno s theory of the culture industry is rather well known and widely discussed, one of its components is often overlooked the dialectic. It is rarely mentioned, whereas the influence of psychoanalysis or aesthetic modernism on Adorno s theory is treated extensively. The aim of the paper is to argue that the role of the dialectic is also highly important and should be examined as well. In order to highlight the dialectical tone of Adorno s thinking the paper draws on his writings centred on philosophy and cultural criticism, where the presence of dialectical themes is easiest to discern. This more general discussion of dialectic leans also on Fredric Jameson s more recent writings on the subject. Together with Adorno s insights they will provide the lens through which some aspects of the theory of culture industry is then interpreted. The argument of the paper will proceed as follows: The first section offers a brief overview of dialectical thinking. Then, to exemplify the different roles the dialectic has in Adorno s theory, the paper distinguishes two dialectical figures that can be found in his theory. The first figure is defined by the dialectic of inside and outside. And, the second relies on the concept of mediation. What is Dialectic? Today the philosophy associated to the word dialectic is more often than not described as rigid and, due to its grandiose goals, unsuitable with our current situation an outlook that Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984) encapsulated more than thirty years ago, when he famously declared the war against those totalising grand narratives, which are often associated to dialectical thinking. While it is true that the will to build systematic and comprehensive overviews is an inherent tendency of the dialectic, it should be added that it is not the whole truth of the dialectic. The dialectic has also its nonsystematic and open-ended side, which is quite often neglected. Already Heraclitus, who is regarded as one of the pre-socratic dialecticians, maintained that the world is not defined by a stabile order, which could be captured by clearly defined system of concepts. Instead, the world is in the state of

2 2 constant flux, everything is changing all the time and even the forms considered as static and eternal are passing away with time. Accordingly, for Heraclitus dialectical thinking was a thought mode corresponding to this state of being. (Haug 2005: 242.) It was thinking devoted to capture the change and the movement of things and to bring unrest to thought that has a tendency to stay still. The critiques of dialectic are primarily directed against Hegel for whom the task of philosophy was to systematically explore the connections between different aspects of social life and to interpret them in the light of logic that steers the course of the world history. However, as Fredric Jameson points out, not even Hegel was as rigid and grandiose thinker as his objectives imply. Especially the young Hegel of the Phenomenology of Mind was a philosopher, who opposed all thinking that strived toward oneness and reduced discernible differences to sameness. (Jameson 2009: 8.) The proposition may at first seem doubtful against Hegel s famous dictum the identity of identity and difference, which can be read as a demand to subsume differences under the general rule of identity and as a proof of Hegel s will to unify everything under some master concept. But the meaning of the proposition changes substantially if we take into account that we must understand Hegel s dictum also the other way around, as a remark that every identity contains difference and as an argument that everything, which appears self-contained and solid is in fact ambiguous and contradictory (Brown 2010: 152). Thus, we may conclude that Hegel s aim was not solely to set everything in its place in a harmonious order, but also to bring movement into things and concepts and to dissolve every certainty and classification taken for granted. In line with the characterisation above dialectic can be defined as a countermove to common sense thinking and empiricism, both of which rely on an idea that things and concepts are positive and autonomies entities. From their viewpoint everything is what it is, and is not what it is not (Grossberg 1979: 236). This is to say, each of the things are identifiable by their qualities, which at the same time separate them from other things. (Marcuse 1977: 67; Jameson 2009: 17.) The aim of dialectical thinking, on the other hand, is to tear down this logic that separates things of concepts from each other. It starts from the assumption that everything is constituted by its changing relationships to other things, that things are always inseparable and never isolatable. It argues that things are so closely interconnected that the relationship becomes the very being of a thing. Consequently, for dialectic the basic unit of reality is not a single thing, but a relationship. (Marcuse 1977: 68; Adorno 2005: 71; Warren 2008: )

