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.