Adorno and the Culture Industry

Josh Landy
Is popular culture just a way for capitalism to breed conformity?

Ken Taylor
Or does the market give us exactly the art we desire?

Josh Landy
When money does the talking, does original art even stand a chance?

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re here at the studios of KALW San Francisco.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Ken teaches philosophy, and I direct the Philosophy and Literature Initiative.

Ken Taylor
Today we’re thinking about Adorno—Theodor Adorno, that is—and the Culture Industry.

Josh Landy
Industry, culture—Ken, culture is not an industry, culture is made by people.

Ken Taylor
Josh, you surprise me—you have such a quaint vision. What, you think culture is made by, like, hipsters in artists, colonies or individual creators toiling away in obscurity or something like that?

Josh Landy
Well, that’s certainly part of the picture.

Ken Taylor
A teeny-tiny part, Josh—come on. Culture is big business these days. I mean, think of—compare it to a conveyor belt in a Ford factory. You know, that factory turns out millions of cars, each one’s more or less identical. And that’s exactly how Hollywood works. It’s a factory too, Josh: it turns out zillions and zillions of films, each one more or less identical, give or take a star or a scenery or a little plot.

Josh Landy
Ok, so Blade Runner is the same as as Citizen Kane? The Seventh Seal is identical to When Harry Met Sally?

Ken Taylor
Different paint job, s same engine Josh. And you know what the engine is? It’s capitalism! It’s just like Adorno says—all these big budget movies celebrate the system that makes them possible. They present life under capitalism as a paradise, a wonderful world where the system takes care of everyone. Marx got it wrong: it’s not religion, it’s movies that are the opium of the people, Josh.

Josh Landy
You sound like a conspiracy theorist, Ken. Where’s your tinfoil hat?

Ken Taylor
I see they’ve gotten to you too, Josh. You’ve been watching too many of those movies. Which ones have you been watching?

Josh Landy
I don’t know, how about Requiem for a Dream or 12 Years a Slave? I mean, there’s plenty of movies out there that don’t present life as a paradise.

Ken Taylor
That’s because the capitalists are clever. Those movies just show—they’re designed to show—that resistance is futile. That’s what Adorno would say. They make us feel like there’s no hope, no point fighting back. They make us resigned to the capitalist system.

Josh Landy
Sounds like your friend Adorno wants to have it both ways. All movies show people getting the help they need except for the ones that don’t.

Ken Taylor
That’s called dialectical thinking, Josh. You know—thesis, antithesis, synthesis. That’s what it is.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I have a different word for it, Ken, but maybe I won’t use it on the radio. Look, there’s tons of art out there that isn’t about conformity. And it isn’t about futility. It’s about resistance. So think about, I don’t know, the music of Ani DiFranco or that great film you and I both love, Get Out.

Ken Taylor
Josh, you’re not seeing the comprehensiveness of the system. It’s like Adorno says—look, the content of something can parade as counter-cultural. But if the form is conventional, it just reinforces the status quo. To really wake people up from their consumerist slumbers, you have to be transgressive—truly transgressive Revolutionary art requires revolutionary forms, Josh.

Josh Landy
But there’s plenty of revolutionary forms even now. Think of the movies of Spike Lee or punk or hip hop or—well, go back to Adorno’s period—think about jazz, right? I mean, when these forms first hit the scene, they were revolutionary, innovative, transgressive—you know, even though they were produced under the same capitalist system you keep talking about.

Ken Taylor
Look, I’m going to concede to you a tiny bit that Adorno may be exaggerating a tiny little, but he’s getting at the truth—a profound truth. When art is commodified, when it needs to make money, it’s bound to sell out. It has to I mean, think of all those crappy sequels, Rocky 74, or something like that. Think product placement. Come on.

Josh Landy
Look, it’s not that different, Ken, from how it’s always been. I mean, don’t forget all the art that was made for monarchs, or for the church. Don’t forget Shakespeare pandering to the Groundlings. Look, there’s always been patrons and there’s always been audiences to please, but here’s the thing: people still manage to produce great,

Ken Taylor
You’re just missing it, Josh. Look, I agree that art can be produced in many different eras and all that sort of stuff. But in capitalism, art is a mere commodity. That’s all it is. It’s designed to make money and nothing more. We’ve lost the sense that art is something radically free, something valuable for its own sake and not just for the money it can make. It’s not just a commodity. We’ve lost art that shows us even the possibility that we can have a different world, a world that’s not so rapacious. Come on, Josh.

Josh Landy
I mean, that I agree with you on. I think we really do need a space like that, showing us a vision over different kinds of world. All I’m saying is, we still have it, right? I’m not saying today’s system is perfect. I’m just saying it’s also given us some really great art.

Ken Taylor
I see it’s gonna take some work to convince you from your commodified capitalist slavery Josh—and maybe our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Liza Veale, can help. We sent her to find out more about what was driving Adorno to these fascinating ideas and how they resonate in today’s pop culture. She files this report.

Liza Veale
When Theodore Adorno was living in exile in the United States in the late 30s and early 40s, he must have been jarred by pop culture’s his failure to reckon with the war back in Europe. The most popular movies at the time glorified Americans’ role in the war—like the hit “Wake Island.”

Wake Island
They didn’t have enough weapons… They didn’t have enough men… All they had were guts—and each other.

