Adorno's "Theory of Pseudo Culture"

Adorno’s 1959 essay “Theory of Pseudo Culture” is in many ways a continuation of “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” chapter in his and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment; but it is also an attempt to think through in a more dialectical, and sociologically grounded, fashion than before the relation between those cultural processes and practices that Adorno thinks are truthful (i.e. instances of actual culture), and those that are products of the Culture Industry and therefore merely “pseudo.” Despite these differences, however, his overall pessimism as to the possibilities of socio-political progress remains as acute as before; he makes no attempt to achieve a Hegelian-like “synthesis” (actually a misnomer since Hegel never used the term and does not argue that antinomies are brought together and thereby reconciled, as synthesis implies; rather, that within both sides of a contradiction there exists a “higher” truth that encompasses and makes sense of both [Mueller 1958; Taylor 1975]), instead denying that any positive understanding (and therefore outcome) is possible because of the inherent complicity with domination that all attempts at progress share in: “The fact that antagonisms multiply signifies that all particular advances in the consciousness of freedom also participate in the persistence of unfreedom.” Although Adorno’s Negative Dialectics was not published until 1966 this article is perhaps best understood as an attempt to apply a “negative dialectical” approach in a less abstrusely theoretical manner.

Adorno begins by arguing that the existent “crisis in culture” cannot be solved by increased education; rather, the decline in culture then so apparent (and one can only imagine how dismayed he would be were he alive today!) is, in fact, a product of culture itself: “What has become of culture, now deposited as a kind of negative objective spirit…can be deduced from the laws of social movement, even from the concept of culture itself. Culture has become socialized pseudo-culture – the omnipresence of alienated spirit.” A lack of “true” culture is not the problem; instead, it is the very attempt to make culture autonomous from its socio-historical grounding, as the bourgeoisie has so insistently attempted to realize, that renders culture into its “pseudo” opposite: “Any culture…which posits itself autonomously and absolutizes itself, has thereby become pseudo-culture.” This is, for Adorno, because culture has an inherently socially adaptive functionality; it always says “that’s right!” to that which is and thus apologizes for that which should and could, in fact, not be.

Not only is cultural education for the “uncultured” classes not an answer to the problem of cultural decline, but neither is the search for cultural authenticity in the “folk,” given some notion that it is there that might be found some still true cultural expressions. (One can only wonder if Adorno here had in mind the Urban Folk Revival that became very popular in North America in the late 1950s.) For Adorno, there are no real folk left. Rather than seeing rural areas as having escaped the effects of capitalism and its attendant cultural industry machine, as many Marxists (most notably Mao) have hoped, Adorno argues that they are “breeding grounds of pseudo-culture” because the rapidity of the transformation from traditional (i.e. religiously based) culture to that which is a product of the culture industry left no time for the cultural autonomy of the bourgeoisie to develop there. For despite cultural autonomy’s complicity in its own “pseudofication,” autonomy remains, for Adorno, the only hope for the continuance of non-pseudo culture: “…the only way spirit can possibly survive is through critical reflection on pseudo-culture, for which culture is essential.”

There is so much more in this essay, but having raised some key points I turn to a reflection on what it all means for contemporary understandings of culture. As is usual in responding to Adorno’s writings, it is difficult to think (deliberately so on his part!) of what should be the practical desired outcome of his theorizing. He, of course, denies the premise that speculative thinking requires a use-value, some practical application or positive program. The very concept of a “negative dialectics” is itself the most obvious example of this denial since dialectics previously conceived (from Plato to Kant and Hegel) was always understood productively, as a process by which truth is attained. But for Adorno, such a hope can, at this point in history, only be delusional, a head-in-the-sand conceit of wishful thinking.

Yet one might wonder whether his use of empirical studies in the essay as evidence of his arguments (for example, the “ingenious study” that compared two listening groups) might not subtly contradict his overall pessimism. For if one accepts that valid truths as to the cultural value of individuals’ experience can be derived through such empirical research, then this would seem to imply that there is something positive that characterizes that which is more “true” (in this study a live musical performance over one listened to over the radio) compared to other possibilities. If so, then it would seem contradictory to insist that, to paraphrase Adorno, all truths lead to untruths. That is, if the live performance of music does lead to greater understanding and less shallow responses than radio broadcasts, then there would seem to be some hope in education as the response to cultural decline—in this case, that which comes from the promotion of attending live musical performances.

Ironically, Adorno’s seemingly greater acceptance of the value of empirical research in this essay might represent a welcome crack in his usually airtight theoretical pessimism. It is therefore of some interest that in his 1961 lecture at the Darmstadt New Music Conference, “Vers Une Musique Informelle” (published later in Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music), he actually gives positive prescriptions as to how music of the avant-garde should be both composed and performed in order to facilitate comprehension by greater numbers of people. Although this “crack” would not have seemed to remain open for long, as his refusal to in any way engage with the student protest movement in the late 1960s demonstrates, that it existed for even a short while suggests how one might think Adorno against himself in order to realize that which he so often denied: the possibility of positivity.

