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According To Adorno's Pessimistic Critique Of Culture

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The rise of big businesses is caused by the end of national leisure policy, which triggered that cultural products and symbols have become commodified. The big businesses are responsible for this development due to tight control of the production, distribution and marketing of cultural products for gaining profit. This need to create scarcity (semi-public goods) to acquire profit conflicts with the small businesses that strive for creativity and uniqueness. Creativity is essential for creating symbols and valuable products. This creativity is difficult to control and manage and contradicts with the effective strategies of big businesses. Before products can be commodified, the cultural products need to be made by the symbolic creators of small …show more content…

I want to highlight this by referring to Adorno’s pessimistic critique of the commodification of culture. Adorno states that culture has lost its meaning and value due to the marketization of culture. According to Adorno culture should broaden people’s knowledge and skills instead of focusing on relaxation and escapism produced by the worlds of entertainment. In Adorno’s perspective, the culture industries are empty and superficial. I agree that the cultural industry has made culture more accessible to people by commodification and indeed this represents a loss in cultural value. However, I believe that the cultural industry has also led to new ways of value. The cultural industries are not only about cultural value, but also symbolic, economic and social value. For instance, culture has become valuable for consumers and businesses as source for showing their identities and for creating connections with people all over the world. I mean it is not only a bad thing that culture is commodified. It has opened ways for new exciting directions and innovations of the capacity of culture. My first argument is related to the interplay of big and small businesses in the cultural industries. Adorno’s perspective indicates that the small businesses have lost the battle and that culture has been already subsumed by the big businesses. I do not agree that the battle is over. I believe that the value of culture is still visible in the small businesses and is the main reason they exist, although, the power of big businesses is increasing. In this perspective, his critique is still relevant for the tensions in the cultural industries today. A positive development of the tensions between big and small businesses is the inspiration for new business models, such as Airbnb and Couchsurfing. Those business models are

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Although economies will need to adapt to this pace, it is important to recognize the strides sectors of the economy have made to evolve with this environment. Companies like Postmates, Uber, and Favor working to alleviate the obstacles a rapidly growing economy affords. For many workers in this field of service, these short-term engagements provide a amount of income that can help with meeting rent or paying their car note. Additionally, as an independent contractor of a company, workers can design a work schedule that does not intervene with other commitments. While it is true that workers in the gig economy are provided with numerous benefits, disadvantages emerge when the needs of these workers are not met.

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In Adorno’s viewpoint, pop music makes the song seem different from all others, but in reality, they are all standardized. Adorno contends that pop songs are pseudo-individualized, which means the elements of a song make it seem different from others to make people believe they have a vast range of choices, but in reality, the choices are illusion (“On Popular Music” 25). Pseudo means fake, so pseudo-individualization means fake individualization. Some elements/features such as a singer’s voice and the subject of a song are included in order to make songs seem different from others, and it leads audiences to believe that they have a variety of choices. But, in reality, the choices are not truly given because content still stays same previously released pop songs.

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Name: Michelle Moffitt Student Number: 12474438 "I define modernism as any attempt by modern men and women to become subjects as well as objects of modernisation, to get a grip on the modern world and make themselves at home in it." (Berman, 1988). It can be seen that both Theodor Adorno and Antonio Gramsci are major thinkers and contributors to the twentieth century. Both Adorno and Gramsci had many ideas by which could be associated with the social world in which we live in today. Even though both Adorno and Gramsci had good points and ideologies which still apply to the modern world, it is clear that Adorno had more to say about the social world we live in today.

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Adorno and Horkheimer drew from Marx with regards to capitalism. According to Lorimer and Scannell (1994), “Following Marx, they saw the application of capitalist methods to cultural production as exploitative of the mass of the production” (p. 165). Adorno and Horkheimer believed that mass culture due to capitalism makes it homogenous. The audience then becomes homogenous and unified. Baofu (2009) further explains the culture industry as, “Popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods to manipulate the masses into passivity; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture make people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances.”

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