In this comments-section Charles Reece declined to respond to my criticisms of Adorno and the Frankfurt School, but mentioned that he had done an essay adapting some of Adorno's thought for an essay. Certainly I've no reason to respond to his essay if he doesn't respond to mine, but I will review one sentence from his brief meditation on GHOST WORLD here:
'Just like the rest of us, Enid was born into the media-saturated “Society of the Spectacle,” which makes it damn hard to distinguish the real from its image (“spectacle”).'
Shortest possible response:
Speak for yourself, Charlie.
Elitist critics to the contrary, the "Society of the Spectacle"-- in large part just another take on the term "mass culture," which Reece also uses in the essay-- has always been coterminous with human society. The real elitist objection to this supposed "society" is that because of the rise of a marketplace for popular culture, "spectacle" becomes more central to culture as a whole once the less educated classes are able to choose what cultural artifacts they will support. This is why Adorno and his fellow travelers sought to marginalize the contemporary articulation of popular culture into a "mass culture" supposedly forced upon the masses from above.
And yet, even though Aristotle's POETICS rated "spectacle" as a marginal element of narrative art, scarcely any famed author of the pre-industrial periods-- when aristocratic patronage usually filled in for the mass market-- really scorned the use of spectacle. An author like Jonathan Swift, whom I assume Reece would find agree antedates the rise of Adorno's mass culture, certainly earned his greatest fame by channeling his satire into spectacular forms.
If it can be demonstrated that all of the societies which predate mass culture have no less a hunger for spectacle than the society that lives with a multitude of saturating media, then one must conclude that the hunger for spectacle is not something foisted upon humanity by mass media-- no matter what separate verdict one may render upon the producers of that media.
In raising once more this insubstantial spectre of mass culture's supposed effects upon one's perception of reality, Reece is certainly correct in thinking that this is what Daniel Clowes is trying to get across to his readers. What I object to, of course, is not that Reece is incorrect about Clowes' agenda but that Reece validates it as philosophically substantive.
Clowes' GHOST WORLD is certainly more readable than many of his often-overrated artcomics works, and his theme, even though it's one with which I have no sympathy, is much better expressed than one finds in the labored surrealism of DAVID BORING. But whereas a High Modernist poet like T.S. Eliot had well-articulated reasons for feeling that civilization was sliding into chaos, Clowes is all about shadows. He gives up on the quest for reality and then claims that mass culture made him do it. He's the one who's given up the "fight" that Reece mentions in his next sentence.
Damn, I just indirectly reviewed another sentence. For that I may need a second article re: caves and shadows.
To be continued, probably.
THE WEIRDIE FILES
2 hours ago
4 comments:
Just to head off a possible misunderstanding, I recognized that the capitalized phrase "Society of the Spectacle" was not something Charles had originated, so I was not crediting him with the phrase, only with going along with its rhetorical implications.
then one must conclude that the hunger for spectacle is not something foisted upon humanity by mass media
Certainly not. I'm not going to deny someone like Adorno is prone to rhetorical excess, but first and foremost his approach is dialectical. Your take is one of the most common misinterpretations that he and Horkheimer were essentially behaviorists, which is just false. This footnote from Robert Hullot-Kentor's Things Beyond Resemblance gets to the point:
"Totality in Adorno's writings means the functional context developed in various ways through the exchange relation. Totality is no more or less real than this functional order. It should not be thought that totality means a system that is simply closed. It is closed and disorganized by its principle of closure. This relation is misunderstood by the usual argument that Adorno exaggerated the idea of the totally administered society. The origin of this misunderstanding is a credulousness for administration. Those who think Adorno overestimated the functional web do so because they imagine that, if the world were so tightly organized as Adorno claims, planes would leave on the minute. Adorno's point, rather, is that administration is a principle of disorganization."
Take eating fast food. Poor people tend to indulge more often, and suffer the health consequences, not because they have been conditioned to love fast food more than good food (or because it's part of their constitution, which keeps them poor), but because the historico-cultural situation of the food industry has constructed the market place so that eating shit is a default, has become the most readily available option and first choice (through pricing, distribution, etc.) to them. Eating healthy requires a good deal more effort (and money), something that isn't always so feasible to some guy working 2 or 3 jobs to support a family. What do you think a similar situation in art, which is hardly a basic need, results in?
It's ironic that the type of cultural model Adorno railed against is so often mistakenly assumed by his critics as his own. The comics industry is a prime example of such a reductive view of its target consumers, but I don't expect you'll ever get this. Socalled high culture is not excluded from his analysis, but you'd rather continue talking about elitism, populism, and a bunch of distracting terms that I don't find very profitable. At best, we can only argue over definitions. You love creating definitions. I do not.
I haven't called Adorno et al behaviorists as such, but the Frankfurt School is certainly in sympathy with the notion that the lower classes can be pacified with "bread and circuses." Moreover, his "culture industry" chapter clearly extends that paradigm back to pre-industrial cultures, where he represents "light culture" as inhering in things like folksongs. Adorno makes quite clear that these products, as much of those of mass media, are "the shadow" of serious culture, rather than creative works in their own right. This is certainly a "closed system" of aesthetics, though I realize that Hullot-Kentor isn't talking aesthetics.
More in a separate post.
Continuing--
I suppose Hullot-Kentor could be correct that some "principle of disorganization" underlies Adorno's concept of the totalitarian culture industry, since there's a lot of Adorno I haven't read. But Adorno's argument in the 'culture industry' essay mitigates against that reading, in that Adorno credits culture industry administrators with a godlike ability to dictate what the audiences want: to make them forget Garbo and look to Mickey Rooney.
But even if Adorno's specific Garbo-Rooney example is poorly chosen, does it invalidate his main claim: that culture industrialists DO try to manipulate the audience? I think so, because even though the culture overlords are indubitably capable of *some* manipulation, the real "principle of disorganization" underlying their choices stems not from their ambition to brainwash the masses but from their own humanity. A Fred Silverman, a Louis B. Mayer or a Stan Lee is in the business of trying to anticipate the chameleon tastes of the lower classes, and they are only able to do so because to some extent they the producers share some of those tastes. The producers certainly pursue large audiences because that's where the money is, but they don't always take the fast food approach you cite.
Mayer is equally responsible for Garbo tragedies and Rooney homilies. Silverman is responsible for both SUPERTRAIN and HILL STREET BLUES. Stan is responsible for both cheesy romances and for THE FANTASTIC FOUR. If you know of a McDonalds' equivalent to HILL STREET BLUES and FANTASTIC FOUR, let me know 'cause I could really go for a Frank Furillo-quality chocolate shake.
As for Adorno's critique being applied to high culture, I intimated as much when I supposed that Adorno would like some "ideas" better than others, not necessarily out of a John Stuart Mill broad-mindedness as from a more adversarial stance-- much as Gary Groth likes Crumb's ideas but not Eisner's.
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