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What has the Culture Industry done to music? Should we care?

Thinking about Music

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MMus Music 21/05/2012

The Culture Industry is a totalitarian mass culture of Western modernity, a standardised bourgeois economy of illusory self-expression and oppressive objective conformity.1 This is the depiction we are provided by the Frankfurt School philosophers, Theador Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Ongoing oppression during World War 2 had denied individual freedom developed in the Enlightenment Age and damaged the autonomous work of art. The purpose of this essay will be to examine Adorno and Horkheimers philosophical notion of the Culture Industry in music. With reference to Adornos Hegelian Marxist dialectical theory, this essay will examine the sociological restraints of music in modernism, referencing Adornos texts On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening and The Ageing of New Music. Using the example of total serialism in the post-war avant-garde, this essay will explain Adornos perceptions on new music and the development of postmodernism. Finally, using the example of Frank Zappa, a composer who ventured between high and low music, this essay will show how Adornos theories on the Culture Industry and music are now of diminishing irrelevance in light of postmodernist thought.

Kellner in Gibson & Rubin (eds.) (2002), 87.

During antiquity, humanitys experiences were represented in Greek mythology. Humanitys struggles to overcome nature were depicted in stories involving animistic characters such as spirit or God. In that distant time, life and death had been interpreted and interwoven in myths.2 The spirit belonged to an abstract existence, far sublime to the concrete existence served by humanity. Myth represented a belief more powerful than fact. It remained unknown and hence irrational. Nature was able to dictate over humanity and humanity feared the inevitable chaos of the unknown.3 The eighteenth century Enlightenment Age, aimed to reify abstract conceptions of nature with concrete scientific rationality. Rationality would provide the individual with knowledge that would liberate the individual from their fear and install them as masters.4 Humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown.5 Kant famously referred to this intellectual movement as mankind's final coming of age, the emancipation of the human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance and error.6 Adorno and Horkheimer contest that rational knowledge knows no limit. The power of knowledge in nature has become responsible for fascisms enslavement of creation achieved by technological innovation, the essence of this knowledge.7 Hegels dialectical model enabled a synthesis of thesis and anti-thesis which reconciled the relationship between individual and nature, infused with purpose and destiny.8 However in Adorno and Horkheimers dialectical argument, the

reconciliation of individual and nature is negative. The depiction of nature as the initial controller of subjectivity is the thesis. The individuals quest for rational liberation from nature is the antithesis.

2 3

Adorno and Horkheimer in Noerr (ed.) (2002), 3. Ibid. 4 Adorno and Horkheimer in Noerr (ed.) (2002), 1. 5 Ibid, 11. 6 TH Kant (1784) in Porter (12 June 2001). 7 Adorno and Horkheimer in Noerr (ed.) (2002), 2. 8 Thomson (2006), 110-111.

The synthesis of rationality and nature or antagonism as Thomson states in Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed, has developed a culture of technological innovation that has destroyed the potential destiny of the individual. The romantic notion of synthesis developing purpose has oppressed the individual.9 The Culture Industry which emerged with the Industrial Revolution in late nineteenth century embodies this and more. As the defining chapter The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception in the Dialectic of Enlightenment suggests, mass culture is now a prevailing commercial industry with rationality as its sole reason for existence rather than aesthetic. The customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object.10 The consumer does not choose which cultural artefacts are consumed, but the persons with the power to control technology, whose economic position in society is strongest.11 Adorno and Horkheimer perceive that technology is gaining power over society, or as suggested in this essays introduction, rational knowledge has advanced technological innovation and isolated the democratic freedom of the individual.12 The Culture Industry represents a postmodern preview of society dominated by late Capitalisms technological sublime. In Jamesons view, the authenticity of a postmodern object is its potential to create a new postmodern space out of the disappearance of the subject , which we perceive as sublime, due to its complexity often beyond the capacity of the normal reading mind.13 Humanity is oppressed by the sheer mass of produced and reproduced homogenous goods, infecting everything with sameness.14

