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.