Liza Veale
Pop culture offers an escape from powerlessness when we need it; to Adorno that’s part of what made it a problem. It also gives us a chance to confront power when that’s what we need. When we watch Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator,” we get to make a mockery of the Hitler figure, heard here giving a speech followed by a translator.

The Great Dictator
[faux-German speech] We must tighten our belts! [faux-German speech] His Excellency has just referred to the Jewish people.

Liza Veale
In this imaginary space viewers get to belittle the “Great Dictator.”

The Great Dictator
Kill off the Jews… Wipe out the brunettes… Then will come forth our dream—a pure Aryan race! Beautiful, blonde Aryans…. They will love you, they will adore you—they will worship you as a god! No, no, you mustn’t say it—you make me afraid of myself!

Liza Veale
At this point in the movie, the Dictator has climbed up the curtains in fright.

The Great Dictator
Leave me—I want to be alone.

Liza Veale
For Adorno, this vicarious experience replaces the real experience of living under power. Rebellion is given vent. Today when we listen to Trevor Noah cleverly make a fool of Donald Trump, it feels like consolation that at least we’re on the right team.

Trevor Noah
Once you realize that Trump is basically the perfect African president, you starts to notice the similarities everywhere.

Donald Trump
I’m really rich. I have a great temperament. They love me! Anyway, I don’t have to do this.

African presidents
The people love me very much. I am very popular. I am very powerful. I am the one who has got the money.

Liza Veale
These feel like battles were winning. But Adorno would point out that the real winner is what he calls the Culture Industry: TV, magazines, movies—the whole business behind culture. CNN executive John Martin predicted a Trump win would be “a bit better from a business standpoint,” explaining there would be a “general fascination that wouldn’t be the same under a Clinton administration.” But can something be good for the culture industry and social progress at the same time? The past few years have shown us that being woke definitely sells—see pretty much any of the Super Bowl commercials.

Mass Mutual
When disaster strikes to one, we all get together and support each other. That’s the nature of humanity.

Liza Veale
That one’s for mass Mutual Insurance. This next one’s for Ram trucks with the voice of Martin Luther King.

MLK
You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve—you only need a heart full of grace.

Liza Veale
The mainstreaming of wokeness has also been a boon to the newest subset of the culture industry, social media—like this genre of viral video.

V For Vendetta
An “ally” is a person that wants to fight for the equality of a marginalized group that they’re not a part of. We need your help building this house, but you probably should listen so you know what to do first—let’s do this!

Liza Veale
It’s hard to parse which of our experiences online carry over to the rest of our lives. Adorno wrote that “on all sides, the borderline between culture and empirical reality becomes more and more indistinct.” The fact that Trump is a reality TV star is a merciless twist on that thought—and his spectacles have real, empirical consequences.

Donald Trump
If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t even be talking about illegal immigration, Chris—you wouldn’t even be talking about it.

Liza Veale
Adorno wrote about the many kinds of deception it takes to get people to support a political program that, as he wrote, is largely incompatible with their own rational self-interest. He was writing about capitalism. In his framework, the culture industry is there to do whatever capitalism needs it to do to make us okay with capitalism. Right now, a sense of momentum towards social justice is something people are willing to pay for. The box-office busting “Black Panther” is part of that.

Black Panther
You get to decide what kind of king you are going to be.

Liza Veale
In the pop culture space at least, it feels like progress. That’s why it’s so unsettling to learn things like this: in terms of wealth, things are getting worse for Black and Latino people in this country. One prediction is that by 2053, median wealth for Black and Latino people will be zero. Actually poor people of all races are getting poor, while rich people get richer. It’s sickening to contemplate. It makes you want to watch a movie about vanquishing the rich.

Eat The Rich
We’re starting a people’s uprising—do you fancy joining us?

Liza Veale
That would make me feel better.

Eat The Rich
Yes, I’d love to!

Liza Veale
Philosophy Talk, I’m Liza Veale.

Ken Taylor
Thanks for that fascinating tour of Trump wokeness and Mutual of Omaha, Liza. I’m Ken Taylor, with me is my Stanford colleague, Josh Landy, and today we’re asking about Adorno and the Culture Industry.

Josh Landy
We’re joined now by Adrian Daub, Professor of German and Comp Lit at Stanford University, and co-author of “The James Bond Songs: Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism.” Adrian, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Adrian Daub
Thank you.

Ken Taylor
So Adrian, how did you get first interested in the culture industry and Adorno and all that stuff? Were you like, in a punk band that sold out or what?

Adrian Daub
I wish. My training is all about high culture and about art from the 19th century. But I’ve always written on pop culture, and I love pop culture. I’m an avid consumer of it. At the same time, I find myself really worried when people sort of hold up the latest TV show, the latest pop song, as you know, equivalent to artworks are doing pretty much the same thing. And and they don’t seem the same to me. I love both, but they don’t seem the same to me.

Josh Landy
Okay, so that’s that. That brings me to the big argument that Ken and I were having a moment ago. So, you know, Ken was saying culture, including especially pop culture has gotten worse under capitalism. I was saying, well, it’s not that different, really, from how it’s been in the past? Where do you stand on it? Or we’re all just everything swirling down the toilet? Or? Or is it much the same as it’s ever been?

Adrian Daub
I hate to tell you that I agree with Ken on this. There is something about the capitalist system of production when it’s applied to culture, that is not necessarily wrecks, art distends it right, the fact that it’s produced for consumers. And it’s who needs it of recognizable forms, genres, and, and narratives can make it less interesting.

