The Culture Industry / Art Under Late Capitalism?

“The whole world is passed through the filter of the culture industry” (99)

Dreams of Universal Subsumption

“Something is provided for everyone so that no one can escape” (97).

“The routine translation of everything… into the schema of mechanical reproduceability…” (100)

INDUSTRIALIZATION OF THOUGHT

LOGIC OF CAPTURE = OMNIVOROUS!!!!!!

Titanic (1997), dir. James Cameron

A film that sweeps us away into a world of spectacle, beauty and excitement, a realm of fantasy unimaginable without the movies. –Chicago Sun Times

A huge, thrilling three-and-a-quarter-hour experience that unerringly lures viewers into the beauty and heartbreak of its lost world. –NY Times

What audiences end up with is a hackneyed, completely derivative copy of old Hollywood romances, a movie that reeks of phoniness and lacks even minimal originality. –LA Times

Homogenization & the Stereotype

“Every film is a preview of the next, which promises yet again to unite the same heroic couple under the same exotic sun: anyone arriving late cannot tell whether he is watching the trailer or the real thing” (132).

“Cool Guys Don’t Look at Explosions.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sqz5dbs5zmo

Pseudoindividuality

“Individuals are tolerated only as far as their wholehearted identity with the universal is beyond question. … The sulky taciturnity or the elegant walk of the individual who happens to be on show is serially produced like the Yale locks which differ by fractions of a millimeter. The peculiarity of the self is a socially conditioned monopoly commodity represented as natural” (125)

“Individuality?”

Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937

In mass culture, “there is no ‘first time’ of repetition, no ‘original’ of which succeeding repetitions are mere copies” (Jameson 137).

The Drowned World &Cli-Fi

Beatrice Dahl lay back on one of the deck chairs, her long oiled body gleaming in the shadows like a sleeping python. The pink-tipped fingers of one hand rested lightly on an ice-filled glass on a table beside her, while the other hand turned slowly through the pages of a magazine. Wide blue-black sunglasses hid her smooth sleek face, but Kerans noted the slightly sullen pout of her firm lower lip. Presumably Riggs had annoyed her, forcing her to accept the logic of his argument [to leave the station].

The Colonel paused at the rail, looking down at the beautiful supple body with ungrudging approval. Noticing him, Beatrice pulled off her sunglasses, then tightened the loose back-straps of her bikini under her arms. Her eyes glinted quietly.

“All right, you two, get on with it. I’m not a strip show.”

 

(J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World, 1962, p. 37)

Escape?

“It is only in its struggle with tradition, a struggle precipitated in style, that art can find expression for suffering. The moment in the work of art by which it transcends reality cannot, indeed, be severed from style; that moment, however, does not consist in achieved harmony, in the questionable unity of form and content, inner and outer, individual and society, but in those traits in which discrepancy emerges, in the necessary failure of the passionate striving for identity.”

-The Culture Industry, 103

“It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world.”

Adorno, “Commitment,” 180