Other Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor. 1998. Vers Une Musique Informelle. In Quasi una fantasia: Essays on

modern music. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. New York: Verso.

Mueller, Gustav E. 1958. The Hegel Legend of ‘Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis.’ Journal of

the History of Ideas 19 (3): 411-14.

Taylor, Charles. 1975. Hegel. New York: Cambridge University Press.

On Walter Benjamin's "The Author as Producer"

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In “The Author as Producer” (1934) Walter Benjamin sets out to diagnose the relation between artistic production and politics broadly conceived. He argues that there is a necessary connection between the techniques used in the production of a work of art and its political orientation and, therefore, the impossibility of a disinterested, autonomous or non-political art work. Interestingly, although Benjamin is now often thought of as a highly unorthodox Marxist (see Richter 2002, 12; Hafstein 2006, 13), here he displays a quite close alignment with orthodox Marxism in his insistence on the clarity of a work’s political tendencies, the dangers of “counterrevolutionary” acts, the inextricable link between one’s “position in the process of production” and one’s political identity, the valorization of Brecht’s explicitly “committed” theatre works and the extolling of the virtues, in ostensibly overcoming social antinomies, of cultural production in the Soviet Union. Whether such an interpretation suggests a wider transformation in Benjamin’s Marxism from the time this essay was written to that of his more well-known works from the later 1930s (e.g. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and the unfinished “Arcades Project”) or, rather, that this essay is an idiosyncratic work in his overall oeuvre, perhaps reflecting an homage of sorts to his friend Brecht (who was much more consistently orthodox Marxist than Benjamin), is an interesting question to consider— although not, obviously, one that can be answered here.

There are, however, undoubted continuities with his later work (especially the aforementioned “Work of Art” essay) in his arguments for the transformational status of the newspaper. In strikingly McLuanesque manner (or, given Benjamin’s antecedent status, perhaps rather McLuhan’s later “Benjaminian” ideas), Benjamin (curiously quoting himself without attribution) points to the effect of the newspaper’s disjointed, never-finished quality, i.e. its medium, on its readers. “[T]he fact that nothing binds the reader to his paper as much as this avid impatience for fresh nourishment every day, has been used by editors, who are always starting new columns open to his questions, opinions, protestations. So the indiscriminate assimilation of facts goes hand in hand with the similar indiscriminate assimilation of readers, who see themselves instantly raised to the level of co-workers” (Benjamin 1934, 3). And this breaking down of the barrier between author and public, producer and audience is, Benjamin argues, a revolutionary action in its breaking of social hierarchies that place the laboring classes beneath the literary, artistic, bourgeois class.

            

 What is obvious, however, is how much Benjamin here differs from Adorno’s views on the relation between artistic production and politics. For both, there is an intimate connection between artistic quality and “correct” politics; but whereas the former argues that the autonomy of the artist should ultimately give way to “plac[ing] himself on the side of the proletariat” (1), the latter insists that the only way to safeguard the possibility of a truthful, non-compromised artistic practice is precisely through the work’s insistence on its autonomy, as that which resists commodification and is thus best able to “crack…established patterns of self-evidence” (Goehr 2004, 235). Nowhere are their differences more obvious than in Benjamin’s discussion of Eisler’s comments on the relation of absolute (non-lyric) music with capitalism: “Words alone can…bring about the transformation of the concert into a political meeting” (Benjamin 1934, 5). There could, in fact, be few things more abhorrent to Adorno than insisting on the necessity of words for music or the subsuming of the autonomy of music (or art more generally) to the inherent heteronomy of a political gathering. Only through its absolute otherness from such prosaic demands can art, according to Adorno, be of any positive political value.

            

 Despite Benjamin’s more obviously orthodox Marxist position in this essay, however, there is a way in which one can see Adorno as, in fact, more true to Marx—at least the older, more structuralist Marx of Das Kapital. This is in terms of their respective views on voluntarism. Benjamin, following Brecht, writes that intellectuals should not “simply transmit the apparatus of production without simultaneously changing it to the maximum extent possible in the direction of socialism” (4). Adorno, on the other hand, does not see genuine, truthful artists as able to will their art in the direction of socialism or of any other; artists, rather, follow the immanent logic of the artistic medium wherever it takes them. In the case of music, Schoenberg did not simply decide to begin writing atonal music around 1908; instead, he realized the next step from what the musical materials post-Wagner and Brahms had bequeathed him. This wasn’t in the direction of socialism, capitalism or any other “ism,” but rather in the direction of art. Although the voluntarism of Benjamin’s position is far more common among Marxists both then and now, such stress on the value of individual volition is in strong tension, if not outright contradicts, the older Marx’s own insistence on the necessarily structural determinations of individuals.

