The complications of Production and Dissemination

For Adorno & Horkheimer, the homogeneity of cultural production in late capitalism ripples with social effects. As with Marx’s analysis, this redrawing of the terms of production produces detachment, in turn producing a social apathy compatible with reproducing the status quo, and permitting the atrocities of liberal capitalism and fascism. In the pursuit of capital and the production of mass culture, humanity strides toward the impersonal, facilitating the exploitations, inequalities, and violences that accompany the social morality of modernity. As Marx analyzed a means of production in an early state of industrial transformation (Benjamin, p. 1051), so does the Frankfurt School occupy only a median point on a continuum of 20th and 21st century cultural expansion. Adorno, Horkheimer, and Benjamin discuss a globalized and homogenized culture industry, but it’s clear to a contemporary reader that the industry they discuss is incomplete. The methods and technologies of production have changed significantly, not to mention the extent to which culture is able to be disseminated in the 21st century.

While Benjamin touches on this issue in his discussion of the reproduction of art and culture, it would be interesting to consider the culture industry in the 21st century, where a revolution in distribution has taken place. It’s noteworthy that in instances of “forgery” (Bejamin, pp. 1051-1052) under the new auspice of digital communications technology, where a teenager can redistribute Star Wars from their cell phone, the broader social problems of the culture industry described by Adorno, Horkheimer, and Benjamin remain relatively unchanged.

It’s therefore easy to get distracted by the physical technology rather than the social effect of the cultural transformation it allows. Horkheimer, Adorno, and Benjamin are of course describing the social implications of a transformed relation of cultural production, in the same way Marx describes the social effect of transformed labor models and value production. Nevertheless, the physical aspects of culture production are a vital part of the Frankfurt School’s analysis, and as such it seems prudent to consider whether new technologies of production and distribution reproduce or complicate the effects it describes.

A final note in Dialectic of Enlightenment highlights the apparent link between the seemingly benign process of production to ideology and the State. The “broadcast as public service” example (which we should consider distinct from public service broadcasting, though not entirely) highlights the myriad stakeholders in the production and consumption of culture: the sponsors and technologies and hegemonic structures of power. Adorno and Horkheimer illustrate this relationship between technologies of communication and technologies of power with the linguistic leitmotif “the increased sales of the electrical industry, which manufactures the radio sets” (mentioned throughout, and returning as a final flourish on p. 1127). The reciprocal dependence of the biggest culture producers on the biggest electrical companies highlights the interconnectedness of hegemonic power, complementing Althusser’s discussion of Ideological State Apparatuses. Like an archipelago connected beneath the waves, these relations are hidden, obfuscated, or distorted, with only the proximity of the institutions above the water as any indication that they’re conjoined at all.