Josh Landy
Yeah, you’re saying that people in the Middle Ages didn’t like to listen to recognizable forms, and was everything. Every artwork was radically different from every other artwork or something like that?

Adrian Daub
Well, they had certainly less choice, right. And they had, they were exposed to things that they sort of needed to figure out as sort of a given. They were not consumers in that sense. You can’t walk into one gothic cathedral and say, I don’t like this one. I’m gonna go to the next one.

Ken Taylor
Yeah. And the Gothic cathedral. There’s lots of art in a gothic cathedral. And as I understand it, it’s it’s meant to give you that feeling of transcendence. It’s meant to kind of push you up toward the heavens, it’s meant to inspire you. It’s not meant to like titillate you.

Josh Landy
But that’s, I think, the real nub of the issue here, right? The assumption seems to be if something’s made, in part to make money, or if money is being made around, then it can’t possibly do that other thing. Why should we think that? I mean, you know, look, someone who goes into nursing or high school teaching will get paid, but they’re not doing it for the money. And there’s plenty of people who like Spike Lee’s do the right thing. It wasn’t just so he could buy himself a Porsche. You know, that’s not why Spike Lee made that movie.

Ken Taylor
You want to take that one, Adrian?

Adrian Daub
Well, I think just because something is just because there’s something that exceeds value creation, doesn’t change the fact that the people behind something like do the right thing. Obviously, we’re doing it to make money. It’s the people who are giving Spike Lee the money. We’re not in salutely.

Ken Taylor
But that—it may have been a commodity commodified to some extent in the Middle Ages. I don’t really think that’s quite true. But in the capitalist system, it’s just a commodity, only the demands of—

Josh Landy
I hear you saying that, but are you making an argument?

Ken Taylor
Well, we got a whole show. We gotta take a break. So you’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about Adorno and the culture industry with Adrian Daub from Stanford University.

Josh Landy
In our next segment, we’ll think about the corruption of culture by money, our movies and music bound to be debased by the demands of commercialism, or can they still be great works of art.

Ken Taylor
Culture, commodification and corruption—plus your calls and emails, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Patti Smith
And in a week or two, if you make the charts, the girls will tear you apart

Ken Taylor
Does the culture industry, or what Joni Mitchell calls “the star-maker machinery,” suck the life out of artists and spit them back out as vapid rock and roll stars? I’m Ken Taylor. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy and we’re thinking about the culture industry. Our guest is Adrian Daub from Stanford University.

Ken Taylor
So Adrian, here’s a quote from Adorno: “Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art, they are just business.” Is that really true?

Adrian Daub
I think it is. I think that, you know, in the age of box office reports that somehow tell people what movies to watch, we’ve really cut out the middleman. No one’s saying what they should say. Black Panther is a terrific movie, you should see it. They’re saying it’s the number one movie, it’s breaking all these all these box office records, therefore go see it.

Josh Landy
I mean, what do you mean, no one’s saying that reviewers say that you say all kinds of thing. Right. But I mean, the reviewers don’t say go see it. Because it’s making a lot of money. They say go see it because it does this, it does that.

Ken Taylor
You know what makes a reviewer successful, influential reviewer, it’s a little bit less with the Rotten Tomatoes. But in the old days, how many marquees they got on, right? How many times they got quoted on the marquee of a movie theater, they are servants of the capitalist industry.

Josh Landy
Look, I mean, again, so it comes back to this the same point, right? Yes, money is involved. And money is going to have perhaps some distorting impacts around the edges. But it doesn’t mean that everything is completely driven by money. These reviewed on a Oh, Scott, writing in New York Times isn’t thinking, Hmm, how can I make more money writing these reviews? He’s trying to think, is this movie a good movie? Explain what’s good.

Ken Taylor
These reviews are a commodity to the New York Times find more, the more clicks they get on his reviews, the more influence he gets, the more influence he gets, the more he’s quoted in them on the movie marquee.

Josh Landy
Okay. Bottom line, are you really saying you never learn anything real from a review?

Ken Taylor
I don’t know. Adrian, what do you think?

Adrian Daub
I think you do. But the problem I think becomes that, you know, Adorno has this very nice quote about how you can see the pudding mix through the pudding and the culture industry. You look at a work of art and you don’t one of the first mysteries you encounter is how, how did this get made? Why did it get made? And you sit there asking that very serious question and the culture industry, you know exactly who made it, whether they were mad at each other when they made it, what the different personalities were like how well it’s doing, if it’s a flop, it’s if it’s a hit, the fact that it’s produced being produced for you is somehow becoming a feature of the object. I think that’s that tends to probably distort what the object is.

Ken Taylor
Josh, you sound like very optimistic. I wonder it’s only test how optimistic you are? Are you denying that capitalism commodifies artistic production? Are you denying that at all I mean, it and it commodifies it to a fare thee well, I mean, it’s intensely driven by these cultural productions have to make make us profit, if they don’t make us profit, we don’t support them. There may be some other way for it to eke out an independent cinema. But the big business of of, of artistic production determines what gets produced by and large.

Josh Landy
So there’s lots of things here, right, but but the main point I just want to make is, yeah, sure there’s money involved. But that doesn’t stop people making great art. Think about passion projects, right? So Scorsese has to make some big movie that makes money so that he can go back to the studio and say, You know what, now I want you to make a movie that loses money. And that’s happening too. Now movies are complicated, because it takes a bunch of money to make a movie. But you know, it’s not that expensive to make a song people are making all kinds of music, people are making all kinds of really countercultural dissonant innovative music.

