JERSEY FLIGHT IN CONVERSATION WITH THEODORE ADORNO

Adorno: The sociological theory that the loss of the support of objectively established religion, the dissolution of the last remnants of pre-capitalism, together with technological and social differentiation or specialization, have led to cultural chaos is disproved every day; for culture now impresses the same stamp on everything.*

Flight: That is to say, culture does not die in the absence of primitive narratives. Those who are attached to these narratives argue for their necessity. They say the world would implode without them, but you are correct, my friend, this has not been the empirical reality. Nihilism is all bark and no bite. 

Adorno: Under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through. The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. They call themselves industries; and when their directors’ incomes are published, any doubt about the social utility of the finished products is removed.

Flight: Monopoly, as you speak of it, means economic control of the cultural industry. This is an important point, because the culture industry is the apparatus which instills individual values. Those who control the culture industry do not have to worry about reality, insofar as they have the power to shape it! This boldness is proof that they have succeeded at instilling their values. But here there is a paradox: they strive to shape reality, precisely because it stands against them, there is nothing they have to worry about more than reality! 

Adorno: The technical contrast between the few production centers and the large number of widely dispersed consumption points is said to demand organization and planning by management. Furthermore, it is claimed that standards were based in the first place on consumers’ needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger. No mention is made of the fact that the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest. A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself.

Flight: It is interesting, no matter how corrosive to the fabric of society, the capitalist always defends the idea that his choices are socially responsible and moral. And yet this is backward. The idea that production functions in order to meet social demand is a truthful lie.+ The reality is that desire is instilled by the producers! The point is not to meet the criteria of human need, but to exploit humans for profit. In order to do this institutions administer ideology through the channels of authority, emotion is exploited for the sake of profit; propaganda propagates itself through the use of authoritarian declarations (as well as irrational rationalism).

+This is the swiftest definition of ideology.
 
Adorno: The step from the telephone to the radio has clearly distinguished the roles. The former still allowed the subscriber to play the role of subject, and was liberal. The latter is democratic: it turns all participants into listeners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs which are all exactly the same. No machinery of rejoinder has been devised, and private broadcasters are denied any freedom. They are confined to the apocryphal field of the “amateur,” and also have to accept organization from above.

Flight: I can see this being the case in a more crude society, but in the present system the control is more subtle. In other words, Elites will allow the “amateur” to broadcast his opinion, they simply use their wealth to bury what he said. He is a solitary voice, easily marked out and painted as a “fanatic,” this is what they call those who expose their truthful untruth+. The ideology of fanaticism is precisely to use this term against those who expose the controllers! Everything is referenced back to the calm atmosphere which insinuates that backwardness is normality. People are taught to respond indifferently to objective suffering; they are conditioned to normalize the tyranny of capitalism. Homelessness, for example, is always framed as a defect of the person, it is never the outcome of a tyrannical system. 

+ Another phrase for ideology. 

Adorno: We are closer to the facts if we explain these phenomena as inherent in the technical and personnel apparatus which, down to its last cog, itself forms part of the economic mechanism of selection. In addition there is the agreement – or at least the determination – of all executive authorities not to produce or sanction anything that in any way differs from their own rules, their own ideas about consumers, or above all themselves.

Flight: People are taught to protect and guard a moral ideology. They are taught that any challenge to this authority will result in absolute tyranny (unspeakable suffering for them and their children). The starting premise is always the same: the masses require the assistance of Elites in order to practice civility, and yet the irony, is that the Elite order, is an order of chaos. It has not been able to peacefully resolve tension between bodies. Institutions, capitalist nations, are always starting wars over resources. War is literally part of the ontology of capitalism. The reason these “executive authorities” cannot permit dissidence is because it would undermine their ideological control of the people. And what would this nullify? Their profit. 

Adorno: In our age the objective social tendency is incarnate in the hidden subjective purposes of company directors…

Flight: This act of concealing the profit motive behind a barrage of justificatory language (pseudo-rationalism) largely summarizes the character of the capitalist world. People are taught to have two faces: one is the “hidden subjective purpose” (to maximize profit through means of exploitation), while the other is the friendly salesman who plays the part of a humanitarian for the sake of profit. When caring about people brings profit, the capitalist pretends to care about people. The capitalist always claims he is engaged in the process of making the world a better place, of “lifting people out of poverty.” This is his own special form of cognitive dissonance (just like the Nazis did not see themselves as immoral, they had many justifications for their actions, and even after they were defeated, excuses were still abundant). Capitalism teaches a man, the better he is at deceiving, the more successful he will be in business.