Ibid, 112. Adorno in Bernstein (ed.) (1991), 85. 11 Adorno and Horkheimer in Noerr (ed.) (2002), 95. 12 Ibid. 13 Jameson (1991), 37-38. 14 Adorno and Horkheimer in Noerr (ed.) (2002), 94.
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Each cultural artefact is designed to be interchangeable in order to promote the conformity embodied in totalitarianism. The Culture Industrys artefacts can be identified by even the most regressive of consumers.15 So how does this affect music? It is important to distinguish the music criticised by Adorno in the Culture Industry from the music he considers autonomous. Commercial music is light music, including the cultivated term, classical music, identified as a commodity of the Culture Industry. Non-commercial music is serious Western Art music, infused with aura and organic totality. Adornos criticism of commercial music can be read in his text On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening (1938). Commercial music represents all the diluted characteristics of mass commercialism: standardisation, homogeneity and conformity. Music, with all the attributes of the ethereal and the sublime...serves in America today as an advertisement for commodities.16 Serious music on the other hand is highly refined, and aware of its history and its sense of tradition. Most importantly it develops a relationship between the part and the whole in a work of art, which explains in Hegelian Marxist terms how everything in life relates to everything else. In Hegelian terminology the whole in life equates to truth. Adornos text The Ageing of New Music for instance approves of the Serialist composers Schoenberg and Berg primarily because they fit Adornos Hegelian Marxist theory of the dialectic.17 In a Hegelian dialectic, the individual must be in a dialectical relationship with the object, the totality of the work. This creates cohesiveness, spontaneity and life in music. The composer receives information from the object, the tradition they are working in, and remakes their own image of the tradition subjectively. This applies value to the subjective perception and makes a new unifying structure, in which individual elements are not disconnected but organically connected to the whole work.
15 16

Adorno in Leppert (ed.) (2002), 300. Ibid, 295. 17 Adorno in Leppert (ed.) (2002), 181.

However, Adornos dialectic has a particularly negative theory of Hegels dialectical argument. If the Hegelian synthesis does not liberate the individual from nature, how can serious music composed by Schoenberg and Berg develop subjective autonomy from the Culture Industry? Schoenberg and Berg must negate or reject the tradition they are living in, by accepting and criticising the failures of human rationality to liberate humanity from oppression. Their music expresses the subjects confusion and anxiety at being trapped by a totalitarian system of objects. The twelve tone technique represents a synthesis of tradition with subjectivity, forming a concrete organic whole. Each of the twelve notes confinement within a static expression represents Adornos perception of the un-free Hegelian dialectical synthesis of rationality and nature, epitomised in the creation of technological enslavement. The diatonic scale in Western tradition is transformed into a new structure that provides continuity with the totality of the music. The tones are deliberately imprisoned in rows to make aware the failure of reason to deliver us from our natural condition.18 As Thomson states: Autonomous reason can only overcome its own natural history...by seeking to admit nature into reason, admitting its always heterogeneous involvement with the natural world...Once we have entered into philosophy, into reflection, and into language, we finally have a chance of affirming freedom. However, this can only be achieved through the critical negation of un-freedom, through our tangled recognition of the failure of reason to deliver us from our natural condition.19

18 19

Thomson (2006), 113. Ibid, 112-113.

This argument is supported further by Adornos denouncement of the new music total serialism. Stockhausen for example, in Adornos theory of dialectical thinking, has composed music that undergoes an abstract negation, meaning that Stockhausen has rejected his tradition.20 The object has not synthesised with the subject. It has become a negation of a negation, which lacks substance and meaning. Stockhausen hence, has mocked Adornos dialectical model. The outcome of Stockhausens compositions from Adornos perception is nihilism, a lack of care for tradition and an overly technocratic attitude towards serialist composition.21 Thus, Adornos biggest concern of commercial music is that the subjective autonomy in serious music will be eradicated by the object of tradition (technology) and engulfed. Commoditisation caused by technology, has created homogenous music that is not the outcome of any such organic social process.22 This can be explained by the Marxist terminology, exchange and use-value. In the text On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening, the discourse between exchange and use-value has shifted. The exchange-value is the trading price of a commodity (the value acquired by trading one use-value with another), while the usevalue is the value attributed to an object for its human functionality and satisfaction.23 A music concert for example, has a use-value in the way that listening to music provides aural pleasure. The use-value is in a direct relationship with the individual, it belongs to us, the producer and consumer - human beings.24 The exchange-value however, is the price of this pleasure when considering the concert as a commodity. In this way the concert is unattainable for the individual without exchanging the concert for currency.

20 21

Adorno in Leppert (ed.) (2002) Ibid, 182. 22 Witkin (2003), 3. 23 Anon, http://rationalrevolution.net/war/marxism.htm. 24 Adorno in Leppert (ed.) (2002), 296.