Adrian Daub
Yeah, but would you say that those are more or less innovative once the culture industry gets his hands on it? I mean, do you think that any any, you know, raucous punk band has ever been really improved by having put been put in touch with a massive record label?

Josh Landy
I don’t know. I mean, like, that’d be an interesting thing to do an empirical testing. I think we all like to think.

Ken Taylor
I don’t think there’s a priori. Let’s think what happened to her rap. Rap is World Music. Now, I remember back in 2005, I was spending the summer in Australia and driving along and listening to rap an Australian right. I said, Wow, rap has really made it. It’s it’s world music. Now. My son who loves original gangster rap says, yeah, it’s world music, but it sucks. And why does it suck because it’s aimed at kind of the lowest common denominator, because the lifeblood has been sucked out of it by the demands of commodification and commercialization. And that—you can’t deny that’s a real phenomenon.

Josh Landy
If you focus on the on the belated side of anything, you’re going to find cases of commodification, but if you focus at the moment of its production, you’re going to find innovation, and that production, the innovation was real. And it was happening within this same system you guys keep complaining about?

Adrian Daub
Well, at the same time, I guess I keep trying to draw the contrast to sort of avant garde art right. Avant Garde art gets staid, gets uninteresting, gets incorporated and someone does something even crazier, and suddenly that’s avant garde. I think I agree with Ken that basically the process is reversed and the culture industry something starts out being exciting, vibrant, extremely alive, and then the caller sets in and within 20 years old.

Josh Landy
What about what about Golden Age of TV? What about TV now? Don’t you see interesting happenings is happening? I mean Twin Peaks even back in A day that again was produced within the culture industry, and yet radically different, I mean, defies all possible expectations, you expect that they’re gonna solve the mystery, and so on and so on and so on. It’s possible too, right?

Adrian Daub
But the same time, you know, I think that already, we’re looking at kind of a end of a golden era. And I think that we’re looking at a at a, you know, at a moment when we’re sort of noticing that even these very highly prestigious productions are starting to resemble each other and that, you know, and, you know, the kinds of things that we held up, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, you know, as being pathbreaking are now being copied, you know, 15 or 20 times on one Netflix.

Ken Taylor
Josh, I think you’re under estimating the logic of capitalism, capitalism, we’re going to Adorno say something about uniformity. But he also talks about all the niches that capitalism provides for all the different kinds of people to identify themselves as this ladder the other day. I think that too, is part of the logic of capitalism. But I want to let a caller in here, and we’ve got Starchild from San Francisco on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, Starchild.

Starchild
Hi, thank you very much.

Ken Taylor
What’s your comment or question?

Starchild
Well, you know, I hear you guys talking about capitalism. And I think you may be misusing that term a little bit early. So I’d like to kind of challenge you on that, okay. I don’t think capitalism is commodification. commodification is one of the things you could choose to do with the freedom under capitalism. Capitalism is simply having the freedom to buy and sell what you choose to do. And that freedom is up to you live an aesthetic life and be like Mahatma Gandhi or something or even live like…

Ken Taylor
Yeah, Starchild, I think I’m going to push back on you. Because I think capitalism, Marx says in the Communist Manifesto, that capitalism has reduced every relation between human and human, he says, between man and man to naked calculations of self interest, think about childcare, who used to take care of your children, like your grandmother, your wife, your, your, your neighbor, people who loved your children. Now you can do something you can hire for a wage laborer, a daycare worker to take care of your children, your daycare worker doesn’t have to love your children, right? So it’s replaced a relation of love that’s grounded in human connectivity, and replaced it with an economic relation that’s turning it into a commodity. And that’s what capitalism does it commodifies more and more and more stuff. And capitalism has commodified artistic production. Do you agree with me?

Adrian Daub
Yeah no, of course, there’s, I think there’s a certain degree of freedom. And and I think your childcare example makes that clear, there is something nice about getting to choose, but there is this dark side to it, that it that if you if everything is open to your choice, the inherent qualities of things suddenly become interchangeable, right?

Josh Landy
I just feel like you kind of have it both ways, right about the about pop culture. You know, the main argument seems to be everything’s the same, everything’s the same. It’s all gonna completely ground down into a similarity monotony. But on the other hand, when I show you that it isn’t all the same, so yeah, well, that’s nice marketing.

Ken Taylor
I think you got to do a little dialectical thinking, Ah, no, but I think everything for I’m gonna contradict the underlying law. I don’t agree with every word that Adorno said, Well, I couldn’t possibly mean every word Adorno says, I don’t even understand every word he says because he writes obscurely. Right. But But I think there is a deep point. I think the logic that produces much of what gets produced is the same, right? I don’t think that every product is the same, because I think he kind of plays with this idea. He realizes, right, this thing about that you said in the opening about? Well, there are films in which there were not they’re not going along, and everything doesn’t work out. Yes. But what happens in those films, either the prison gets crushed, or, or, or something, right. So you got to human beings are complex and capitalism doesn’t, isn’t blind to that complexity. So it’s got to provide lots of different kinds of products.

