'Marxist' Dialectic

I had a few questions come up in my head while reading, most along the lines of devil's advocacy. Here's the corresponding dialogue that I hope might either clear things up or raise new questions.
~

Adorno's (and Horkheimer's) central argument about the culture industry seems to be that it alienates people from the benefits of 'real' or high culture. I don't see how this can be the case; how are the products of the cultural industry any less cultural?

Well, Adorno doesn't necessarily commit to the idea that the cultural products of the culture industry are 'less cultural,' but rather that their commodification and homogenous content reinforce dominant ideology.

But how does he show this to be the case? Even though my Che Guevara t-shirt is a mass production, I, like he, am still a socialist; and furthermore, by wearing it, I use such a mass production to undermine the dominant - capitalist - ideology.  So not only is Adorno wrong in asserting that the culture industry necessarily assimilates consumers into the dominant ideology, but its products can also subvert the dominant ideology! #feelthebern

Maybe the content of something produced by the culture industry can be non- or even anti-capitalist, but Adorno's argument is more about how the products express an idea, or how they are consumed. Your shirt might indicate that you're a sell-out, but that isn't what his argument rests on, and thus that you can be a socialist sell-out doesn't really respond to what he's saying.  It is the homogenization and mass-consumption of Che Guevara t-shirts (and other cultural products) that reinforce capitalist consumerism.

Then I'll ask again, how does he show this to be true?

He doesn't really, in terms of providing examples.  But his argument is, like you had said, that mass-consumption of cultural sameness alienates us from the benefits of authentic culture.

And what are these benefits?

Originality and critical thinking. He says "that which legitimately could be called culture attempted, as an expression of suffering and contradiction, to maintain a grasp on the idea of the good life" (104).

And how is my idea of the good life grasped any less through the products of the culture industry?

Because it strengthens conformity to the status quo (which sucks), as opposed to the original, critical nature of authentic culture/art.  "While [the culture industry] claims to lead the perplexed, it deludes them with false conflicts which they are to exchange for their own.  It solves conflicts for them only in appearance, in a way that they can hardly be solved in their real lives.  In the products of the culture industry human beings get into trouble only so that they can be rescued unharmed, usually be representatives of a benevolent collective; and then in empty harmony, they are reconciled with the general, whose demands they had experienced at the outset as irreconcilable with their interests" (104-105).

Kind of like how in the plots of movies like The Princess Diaries and Devil Wears Prada, where Anne Hathaway starred as a nerdy outcast who transforms into a pretty, successful idol?  And like how that is completely removed from ordinary life?  Genovia isn't even real fuckin country.

Exactly.

So, for Adorno, genuine - or proper - cultural products are only those that criticize the capitalist state of affairs?

Basically.

Then wouldn't my Che Guevara t-shirt count?  

I doubt it; Adorno would probably say that it constitutes an empty substitution for the actual rebellion that culture is supposed to engage.  Guevara's face might as well be mocking you on behalf of the capitalists who have capitalized on him through you.

I see, but that's simply an argument for the culture industry's perpetuation of consumerism, not necessarily for the reinforcement of capitalism in mass ideology.  If the formulaic schemes evident in sitcoms, novels, and action movies are so pervasive, isn't that just an indication of what the masses want?

Maybe, but that's why Adorno specifically used the term "culture industry" as opposed to "mass culture," the latter of which he isn't critiquing per se.

His argument isn't "fuck mass-product sell-outs," it's "fuck conformity."  How nuanced.

Sure, and so for him the real problem isn't the process of supply and demand prompting the market to produce a bunch of cultural products.  It's rather the particular demand that's being reinforced - a continual desire for "sameness" that constitutes a false psychological substitution for genuine sublimation, where "the physiognomy of the culture industry is essentially a mixture of streamlining, photographic hardness and precision on the one hand, and individualistic residues, sentimentality and an already rationally disposed and adapted romanticism on the other" (101).

He's saying then that the formulaic cultural products of the culture industry are the "opiate of the masses"?  In all this rhetoric about how we'll "be harmed indeed by the stupefication which lies in the claim [and] feeling of wellbeing that that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry" and that "the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects," "imped[ing] the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves," and "obstructing the emancipation for which human beings are as ripe as the productive forces of the epoch permit" (106)?

I guess.

How then is the culture industry different from any other form of entertainment? 

It's profit-driven, which can be collapsed into the imperative to create the most consumable cultural product, which leads to the extra-artistic imperative to create the most formulaic product, where "the cultural commodities of the industry are governed [...] by the principle of their realization as value, and not by their own specific content and harmonious formation," (99).

Then Adorno just seems to want a society full of critical-theory independent artists on the level of Divinci or Picasso.  And then 'all our problems would be solved.'

Or, like every Marxist, for the working class to simply revolt and establish an 'authentic' society.

K.