Adorno argues that the exchange value has overpowered the use-value, resulting in the alienation of self expression and a return to primitive society.25 In regards to a Toscanini concert, Adorno states: The consumer is really worshipping the money that he himself has paid for the ticket to the Toscanini concert. He has literally made the success which he reifies and accepts as an object criterion, without recognizing himself with it.26 Toscanini was the barbarism of perfection, able to fulfil the Hegelian dialectical model when conducting the Beethoven symphonies.27 However, the satisfaction of listening to a Toscanini concert has now become a social status, the satisfaction of being able to afford the concert. Reification treats the concert as lifeless, which disagrees with Marxisms perception of the world as dynamic. It makes concrete what was an abstract element in concert life. This could be a metaphysical element in music that cannot be measured. It becomes reified behind ideological curtains.28 Even great Western Art music such as Mozarts E-Flat Major Symphony had become reified into a commodity of light music. Adorno explains that it [has] turned by the performance into an artisan-type genre rather than the sort of classicism it [was] supposed to advertise.29 An alternative theory is that The Culture Industry has attempted to re-humanise Western music, by constructing certain features that instantly connect with a wider group of people.30 However, Hansen in the text Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing, argues that the repetitive melodies and catchy tunes have covered up and reduced consumers listening habits to what one has heard before, apparently
25 26

Witkin (1998), 59. Ibid, 296. 27 Ibid, 301. 28 Adorno and Horkheimer in Noerr (ed.) (2002), xviii. 29 Ibid, 299. 30 Hansen in Gibson & Rubin (2002), 62.

lacking in original value.31 In this way, atonality is portrayed as the most original and listener educative music. The mass of commercial music alienates the progression of atonality in Western art music and nullifies or de-concentrates the musical education of the listener. In other words, the listener becomes in Adornos language, regressive. The listener can no longer listen without becoming distracted by an unconscious political message. Values are consumed and draw feelings to themselves, without their specific qualities being reached by the consumer. 32 Regressive listening can be identified as the fault of commodity fetishism, which has resulted from the treatment of music as commodity. The consumer demands the same formula provided in all commercial music, the illusion of playfulness in the standardised pop tune, pop star and performance. They [the regressive listener] demand the one dish they have once been served. 33 For instance, regressive consumers demand the illusion of subjectivity of the performer in a performance, and the popular tune that must, from the listeners perspective, consider style such as instrument colour over unifying form. The commodity fetish reflects a totalitarian society where the listener is alienated by exchange-values.34 Regressive listeners consider success on the grounds of commercial judgment rather than taste. The freedom offered is illusory because the formulas and patterns of popular music are the same, dictated by totalitarian society. The treatment of play as a duty puts it [commercial music] among useful purposes and thereby wipes out the trace of freedom in it.35 Hence any referral to the individual in commercial music is false. Commercial musics duty is its duty to stick to the commercially successful formulas, mass production of the same thing.

31 32

Ibid. Adorno in Leppert (ed.), 295. 33 Ibid, 307. 34 Ibid, 296. 35 Ibid, 312.

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Is this view of the Culture Industry fair and is such a view still relevant today? It is important to remember that Adornos critiques remain high modernist. Music must create an organic entity, it must also be autonomous. Secondly, Adorno was a political refugee. His left-wing views were threatened by the rising power of fascism, capitalism and commercialism in World War Two. This certainly contributed to his hatred of the commercial character of native America. Finally, Adornos arguments must fit with his Hegelian Marxist dialectic way of thinking. His negative dialectic rejects the reconciliation between nature and the individual in the Hegelian synthesis in favour of criticism, which will produce a more positive dialectic.36 With these concepts in mind, we can consider the merger of high and low-music in postmodernism and the consequence of such on Adornos theories. Where does his dialectical model fit in postmodernism? Stockhausen for example, failed to fit in Adornos dialectic because he did not acknowledge the tradition of expressionism that Adorno outlined with the first stage of serialism in Vienna. He has however, contributed to the advancement of electronic technology in music of high and low art. The dilemma lies in what category of music the Stockhausen example belongs in the Culture Industry, Serious or popular music? Or is this too narrow an assessment? For Tia de Nora, Adorno generalises and categorises music because he examines music from a Marxist perspective.37 Music can either be a commodity and hence commercial, or autonomous and non-commercial. His language does not cope with a selection of postmodernist topics. In fact, his language conveys the voice of high modernist authority. For example, Adorno states that popular music mummifies the vulgarized and decaying remnants of romantic individualism.38 Romanticism was connected to the first stage of serialism, but not the second, in which composers such as Stockhausen, ultimately progressed music towards the use of technology

36 37

Thomson (2006), 140. DeNora (2003), 18. 38 Adorno in Leppert (2002), 311.