Josh Landy
Okay. But like, I think if, you know, if you’re willing to be, you know, a kind of EA or figure, you’re, it’s easy to interpret anything to make it seem negative. But you know, that’s, you’ve got to give better arguments than that. Just Well, you know, when things are going great. That’s a celebration of capitalism. And then when things are going badly, it makes you resign yourself, look, I’m sorry, yeah, I could, I could read anything. That way I could read all the things adorn our legs and make them seem terrible.

Adrian Daub
Really, you think that you know that there’s something I mean, true sort of avant garde? I know you love Beckett, do you think that you could read Beckett as deeply affirmative?

Josh Landy
No, but I could say, oh, that also makes us resent ourselves anything Adorno likes, like, if I want to be like Adorno Of course, you can always make something seem like it’s terrible, and just makes you resign yourself or love the system or something like that. But these are just—these arguments are arbitrary.

Ken Taylor
Go back to the very idea of a hit a hit film, a hit song, right? And think of the vapid sameness, of so much hit material. Here’s something else that capitalism is about, according to like the Marxist and even according to the honest capitalist, it’s not just about the satisfaction of desires that are antecedently there. It’s about the creation and disciplining of desires, and and the very phenomena of the hit song, you know the top 40 song and the you can hardly tell the difference between the top 40 songs is disciplining and creating taste. Right you don’t agree with that.

Josh Landy
So I think the question just billings is a really interesting one but um, first of all, I don’t agree that all songs are the same. I think the you know, this is a kind of aristocratic snooty disdain that Adorno has for the, you know, us, hoi polloi. But the other thing I want to say is, look, know, you really think it’s that different. You think that there was some golden age where everything was just radically different from everything else? No, look, there’s always been mediocre art that oh, the vast majority of all cultural production is always going to be mediocre. That’s just how it is.

Adrian Daub
Well, I mean, I, we should say that Adorno doesn’t think there ever was a golden age. I mean, I guess we might disagree with that. But but he doesn’t think so he thinks has always been about power relations, it’s just in capitalism, it becomes perfectly obvious, you know, much more so than it would have been in let’s say, a gothic cathedral.

Ken Taylor
Right. So it’s not, he’s not harkening back to some passes, from which we have fallen. I mean, no Marxist would do that. Anyway. I mean, history is a trends, transition away from failed human relations to other human relations.

Adrian Daub
I think that sort of moments that you get where he, where he is nostalgic, is for a more dispersed mode of cultural production. Right. Adorno was composer himself was a avid musician. He likes this idea of, you know, what, what happened when people were making the music themselves in their homes, etc. You know, I think that’s sort of where he has a certain amount of nostalgia. He thinks that today, of course, the there’s a great concentration of the centers of production. And today, we might say, well, with Amazon, Direct Publishing, etc. With YouTube, anyone can do this? Well, that’s not really true, either, that some platforms are heavily concentrated. And for the rest of us there is podcasting, basically.

Ken Taylor
Right, Karen from Milpitas on the line. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, what’s your comment or question?

Karen
Hi, I have a really good question. So given that money is involved, and I guess to an extent that we’re, we want to, like I want to give money to artists, so that they can live life in a way that may be different than mine, so that they can produce art that I can consume that is, or that I can view and look at that is different than what I would experience in my own life. How can I do that without painting? There was plenty of my intention.

Ken Taylor
There you go. You got an idea, Adrian?

Adrian Daub
I worry that maybe you can’t and but maybe that’s not the worst thing? You know, you know, that doesn’t mean that, you know, the artists work will get worse because of it. It just means that I think there’s a certain naivete we can’t have right, we are in a capitalist system that will influence the art that’s being made. And yeah…

Ken Taylor
I think there’s a profound question here, though, because one of the things in when Adorno was writing, for example, the production of the mass production of art was not very democratized. Right, you know, the big studio system, the big recording companies, I mean, there was the jazz movement arising but me Miss J. He didn’t understand things he says. Stupid things he says about yet about anything. There’s things he says about jazz. But you might think, well, maybe we’ve overcome the capitalist hegemony, because of technology has democratized production and given us many new avenues to distribute stuff, all you need. I mean, is that great artists in his or her garage and the internet? How to make a movie on CD and CD, baby? And what do you think about that?

Adrian Daub
Yeah, I mean, I think that there’s something to that at the same time, I keep thinking, I mean, I was very excited when these websites like Patreon, and you know, and Kickstarter, right, sort of came on the scene. At the same time, I now note, notice that there are YouTube videos that explain to you exactly how to streamline your product so that it will maximize what you get there. And then I think, well, gee, you know, if I were to argue with Adorno, that’s probably what he point to.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, because Adorno thinks that the capitalist production of technology serves capitalism. And so all the technology that gets produced under capitalism gets repurposed for the purposes of the capitalist. And I think you see that happening with like Facebook and Google, they look like these great democratizing things and whatever, they become huge behemoth.

Josh Landy
Yeah, but again, I think if you sat if you sat in the room, you thought to yourself, what, what kind of an artwork would I want to see? In the ideal case, you might think? Well, I’d like to see a great variety of artworks, you know, some of them really protest against the system, and some of them are really dissonant, and some of them are innovative and unpredictable. Well, guess what? That’s exactly what we have. So just to say, well…

Ken Taylor
Except—okay, you’re a highly educated, highly sophisticated consumer of these things to add. But here’s the thing I don’t think you’re giving enough credit for take the average person under capitalism. I don’t know who that is gonna take some mythical average person under capitalism and ask them to imagine what they want to see. And you know what I bet they’re going to basically want to see what capitalism gives them to see, because capitalism already on its own. I mean, now it conditions our taste, our imaginations are not just free, unfettered things. They are they are conditioned by, by capitalist.