3 3 To keep this simple enough, we could argue, as Jameson does, that the basic form of the relationship is dualism or binary pair. To think dialectically, then, means to keep an eye on dualisms, and to understand that things and concepts come to us in groups of two, where each pole is defined against each other. However, this is not merely to argue that an identity of some entity or concept is constituted by its difference from what it is not or from its opposite. Genuine dialectic maintains rather that the opposite should be understood as inseparable part of the identity from which it was supposed to differ. (Jameson 2009: 17.) To put this in more concrete terms, we could say that the task dialectic faces is twofold. First, it should attest that two separate things or realms, which seem to be independent, may actually be interwoven and related to each other. In a sense, the task of the dialectic is to shift thinking to a new and higher plane or to provide a wider horizon, where those things could meet. Secondly, dialectic ought to reveal that (any) given phenomenon is probably comprised of two opposing poles, of which only one is perceivable at a time. That is, when phenomenon like this is brought under a dialectical gaze and reconceptualised in altered context, the one should turn into another, the negative into positive, and so on. (Ibid. 24, 39.) There is still one fundamental feature in dialectical thinking that should be mentioned. It is its commitment to be historical thinking, or to always historicize. From the point of view of the dialectic all the things among us be they material or not and the concepts by which we explain those things are historical in nature. (Jameson 2007: ix.) However, this does not only mean that the aim of the dialectic is to situate the development of some philosophical outlook, worldview or art movement in a certain moment in history. The assertion is much more radical, since for the dialectic the social situation with its problems, contradictions, and so on is present in the characteristics of those phenomena. Here the problem is, naturally, that the presence of social situation in thinking, for example, is not apparent. Consequently, the aim of dialectic is to trace this or that feature of thinking to its origins in social life. And, as we may discern, also this task involves work with dualisms. It requires a leap from conceptual to historical level, or from spirit to matter a leap that will reveal that this or that cultural fact is actually a microcosm of that vaster social reality it belongs to. (Jameson 1974: ) The First Figure: The Dialectic of Inside and Outside The first figure, the dialectic of inside and outside, to which we now turn, offers us a genuinely dialectical solution to the question, how to understand and describe the relationship between some cultural text, such as work of art, media product or a thought system, and its context or social ground.

4 4 That is, the focal point of the first figure is in dialectical relationship between cultural product, its inherent features, and the world outside of it. To speak about culture and its inevitable links to other societal forces in discussion about Adorno may at first glance seem like an anomaly. After all, Adorno is known from his arguments that defend art against the commercial imperatives or demands of social utility. It is often thought that Adorno presumed art to constitute its own, independent sphere of life that should be guarded against intruders a view that is generally related to the doctrine of autonomy of art. In the critiques of Adorno s theory of the culture industry, for instance, this characterisation is not that uncommon (see Hohendahl 1995: 9 10). According to them Adorno values art and especially modernist high culture, because it is self-sufficient, independent, separated from mundane activities and thereby obliged to follow and to develop its own formal laws only. It cannot be denied that Adorno argued that art should not be succumbed to the requirements of other social forces. The presence of these arguments may also explain, why his thoughts are every now and then associated to the doctrine of autonomy of art. However, it is doubtful whether they provide a valid reason for that. Clearly to defend art as Adorno did is not the same as to deny that art itself is a social phenomenon or it should be conceptualised as such. Therefore, to define Adorno as a defender of holy and unearthly art is to commit a category mistake. Moreover, there is plenty of textual evidence saying that actually the opposite is true. In the light of it the relationship between art and society could even be defined as one of Adorno s central concerns to which he repeatedly came back to and which he saw as primary importance in all the exhaustive studies of art and culture. (Hohendahl 1995: 149; Adorno 2002; Adorno 2006: ) Before we go into detail in dialectical relationship between culture and society, it is worth to note that the first dialectical figure is not limited solely to Adorno s writings about art or culture industry, but it characterises dialectical thinking more generally as well. Thereby, when Jameson defines the dialectic as thinking to the second power, we could say that he is also describing our first figure. What is, then, thinking to the second power? It is thinking about thinking that distanciates itself from the ordinary thought processes and lifts itself to a higher level in order to be able to look at its own procedures with renewed eyes. (Jameson 1977: ) This way, by becoming conscious of its mental procedures, the dialectic strives for two different things. On one hand, it tries to register, how theories and concepts give form and set the limits to our conceptions of the objective world we try to comprehend. On the other which is more important it tries to

5 5 comprehend, how that world affects to thinking in turn. That is, for the dialectic certain problematic, particular contradiction of thinking or recurrent flaws, for example, are not necessarily products of faulty thinking. Instead, they can be sort of reduplicates of contradictions or obstacles of social life in general. (Ibid ) It is not uncommon to argue that thinking or theories as phenomena are basically historical. Yet, what is peculiar to the dialectic and noteworthy for the dialectic of inside and outside is the way it understands the relationship between the subjective forms of thinking and objective world we think about. The dialectic conceives the social not merely as a setting that induces certain forms of thinking, or as an outer context where the thought processes are situated. Historicity of thinking means rather that the socio-economic reality with its characteristics is build into our thoughts: what is possible in social life is possible in thinking as well and, more importantly, what is out of our reach or out of joint in social life is likewise in the realm of theories too. Consequently, for the dialectic, the revealing of the social character of thinking cannot be just a contextualising operation. Instead, in it the object, that is a theory etc., is turned inside out and observed from the outside in larger terms, so that what at first seems to be merely a statement on theory becomes after dialectical enlargement and turning of focus a comment on social and historical world. (Jameson 1977: ; Jameson 2007: 37; Balakhrisnan 2010: ) Nearly all of this applies to Adorno s cultural analysis as well. The lesson Adorno tries to convey with his writings on culture is that art and culture should not be apprehended merely with the criteria they have set to themselves. The substance of culture resides also in its relation to something external, to the material life-processes, which the analysis should also take into account. (Adorno 1967: 29; Adorno 2006: 535.) To be precise, the guideline of Adorno s analysis is that the society with its antinomies and contradictions appears in art and constitutes the terms within which the art is to be interpreted. However, as above, this should not be understood merely as a contextualising operation. That is, the social insights should not be brought into to the works from the outside, since it makes them merely illustrations of social theories. For Adorno society is not just an outside of cultural products, but in a sense it is inside of them also. (Adorno 1989: ; Adorno 2006: ) Or, to use Hegelian language, the social whole does not exist anywhere beyond its parts, even though it has primacy over them. Instead, the whole exists only in its partial moments. (Adorno 1993: 4.) Therefore, an interpretation that wishes to be faithful to the characteristics of cultural product and to its social content at the same time should proceed immanently. This means that the task of an analyst is to explore the work and then to create a social