            

 From my understanding of Benjamin’s later texts, he did move closer to Adorno’s position through the 1930s without ever sharing Adorno’s pessimism as to the potential value of mechanical and electrical technologies in liberating the proletariat. The opposition between these two sides of leftist aesthetics—elitist autonomy vs. mass heteronomy—is still alive and well, although because of Benjamin’s tragic early death it was the elitist-autonomy of Adorno that would come to dominate the Frankfurt School’s own variety of unorthodox Marxism.

           

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. 1934. The author as producer. New Left Review 1 (62):

http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=135 (accessed February 14, 2011).

Goehr, Lydia. 2004. Dissonant works and the listening public. In The Cambridge

companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn, 257-85. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hafstein, Vladimar T. 2007. Spectacular reproduction: Ron’s angels and mechanical

reproduction in the age of ART (assisted reproductive technology). The Journal of Medical Humanities 28 (1): 3-17.

Richter. Gerhard. 2002. Benjamin's ghosts: interventions in contemporary literary and

cultural theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

On jazz

The Montreal Gazette published an opinion piece I wrote responding to an earlier piece about what is and is not jazz: "Don't Discount the Evolution of Jazz" (not my title though). Unfortunately, but hardly surprising, it's not exactly what I intended so here's the real thing.


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Jonathan Goldman’s recent Gazette opinion piece (“Montreal International Jazz Festival: This isn’t jazz”) reflects a common perspective among contemporary jazz musicians that some of what is now called jazz fails to meet various definitional criteria. Based on his “nearly 15 years…of instrumental practice, listening sessions and reading, plus two music degrees,” Goldman attempts to define jazz according to three requisite characteristics: the blues, swing rhythms and improvisation. “The fewer of these elements a musical style has, the more distantly related it is to jazz. Thus, R&B is closely related to jazz, in that it contains elements of blues and swing, though it lacks improvisation. Rock ’n’ roll is even farther from jazz, having in common only elements of the blues vocabulary.”

One must wonder how he can be unaware of the plethora of improvisation in R&B from Louis Jordan to Mary J. Blige and that of improvisation and swing in such rock groups as the Rolling Stones and the Grateful Dead. However, on the basis of these qualities he then goes on to exclude the group She & Him from consideration as jazz claiming that the group’s inclusion as a headlining act at the Jazzfest “shows that, for all intents and purposes, jazz is dead.”

What is interesting about such jeremiads is how common they are in jazz’s history. In the 1930s, fans of the older Dixieland style lamented what they saw as the crass, watered-down commercialism of the-then popular Swing bands. In the late 1940s, the debate shifted to the innovations of Bebop with partisans of Swing attacking Bebop’s technical difficulty and resistance to audience dancing. Around 1960, Free Jazz’s abandonment of traditional chord-scale relations aroused no shortage of controversy with Down Beat magazine proclaiming Goldman’s very own hero John Coltrane as seemingly “bent on pursuing an anarchistic course…that can but be termed anti-jazz.” And in the 1970s-80s, Jazz Fusion divided musicians and critics with some seeing its incorporation of rock and funk elements as the wave of the future, while others, such as Wynton Marsalis, argued that such influences, together with its lack of swing, placed it outside the jazz tradition.

This short detour through jazz history shows that any presumption to defining a trans-historical essence of jazz is a fool’s errand. Jazz has been many different things to many different people. Guy Lombardo, for example, made far less use of the blues, swing and improvisation than many R&B and Rock groups have. But despite these limitations, his group was among the favorites of jazz legend Louis Armstrong. And though many bossa nova songs are now considered jazz standards (think “Girl from Ipanema”), they have even less of a connection to the blues and, furthermore, don’t use swing rhythms.

I would hardly qualify She & Him as strong representatives of jazz today although at least one of their songs, “Never Wanted Your Love, does use swing rhythms. But as my historical survey has shown, whatever the presence of Goldman’s three criteria might be, they are hardly sufficient for defining jazz given its variety over the last century. It is often forgotten that until the late 1940s, jazz was popular music—intended for the entertainment of listeners and dancers with little artistic pretention. Since this is clearly what She & Him intend as well one could reasonably argue, contra Goldman, that they are in fact more true to the original meaning of jazz than those he thinks properly define it today.

More valuable, however, is asking why debates about jazz have aroused such controversy. Balanced between the high art values of classical music and the explicit entertainment of pop, jazz musicians have desired both the artistic respectability of the former and the commercial success of the latter. But unwilling to choose they fight all the more to protect their proverbial turf from popular music interlopers.

As a sometime jazz musician myself, well aware of the difficulty in making a living as such, I don’t blame them for doing so. But instead of lamenting whom the Jazzfest books, musicians such as Goldman should use their supposedly superior skills to create better music with the same popular appeal as those ostensibly non-jazz groups they decry. If people like She & Him’s music then who are we as musicians to argue over labels? Perhaps we need to make a greater effort to play music that more people might enjoy so that we’ll be the ones performing at future Jazzfests.

For jazz will only die when musicians stop creating music that challenges and appeals to an ever-changing musical audience.