Josh Landy
But it’s just the case with any society. So our people’s tastes are going to get conditioned by their society, no matter whether it’s capitalism or not.

Ken Taylor
So the question is, how can you have a society? How can you have a social economic political formation that frees the imagination to have full range of human possibilities? How can you do that, Adrian?

Adrian Daub
Yeah, I think that that’s, and that’s where we’re Adorno is background as a Marxist philosopher becomes super important, right? Earlier you said, you know, you sort of suggested that there’s something elitist about about Adorno. And that’s, in some strict sense, probably true. But the but his point is not that most people are stupid on like, stupid things. His point is that people are not given the time. Of course, if you come home at 8pm, from a long day of work, you’re gonna go for, you know, Leave It to Beaver over a Mondrian painting. The point that he wants to make is maybe we need to strive for a society where everybody can spend time with the kind of art represented by a Mondrian painting.

Ken Taylor
Yes, you’re listening to Philosophy Talk, We’re asking about the culture industry, with Adrian Daub from Stanford University.

Josh Landy
In our final segment, we’ll think about what you can do if you’re worried about culture getting ruined by commodification, how can we resist what’s being fed to us by the culture industry and find the real works of art wherever they may be.

Ken Taylor
A critique of capitalist judgment—when Philosophy Talk it continues.

George Harrison
This song is in E, this is for you and…

Ken Taylor
This song is just another capitalist commodity constructed to conform to crass commercialism—or so Adorno would say, and he’d probably be right. I’m Ken Taylor, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
… except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy and our guests is Adrian Daub from Stanford University. Today, we’re thinking about the culture industry.

Ken Taylor
And we’ve got a caller on the line, Rob in San Francisco. Welcome to Philosophy. Talk, Rob, what’s your comment or question?

Rob
Yes. Good morning. First of all, very, very engaging and interesting conversation this morning. I would just ask that the panel considered the question whether or not Art has always been commodified well before capitalism, and I offer that early art was created for a multitude of reasons as a commodity to please the church to please the people in power and or simply just to increase the prominence of the artists within their own art mediums peer group.

Ken Taylor
Josh here is doing cartwheels of joy because ou’re echoing a point he made earlier in the show. So thanks for the question, Rob. Okay, we had this before, but I want to give you another chance to just knock Josh out of the park. I know you guys are colleagues and friends.

Adrian Daub
Yeah, I gotta be gentle here. I agreed to a point if the point is that people have always tried to make money or survive making art. That’s certainly that’s certainly been true for a long time. The same time. I do think that again, if we go back to a gothic cathedral, it doesn’t have a price tag, right? It doesn’t a Greek temple doesn’t have a price tag. It’s not—there’s an economic aspect to it. I don’t think you’d call it commodifed.

Ken Taylor
Did the paintings in the Sistine Chapel before the rise of capitalism—were there reproductions of those and then got sold and the man was there it was there a whole business of reproducing these things?

Adrian Daub
Only in starting the 18th century, right.

Ken Taylor
So that’s post capitalist, right? So I mean, in the in the Middle Ages, and are you created a piece of art some patron page or the making a piece of art? It hung somewhere? I assume that people have to pay to see this thing?

Adrian Daub
Well, or was part of a ritual context, right? I mean, there were certainly things you weren’t allowed to copy right today. Everything Right? Any any painting can be on any mug. You know, the little finger of St. Cecilia, I think you’re pretty much not that hook.

Ken Taylor
I mean, that whole commodification thing as as a thing that more units of it can be produced. More viewers means more money. I mean, what When did when did more viewers have a well, I suppose in Shakespeare’s time more viewers of a play meant more money, but I think

Josh Landy
I look I sort of take your point. I think you guys are focusing selectively so I mean, look, yeah, not everything was like churches, you also had bands of touring performers paid right away, right after the show.

Ken Taylor
Disreputable folks, right.

Josh Landy
Okay, so you had that. And conversely today you have situate, like many people are listening to their, their popular music on YouTube today. And as far as they’re concerned, it’s free. Now, of course we can get into whether it really is free. But as far as they’re concerned, they do something that they’re not paying for, they hear a song, all they’re focused on is how much they love the song.

Adrian Daub
In terms of commodification, I would just throw in one thing, right? Let’s say one of those medieval troops shows up in your village and does their play, you can give them the money, you can not give him the money, you can not say, oh, there’s this other troop that also happens to be in town and I will be put my money there.

Josh Landy
Why is that worse?

Adrian Daub
But that’s what commodification is.

Ken Taylor
It’s not worse. It’s just the logic of capitalism and the point. So you’re going to grant the logic of capitalism. Right. But then point to the Adorno. Point. I mean, there’s a lot of in general that I don’t understand or don’t agree with, but the sort of basic Marx’s critique of capitalist production when, when the capitalist mode of production meets artistic production, a complicated thing happens. It’s hard to deny that it’s this. It’s a new way of producing art under the sun that wasn’t before. Wouldn’t you agree with that?