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and away from traditional notions of expression. As Walter Benjamin expressed in his text The Work of Art in the Mechanical Age of Reproduction the aura of nineteenth century art works, fine arts potential for spiritual contemplation, has been replaced by non-authoritarian reproductions, or exhibits, that are capable of new un-assumed perceptions. In particular the artist can now politicise their work, with the help of the technological materials supplied by the Culture Industry.39 In twentieth century music, Darmstadt composers and Boulezs IRCAM for example, are indebted to technological innovation which has widened their musical vocabulary. For Boulez, technology allows further experimentation with new sound, questioning the parameters of music and instrumentation. Boulez and Stockhausen remained owners of their works by claiming authorship of their complex structures which control the electronic sound.40 It should be clear that these examples haze the border between high and low music. The final example is the American popular culture and avant-garde composer, Frank Zappa. As Watson in his text, Frank Zappa: the Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play states: What Adorno appears incapable of appreciating is an art that, instead of distilling the pure spirit of subjective expression, should purposely construct learning mazes with the materials to hand.41 Zappa was an avant-gardist who works from within the Culture Industry.42 Frank Zappa created an idiosyncratic language in his music. He consumed fetish objects that Adorno so despised in the Culture Industry, in order to attack middle class ethics. Zappa used his own generation of materiality to attack late capitalism. He highlighted, through the consumption of materialism, an ongoing class struggle
39 40

Wilette (2012), http://www.arthistoryunstuffed.com/theodor-adorno-and-the-culture-industry/ Born (1995). 41 Watson (1996), 57. 42 Ibid, 215.

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between high and low art. His music presents a continual disjunct, a permanent dada.43 The function of dada was to ignore previous aesthetic rules in favour of nihilism. In much the same way, Zappa used current technological and commodity driven trends, such as rock musics fetishization of the electric guitar to create irony and irrationality.44 While Zappa can be held to go along with Adorno's view on 'entertainment', his adoption of collage/ montage techniques suggests a more direct engagement with 'life praxis' through semiotic interruptions of normative experience.45 Zappa questioned the authority and identity of Culture Industry artefacts. For example, Zappas collaborations with the music group the Mothers of Invention, focussed upon re-appropriating the technical clichs and identity of instrumentation in popular performance practice. The 1968 French television show, Forum Musiques displayed Zappa nihilistically deforming the identity of the melismatic voice in the blues with screams and grunts.46 Zappa was releasing the human body out of the restraints of middle-class convention and restoring it to human primitivism. This is what Wragg refers to, when he discusses Zappas direct engagement with life praxis through semiotic interruptions of normative experience. The semiotic reception of the signal, the voice, leaves the restraints of the commodity identity. The voice becomes de-contextualised.47 Zappas materialist consumption deforms the identity of homogenous culture in much the same way that Warhols portrayal of the photo negative Diamond Dust Shoes does in Jamesons Postmodernism.48 Both artists had accepted the death of quasi-religious art and the faith it gave to the

43 44

Ibid, xiii. Wragg (2001), 212. 45 Ibid, 214. 46 TooleMan87, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0ysRH1Dxyw. 47 Wragg (2001), 214. 48 Jameson (1991).

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consumer in favour of reproduction, re-appropriation and knowledge. As Watson states, To like art under capitalism is to revel in contradiction .49 Aesthetics and the schizophrenic individual, concerns of both Adorno and Jameson, are meaningless in the music of Zappa.50 Therefore this essay should make clear that Adornos high modernism and Zappas commercialism, voice the same thing. Both men criticise the social conditions of contemporary mass culture and both men are aware of the historical importance of art. While the Culture Industry offers fetishes in the form of commodities that represent the individual as an object of rationality, Frank Zappa represents the commodity as an object of his individuality. Zappas music can self-negate, it suggests a purpose for the individual out of his tradition, beyond the commodity driven market.51 Zappa like Adorno is capable of a negative dialectic that becomes positive after criticism. The Culture Industry remains a vital model to relate postmodernism perspectives of high and low art with contemporary music trends.

(3047 words)

49 50

Watson (1996), xv. Wragg (2001), 214. 51 Ibid, 220.

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16 _______________, Adorno on Popular Culture (London, Routledge, 2003). WRAGG, DAVID, 'Or Any Art at All?': Frank Zappa Meets Critical Theory, Popular Music, 20/2 (2001), 205-222.