I would agree with Adorno in some aspects of popular culture, but in others I would starkly disagree. Yes, not all popular culture is a natural creation of what the masses want, but a business that is powered by culture e.g. the Kardashians. They haven't created any new aspect of our culture, or added to any part either, but they are an essential part of describing our culture today. But that does not mean culture is a business creation. Especially in today's connected world, anyone is able to go onto the internet find and create culture. Facebook started as a way to connect with friends. The Youtube personality, Pewdiepie, started by just posting reaction videos to video games. Now, they are both synonymous with our culture. Both were creatively made and neither, even though it may be disputed now, tried to conform us into believing popular beliefs.
Adorno perplexes me and angers me. He seems to have written this chapter with an extremely biased view of popular culture as a negative entity without exploring all of its aspects. He talks about this separation of what is popular culture and what is intellectual culture and that they cannot mix. He says popular culture is us conforming to what everybody else wants us to conform to, which is true to an extent. But, Adorno does not really give straight examples of how popular culture does this. He does give the example about movies stereotypically portraying intellectuals, but why does he just focus on them? Surely there are others that are mis-portrayed by popular culture. It was in this example that Adorno started to become a person that was against popular culture to begin with, rather than a person who looked at the entity as a whole and really dissected its true rule in our society. I can't prove that Adorno is wrong, but I'm sure "an imaginatively designed experiment could achieve this more successfully than the powerful financial interests concerned would find comfortable." (p105) :)
In response to your segment on the separation of popular culture and intellectual culture, I would like to point out that this is a concept that has changed drastically from the 1940s until now. Back then, intellectual culture (otherwise known as high culture) was only experienced by the wealthy, educated, elite ruling class. Low culture was something that appealed to the masses because the less educated, middle class was able to obtain access to such experiences.
ReplyDeleteToday scholars argue that high and low culture may no longer even be distinguishable, mainly due to the fact that what we consider to be “high” culture is so accessible in the 21st century. If everyone has access, does high versus low culture even exist? Do Adorno’s thoughts on the culture industry still apply?