6 6 insight out of the findings on its internal structure, or to read them as ciphers of societal conditions, for instance. This, as Adorno argues, will not lead us away from the work, but it rather exposes something essential of it and helps us to understand, why that particular work is as it is. (Adorno 1989: ; Adorno 1998: 218.) If we then turn to Adorno s analyses, we may see that they are characterised by dialectical movement between inside and outside, wherein internal features of an individual work are juxtaposed with a vaster reality in order to read them in terms of a larger socio-historical situation. To understand how this happens in practice, we should examine in detail a brief quotation by Adorno. In the passage, his main intention is to illustrate the reception of light music with the help of a beer advertisement. However, the text also exemplifies how one can read the artistic style of an advertisement dialectically. In it Adorno writes: An English brewery used for propaganda purposes a billboard that bore a deceptive likeness to one of the whitewashed brick walls which are so numerous in the slums of London and the industrial cities of the North. Properly placed, the billboard was barely distinguishable from a real wall. On it, chalkwhite, was a careful imitation of awkward writing. The words said: What we want is Watney s. (Adorno 1991b: 48.) At first, Adorno focuses on a phenomenon as abstract as an artistic style of the advertisement. Then he argues that the advertisement in question is mainly an example of commercial propaganda which is quite foreseeable (ibid 48). But in no time something interesting happens. Adorno continues: the type of relationship suggested by the billboard, in which masses make a commodity recommended to them the object of their own action, is in fact found again as the pattern for the reception of light music. They need and demand what has been palmed off on them. (Ibid. 48.) In the passage, the features of the advertisement style are suddenly exposed to the outside of an artistic realm, to the socio-economic reality, which makes them speak different language. They are no longer just results of artistic choices, but also expressions of tensions and characteristics of a vaster social reality. To be precise, we can see that the advertisement is not only a replica of graffiti. Now it is also a manifestation of a situation where the possibilities of human beings are narrowed down and where they are not even masters of their own desires anymore. The style that imitates a graffiti that could have been written by anyone of us, it could be said, expresses the powerlessness of the masses in the face of ever-larger institutions and corporations. In short, in the passage the style becomes an afterimage of the historical situation, whereas the situation begins to work as a framework that explains the peculiarities of the style in question.

7 7 The Second Figure: Mediation The second figure, which is defined by the idea of mediation, is connected to general assumptions of the dialectic by its will to transcend our habitual view of cultural and social phenomena as isolatable and independent entities. As the term itself suggest, mediation refers to processes whose intention is to link otherwise disparate phenomena. In this regard, it can be primarily defined as a mean to deepen our sense of immediate, or to transcend the level of immediate appearances. For, as Mike Wayne points out, when we study a particular thing, it is its immediacy which impresses itself on us most powerfully, and it is primary due to the immediacy, why we perceive it as discrete and isolate thing. (Wayne 2003: ) The idea of mediation is itself older than the German idealism or Hegel s dialectic, but the later meanings of the word are already discernible in its early phases. At first mediation referred, in very practical sense, to interceding between adversaries that aimed at reconciling a conflict of interest or opinion. Later, in German idealist philosophy the concept of mediation had various specific uses, each of them foregrounding slightly different aspects of the word. Yet, the idea of reconciling or bringing the opposites in contact with one another is a central one in all of its uses. For instance, mediation was defined as a process that uncovers the interrelationship of opposed and distinct concepts or entities by relocating them to the totality they both actually belong to. (Williams 1976: ) For our purposes this definition is also the most noteworthy, since the peculiarity of mediation is just this kind of introduction of a larger ground or a third term that reveals the nexus or even the unity of alleged opposites, as we will see. In the recent past, the idea of mediation has been an object of criticism and as a procedure it has been widely disputed. However, many of the critiques sprang from the misunderstandings concerning the actual process. Therefore, before we discuss the role of mediation in cultural analysis, we should briefly specify what mediation actually is and what it is not. In general, it is acknowledged that mediation is a dialectical term that helps to establish a relationship between two distinct regions or levels of social life (Jameson 2007: 25 26; Nilges 2010: 82). What has not been as unequivocally clear and which is the most usual source of misunderstandings relates to the question, how mediation actually relates those distinct regions, that is, how the nature of that relationship should be conceptualised.