Adorno: Kant said that there was a secret mechanism in the soul which prepared direct intuitions in such a way that they could be fitted into the system of pure reason. But today that secret has been deciphered. While the mechanism is to all appearances planned by those who serve up the data of experience, that is, by the culture industry, it is in fact forced upon the latter by the power of society, which remains irrational, however we may try to rationalise it; and this inescapable force is processed by commercial agencies so that they give an artificial impression of being in command.

Flight: This was not hard to figure out. Psychology established the supremacy of emotion as the strongest medium of control. Capitalism is all about the manipulation of consumer emotion. The secret to control is to conceal the mechanism of control. In other words, you are correct, emotional manipulation does not constitute real control, but is in fact, a manifestation of how hard one has to work to retain control. There is much hope in this, because it implies that humans have to be manipulated in order to be integrated into capitalism. If this manipulation does remain constant, the whole system is in danger of breaking apart. The tactic is to Keep people so busy they never get the chance to stop and analyze the system which holds them captive.     

Adorno: There is nothing left for the consumer to classify. Producers have done it for him.

Flight: This is the equivalent of constructing the world through an architecture of authority. In all truth, this is only possible because people are conditioned to obey authority. How many people know how to deconstruct and qualify classifications? We must begin to teach people how to detect and refute authority, which is to say, we must teach them how to discern legitimate authority,  justified authority.

Adorno: The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry. The old experience of the movie-goer, who sees the world outside as an extension of the film he has just left (because the latter is intent upon reproducing the world of everyday perceptions), is now the producer’s guideline. The more intensely and flawlessly his techniques duplicate empirical objects, the easier it is today for the illusion to prevail that the outside world is the straightforward continuation of that presented on the screen.

Flight: This is a device for total control. A young person is taught to mimic what they see on the screen. When we ask the question, for example, “how does love work,” the answer for those who have been filtered through the cultural industry, is always the same: “love is what is portrayed by the image.” If reality fails to match the ideology of the theater, then one feels cheated. But this feeling is the result of normalization, which is to say, the result of moral conditioning through the medium of film. The individual, inoculated into the cultural industry, does not know how to penetrate the veil of ideology which stands before him. He is powerless against insinuation, because he does not know how to identify and challenge that which is presented as normal. He is taught to go along with the status quo. If one can laugh at a holocaust, then a holocaust is normal. I'm afraid things really are this bad.

Adorno: Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound film, far surpassing the theatre of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality. The stunting of the mass-media consumer’s powers of imagination and spontaneity does not have to be traced back to any psychological mechanisms; he must ascribe the loss of those attributes to the objective nature of the products themselves, especially to the most characteristic of them, the sound film. They are so designed that quickness, powers of observation, and experience are undeniably needed to apprehend them at all; yet sustained thought is out of the question if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of facts.
 
Even though the effort required for his response is semi-automatic, no scope is left for the imagination. Those who are so absorbed by the world of the movie – by its images, gestures, and words – that they are unable to supply what really makes it a world, do not have to dwell on particular points of its mechanics during a screening. All the other films and products of the entertainment industry which they have seen have taught them what to expect; they react automatically.

Flight: What this tells me is that film is a powerful medium for the emancipation and expansion of consciousness. One cannot reject all philosophy simply because there is bad philosophy. These aesthetic devices should be used to bring about a greater liberation in society, but instead, they are used to pacify intelligence, and bring about a mindless submission. Perhaps the most tragic point is when the producer is not aware of what he is producing. This is because he is only able to produce in light of his consciousness, and if his consciousness is shaped by ideology, then he will reproduce ideology.

Adorno: Whereas today in material production the mechanism of supply and demand is disintegrating, in the superstructure it still operates as a check in the rulers’ favour. The consumers are the workers and employees, the farmers and lower middle class. Capitalist production so confines them, body and soul, that they fall helpless victims to what is offered them. As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them.

Flight: This is a complete ideological circle. Never is ideology more successful than when it instills the desire for itself! 


* All Adorno quotes are taken from the "Dialectic of Enlightenment," section, "The Cultural Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," pg.94-136, Stanford University Press 2002
  

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