The culture industry
"The creation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory in the 1920s saw the birth of some of the most exciting and challenging writings of the twentieth century. It is out of this background that the great critic Theodor Adorno emerged. His finest essays are collected here, offering the reader unparalleled insights into Adorno's thoughts on culture. He argued that the culture industry commodified and standardised all art. In turn this suffocated individuality and destroyed critical thinking. At the time, Adorno was accused by his many detractors of everything from overreaction to deranged hysteria. In today's world, where even the least cynical of consumers is aware of the influence of the media, Adorno's work takes on a more immediate significance. The Culture Industry is an unrivaled indictment of the banality of mass culture."--Jacket.
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- i recommend the book: The Culture Industry
https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Industry-Selected-Routledge-C...
basically what happened is capitalism and capitalism means that companies and individuals seek out creating goods that make the most instead of contributing to culture
this is the answer to why all music sounds the same and all art looks the same
- One of my favorite essay is Adorno's "Free Time" in The Culture Industry [0]. When someone talks of work and rest as opposite, I always think of this quote:
>I have no hobby. Not that I am the kind of workaholic, who is incapable of doing anything with his time but applying himself industriously to the required task. But, as far as my activities beyond the bounds of my recognized profession are concerned, I take them all, without exception, very seriously.
Free Time and Rest are actually what makes us intelligent and creative. Work is experienced within its own constraint while free time let us explore and make fortunate mistakes.
- 'Dialectic of Enlightenment' might be a good place to start when it comes to thinking about thinking. If you want something a bit more fragmented/playful/debatable, then 'Minima Moralia' would be interesting. 'The Culture Industry' is well worth reading too.
- I would also add that 'The Dialectic of Enlightenment', is perhaps a more thorough precedent to 'The Society of the Spectacle'... if you're at all interested ... the chapter 'The Culture Industry' is good. https://thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Max-H...
- >First, it presumes a 19th-century separation of "capital" and "labor" where "capital" is a bunch of greedy pigs trying their damndest to exploit labor, with little crossover between the two groups.
If you're talking about Marxism, you're misunderstanding the division between bourgeoisie and proletarians; stocks, pensions, 401k, whatever, does not count as means of production; the division is between the proletarians, who almost always have nothing to sell but their labour-power and the bourgeoisie, i.e a class of people who own the means of production.
Further, you're using "exploit" as a prejorative, which it isn't necessarily; Marx's idea of exploitation is removed from what we think of as exploitation (in a negative sense); it's exploitation just as you'd exploit a car or something like that - you make use of it, use it up. Machines are also exploited in the same way. Nevertheless, the goal of the Marxists and indeed Communists in general is to abolish this exploitation.
Your simplification does not make the anti-capitalist plight any weaker, and in fact it just goes to show how much the ideas of the Communists are miscommunicated and misinterpreted. It could be said, with the shrinking of the number of people who are self-employed (actually, things like freelance programming forming an exception) that the model of proletarians and bourgeoisie is just as relevant if not moreso today than it was in the 19th century.
I advise you to read modern Marxist works, such as Spectres of Marx, The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, and particularly almost all of Zizek's work (in particular The Sublime Object of Ideology), which I must recommend. Of particular note is The Culture Industry by Adorno, commonly associated with the Frankfurt School.
- >The step from telephone to radio has clearly distinguished the roles. The former liberally permitted the participant to play the role of the subject. The latter democratically makes everyone equally into listeners, in order to expose them in authoritarian fashion to the same programs put out by different stations. No mechanism of reply has been developed, and private transmissions are condemned to unfreedom. (from "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" in Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno)
I think this passage is brilliantly relevant to these discussions. For me the internet provides an illusion of interactivity when really most if not all of it is one-way. The internet is a place where opinions are broadcast, but it is nowhere near as radically communicative as the telephone except in actual communication media built off of it (email, IRC, slack, or whatever else etc) and even then I would argue that is mostly not subjects communicating due to the delay not present in vocal or signed communication. That we can broadcast our opinions back does not mean that the speaker and listener are on equal footing as in telephony, because the communication is indirect.