Adrian Daub
Yeah, I think that’s right. I think that there’s that. And it’s hard for us to even imagine and conceive of art, the way it used to be, I guess,

Ken Taylor
But again, I want to I want to, I want to ask you a question about. So I said, capitalism creates conditions and disciplines taste. So is it even possible? Are we totally powerless before this capitalist machinery of taste production, manipulation and discipline? Can we stand up and say, I’m mad as hell? And I’m not going to take this anymore? I’m not going to consume this anymore. Is that even possible that you think?

Adrian Daub
I think I think that there there are, there are ways of doing that. And I hope that and I think that actually Adorno has has some suggestions there too. And I sort of thought of three things that I think he points to. One is, we just can’t be naive consumers, right? Our what we happen to want cannot be something that we think just occurred to us has been produced in us and that’s okay. But it’s something to take into account. Second thing. You, you dwells very much on this question of categorization of judgment, the fact that things are pre categorized, if you’re this kind of person, you might also enjoy this other thing, break that get out of that mold, I think it’s very important. The third one is own your philistinism. Don’t, don’t let the culture industry tell you sort of what kind of expertise you need to have. If you think of plays over your head go see it twice anyway. And if you still don’t get it, that’s fine, too. It’s probably better than reading the little booklet that explains everything and pre digests everything for you.

Josh Landy
I love all of those things. I just want to say one quick thing, which is Toni Morrison, Toni Morrison started writing the book she wrote, because they didn’t exist. She had an idea of the books she wanted to read. They didn’t exist. So she made them. And so to me, that’s the publishing houses true. Okay. Yeah. So that shows on the one hand that capitalism wasn’t doing all it could have. But on the other hand, we aren’t just drones, we aren’t just complete servants to the system. It’s possible for a great individual like Tony Morrison to say, you know, there’s something that needs to be done not so I can make money. It needs to be there, and I’m going to make it.

Ken Taylor
Look, I agree with something underneath you. I think the the human impulse to create human genius, human imagination is not totally a prisoner of the moment. I totally agree with that. And that’s why revolutionary change and revolutionary imagination is possible. But it’s still there is the brutal, use an existentialist term, there is the brute facticity of the capitalist mode of production, which is not just something I forget that Right, right. That’s the that’s the that’s the, that’s the air against what your wings have to beat in order to achieve this elevation from it. And I think it’s a huge and massive fact. Right?

Adrian Daub
Yeah, I think that’s beautiful. I think that there’s that there’s really a call here for being open to aesthetic experiences, but also being really scared of moments when your aesthetic experiences kind of predetermined. When you’re when you’re being when when you’re sort of being told what you’re being given and how you are to receive it.

Josh Landy
So this almost sounds like a beautiful dialectical moment. They say, right? You know, we could say, well, we’re not completely trapped, right? But it’s good to be aware of the particular constraints operating now. So that we can try to push back gets in the way that Adrian was saying, right?

Ken Taylor
So we got a comment just along this lines that asked, I think we kind of answered this, but it was just foregrounded, how can you have a society? This is from Joanne, how can you have a society that’s free? Thinking about art and culture without commodification, you can’t? The herd mentality is hardwired. And that tendency lends itself to commodification.

Adrian Daub
Interesting, I wonder, the same time. So is the drive to distinguish ourselves from others. I mean, capitalism is great because it works so well because it can do both.

Ken Taylor
So So look, I mean, I don’t know if Marx is right. He just typed in the wall Marxist is that that’s, that’s, that’s fair reading, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Okay. I mean, I don’t know what he thinks about the Soviet Union or China or any of those places doesn’t like dun dun like, um, so here’s the thing, right? I mean, I It’s hard for me going back to Joanne’s question. I think how could we build a society a social world and economic, social political world that gave free rein to the human imagination? Right, and to produce things of, of how did how does he put it in that quote, We it’s something like a world that’s, you know, imagine possibilities different from this rapacious world? How do we how do we make that happen? Because it seems to me there needs to be social enabling possibilities. Do you have a view of how you guys both study high art? And how do you enable that?

Adrian Daub
Yeah, I think that Adorno that this is the point where Adorno might indeed be a kind of an elitist because I think he thinks that if we give people this kind of freedom, they will gravitate towards harder, more difficult things. And then we might say, Geez, you know, do do we really think that we’re all going to listen to Arnold Schoenberg? The moment you know, capitalism crumbles. Maybe we’re not going to grant Adorno that.

Ken Taylor
I don’t think—I just think of amazing stories. Think of amazing stories and fiction. I think there are a zillion stories to be told a few of them get told in moviemaking. I do think that we’re at a bit of a like, if not a golden age of Bronze Age of Television and storytelling, like a Game of Thrones or, or or the wire the Breaking Bad, amazing storytelling. Right? How can we how can there be more of that?

Adrian Daub
Well, I do think that this decentralization probably is going in that direction. I hope that I hope that people getting easier and easier access to the means of production probably is one thing that Adorno would point to the same time. We can’t allow it to sort of fracture us too much, right? Because a big part of of great art is that it’s compelling to a great number of people.

Ken Taylor
Right. So, Adrian, on that hopeful possibly note, I’m going to thank you for joining us. I do not feel commodified by this conversation.

Adrian Daub
Very glad I’ve done my job.

Ken Taylor
Our guest has been Adrian Daub, a Professor of German and Comp Lit at Stanford University (colleagues with Josh in the Comp List department) and co-author of “The James Bond Songs: Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism.” So Josh, are you feeling liberated or commodified by this conversation?