8 8 The major critics of mediation, Louis Althusser and his followers, who associate mediation primarily to its Hegelian usage and to orthodox Marxism are cases in point here. For Althusser the major flaw in the practice of mediations is an assumption that all the different levels of our social reality political, cultural, and ideological are merely expressions of an underlying mechanism that governs the course of the world. Hence, Marxist analyses of mediations following the assumption have been able to maintain that the legal system and political system are nothing but expressions of underlying economic relations. This is then the reason, Althusser maintains, why the practice of mediations eventually fails to acknowledge the doctrine of semi-autonomy which says that the culture, legal system and the rest have their own dynamics. This is to say, in order to articulate the relationship between different levels, the analyses of mediations have had to deny their autonomy and to attest that they are reducible to some underlying essence common to all. (Dowling 1984: 71 72; Best 1989: ) Even though the critique hits the weak spot of mediation, it is not a reason to repudiate the idea of mediation completely. As Fredric Jameson has pointed out, Althusserian s denunciation does not encompass the whole field of mediation, but only a particular form of it, namely the one operating under the concepts of homology and expressive causality. In another words, the critique bypasses more sophisticated versions of mediation, which actually fulfil the criteria Althusser has set: they are able to respect the semi-autonomy of levels, and at the same time to describe how they are related to each other. To distinguish these forms of mediation from the more straightforward ones, Jameson has characterised them as processes of transcoding. In contrast to establishing homologies, for instance, transcoding aims not so much to reveal the underlying identity of its distinct objects as to define some fundamental category against which their characteristics can be understood. What is essential to the process is that the analyst invents a set of terms or chooses a particular language, which he applies to the analysis of two distinct objects or cultural texts. The conclusion of the analysis may then attest that the objects of analysis can be understood as reactions to, revolts against, or symptoms of situation or the like depicted in the language the analyst have chosen. That is, they are understood as distinct objects which are nonetheless related by the situation they both belong to. (Jameson 2007: ) In order to clarify the idea of mediation a bit we could now turn to the dichotomy between popular culture and modernism that Adorno comments here and there in his writings. The dichotomy in question is not any more the most topical of all the possible ones, but its after-effects are still discernible in discussions that touch on the relationship between high art and popular culture. The

9 9 recurrent problem and the one that needs the help of mediation in these discussions is that the halves of the dichotomy do not easily meet in it, at least not in an equal ground, but rather drift away from each other. (Adorno 1991a: 159; Jameson 2007; ) It is as if you could talk about popular culture and modernism either in terms of elitism or of populism: you must take either one as your starting point, base your evaluation and description on that side only and then deny the meaning of the other pole, since it does not match the scheme based on the first one. In other words, the debates tend to conceptualise popular culture and modernism as two mutually exclusive phenomena that cannot be brought under the same evaluating gaze. As Adorno and Jameson maintain, dialectical and historical approach could overcome the deadends of the discussion. In his argument Jameson starts with a suggestion that popular culture and modernism are to be understood as two interdependent phenomena or, to be precise, as two inseparable forms of aesthetic production under multinational stage of capitalism. This means that the emphasis of an analysis should lie in a social situation against which the cultural forms should then be defined. Hence, because both popular culture and modernism have developed during the expanding industrialisation and commercialisation, their characteristic could be explained in relation to commodity production which would here work as third, or mediating term between the alleged opposites. (Jameson 1992: ) As for popular culture, it has not been uncommon to define it as an outcome of commercialisation. It has been understood, for instance, as one of the means by which the capitalist class increases their profit, and as a mean to achieve consumer satisfaction. However, modernism is equally involved in the developments of social life. In so far as modernist work is defined by its vocation not to be a commodity and not to be pleasurable, it is clear that it is also a reaction to the ever-widening commodity production, reaction that could not have been developed in any other time not just an outcome of aesthetic innovation. Yet, modernism should not be defined merely in terms of anticommercialism. For example in Adorno s definition Baudelaire is a modern poet, who protests against the commodity production with its own means. As Adorno puts it, aesthetic abstraction and obscurity of his poems are not just a result of Baudelaire s unwillingness to follow the artistic conventions, but also formal reactions to increasingly abstract and indefinite world of capitalism. (Adorno 2006: ) In short, the dialectical lesson here is that to conceptualise popular culture and modernism as two distinct phenomena is not the only option. They can also be understood as symptoms or reactions to the same situation, to the world community production, which gives us

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