Josh Landy
Always liberated. You know, I look, I, I mean, obviously, product placement is terrible. The rash of sequels. That’s lame, but you know, they’ve always been constraints, it’s always been possible to rise above them and make great works. And guess what, today, today, a higher percent of the population, get to experience those works of art all you know, I mean, if it weren’t for all the sort of industrialization and mass marketing and so on, people wouldn’t be able to get their hands on a Toni Morrison novel for $15.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, this is a good mass marketing has, it’s tough. It does appeal to the masses. It does spread the goods of culture wider. And there have always been constraints. But there haven’t always been the constraints of capitalism, and capitalists, commodification and commodification is a good thing. It does give you access to child paid child care and people to drive your car and all who don’t care about you. It does do that. But it also has its downside. I don’t I just don’t think you’re alive enough to the downside of capitalist commodification for artistic production. But you know what? This conversation continues at our website at philosophers corner and our online community of thinkers were our moto is (with apologies to Descartes) Cogito ergo Bloggo—I think, therefore I blog. And you can become a partner in that community just by visiting our website, philosophytalk.org

Josh Landy
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments @philosophytalk.org, and we may feature it on the blog. Now a man who speaks so fast the culture industry will never catch him. It’s in Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales… So 2018 saw the fall of the once mighty empire known as TOYS R US, gone into bankruptcy, thanks largely to a couple billion dollar debt load, acquired, as I understand it, back in 2005 or so, when the chain was purchased in a leveraged buy out. The way that works, apparently, is that Toys R Us wound up owning the debt the purchasers spent buying the store in the first place. This whole late capitalism schtick baffles me. It’s like selling your garage, only you still own it, and you have to pay cars to park in you. This makes no sense to me. So now the kiddies and collectors have to buy all their Star Wars robots at Wal Mart. Until Wal Mart collapses under its own weight. However will we survive? Whither the kitsch of tomorrow? All of this made me think about Adorno and Horkheimer’s culture industry concept. The idea is that mass culture and mass entertainment have replaced both high and low art, keeping us passive and in thrall to capitalism. They pointed to the film industry in particular, writing in Hollywood, ironically enough, in exile in the 1940’s. So I guess they were talking about musicals and propaganda but not film noir, a glum expressionist genre which kind of undermines their point. They forgot that culture is subject to the same ever-changing whims of capitalism and desire as anything else that costs a buck. My favorite example is the movie V FOR VENDETTA, based on the comic book written by Alan Moore, which he intended to be about the struggle between anarchy and fascism, with anarchy winning, kind of, spoiler alert, thanks to a masked superhero anarchist. The movie was a bit more Hollywood-y, but still weird, with the main character wearing his hero mask though the whole movie as he kills off the fascists who wronged him, one by one. It was kind of like COUNT OF MONTE CHRISTO only creepy and dystopian. But okay, the mask designed for the character, was of Guy Fawkes, the English Catholic who tried to blow up King James in 1604. The movie became something of a cult hit, especially with anarchists, or their pale and pudgy young male stand ins who troll the Internet for grins. And the mask became popular at real life protest marches, and for some time was the top selling mask on Amazon, selling hundreds of thousands a year. So every time an anarchist bought one of these masks he was putting money into the pockets of Time Warner, a major corporation, which is kind of ironic. Alan Moore himself, perhaps aware of this irony, hated the movie made of his comic. He wrote “It’s a thwarted and frustrated and largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values standing up against a state run by neoconservatives.” As opposed to his fantasy of a lone English anarchist standing up to a fascist regime. Culture changes. The ironies get lost. Remember when Apple was the cool upstart and not just another damn culture-shocking behemoth? Remember Palm Pilots and Razrs and Nokias and Blackberries? Here’s a thought experiment. Back in the early 1920’s a family in Kentucky, at the birth of radio, started a family band. They played ocarinas they made themselves out of beets and a red clay glaze. They became big stars. To emulate them, people began making their own ocarinas. Beet sales went through the roof. Then the family began recording, and marketing their own ocarinas made from bakelite, with the name of the family in a logo on the side. Ocarina making skills vanished. Beet carving dried up. Beet sales plummeted. Then people got sick of the ocarina family. The divorce, the troubled son, that trip to Hollywood that didn’t quite work out, people got bored of it. Plus they were into kazoos now, and Hawaiian guitars. Then the Depression made it illegal to use beets for crafts. People were starving. So now nobody plays the ocarina, and most people hate beets. Is pop culture to blame? Or culture Marxists? And what about the LEGEND OF ZELDA the Ocarina of Time. Remember that video game? 1998? There was a resurgence of interest in ocarinas. I think you could buy them at Toys R Us. Go to your iPod to check availability. Do they still have those? If not, I feel your pain. Speaking on behalf of culture everywhere, I am sorry for your loss. I gotta go.

Ken Taylor
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University. Copyright 2018.

Josh Landy
Our executive producers are David Demarest and Matt Martin.

Ken Taylor
The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research. Cindy Prince Baum is our Director of Marketing.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Karola Kreitmayer, Emily King Angela Johnston, and Colin Peden.

Ken Taylor
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University, and from the partners at our online Community of Thinkers.

Josh Landy
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) in this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Ken Taylor
Not even when they’re true and reasonable.

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you too, can become a partner in our community of thinkers. I’m Josh Landy.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

V For Vendetta
Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose. So let me simply add that it’s my very good honor to meet you… and you may call me V. Are you, like, a crazy person? I am quite sure they will say so.