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The Culture Industry revisited

Posted by moses @ 15:57 • , , , , , , • 0 comments



While cultural studies has today succeeded in appearing to undermine the Frankfurt School critique of the Culture Industry, the machinery of commodification steams ahead, more productive than ever. The intellectual world is powerless before this trend and continues to concede its influence. Numerous scholars of culture are striving to make their field at once more obscure and more accessible. They toil to create a happy vision of a world that is poised to reap the benefits of new communications technology, promising a cosmopolitan future of choice and enlightened consumption.

This vision is constructed through discourse that is sprinkled with an ever-growing list of newly-coined terms. Yet it is, at the same time, one that people can readily identify with—for who isn't ready to believe in the prospect of a brave new world, especially when the media has just informed them of the exciting new products available in the market?

Admittedly, Critical Theory does not often fare well in today's intellectual climate, a circumstance that I feel is attributable to its underpinnings in the labour theory of value, or at least in varying degrees of economic determinism. Popular conceptions of value no longer hold it as something objective or cardinal. Value is something that is purely relational and manifested in actual preferences. In other words, that people value something more than another cannot often be explained in terms of natural and tangible causes. Valuation is often a subjective affair.

In a powerful way, this undermines the Marxist critique of exchange value, not only by dispelling the labour theory of value on which the critique is based, but also by replacing the concept of use value with ordinal utility. Now we have another conception of value that is also Subject-determined and correlated with exchange value but is not equivalent to the latter. And the concept of use value seems cumbersome and obsolete beside one that is able to account for all Subject perceptions of value, including the intangible, instead of being mired in the materialist paradigm. Moreover, this conception of value is seductively democratic. After all, what can appear more empowering than a view of value that privileges people's preferences and decisions?

What this means for the Frankfurt School critique is its effective isolation as an elitist view of culture that presumes to tell people what they ought to value. If preferences are subjective, what right does anyone have to proscribe any as long as no actual harm can reasonably be alleged to result?

It is difficult to defend the Frankfurt School from such a charge. Yet I maintain that its critique of the Culture Industry still rings true, albeit in a way that may necessitate some distancing from Marxist discourse. My proposition is to look at the critique from a particularly modern perspective that revolves around expectations and hype.

If there is anything that we have learned from the last global financial crisis, it is that expectations may diverge from a more tangible reality of a situation, whatever the latter may be. Perhaps this can be seen in terms of the divergence between short-term and long-term confidence, the latter which is dependent on a stricter or more complete procedure of reasoning. But regardless of what exactly we should compare expectations to, the evidence seems to point to the existence of hype.

Hype can be understood, in that sense, as the inflating of expectations of returns relative to a more tangible measure of actual returns. Even under conventional ways of looking at the market, hype is rarely a good thing—it implies that buyers are ultimately losing out in terms of expected versus real returns to their spending. And since hype is paid for by marketing costs that are likely to figure in pricing decisions, hype also represents a potential deadweight loss.

What does this have to do with the Culture Industry? It is my contention that the Culture Industry is a major source of hype. It deals in feelings, manufacturing them in order to generate interest in things—a process that is typically subsumed under the goal of making profit. It thus becomes the primary source of trends that influence people's preferences in goods. To grasp the commercial importance of the Culture Industry under late capitalism, simply witness how advertising thrives on the products of the Culture Industry.

Moreover, this principle does not apply merely to the products of various industries, but also to more general things such as lifestyles and even happiness—the message is that spending our money on something or adopting a certain attitude or lifestyle can bring us happiness or a sense of fulfillment.

But can hype not become real if it proves to be permanent? After all, there are still many people who would be very happy to buy, for example, the latest Apple products simply on the basis of the expectations that have been generated through marketing. Thus, it would seem to be the case that these people continue to get what they expect.

Yet it remains true that no one really knows how long the ephemeral expectations that are associated with hype can last, especially on the level of the individual. All it takes is for the realisation to come, in one fine moment, that there is no basis for believing that something is as good as it has been made out to be. Much of the perceived returns would be lost in that moment, just as the perceived values of certain financial instruments evaporated a few years ago.

The lie that Culture Industry sells us does not, therefore, have to depend on a highly contentious philosophical analysis of value. Whatever the exact nature or typology of value may be, hype as the commodification of feelings can be observed in our everyday experience; and it stands clearly a means of extracting profit through the inflating of expectations.

The perpetual requiem

Posted by moses @ 19:32 • , • 0 comments


Those who wish to hold on to dreams should also be prepared to give them up. One cannot be uncompromising about dreams, for dreams have power over us. They have the power to reveal our mortal limitations, unclothed by the delusions of power that flights of fancy bring. For dreams are always a few steps ahead of us—the more we are able to realise, the fancier they become. Confidence often leads to our undoing, and the moment when we see the precariousness of our situation, the potential futility of our efforts, is the moment of despondency; a moment of lifelessness and regret for failures past.

To dare to dream is to dare to give them up. Yet, on the other hand, can we do without them? As dreams give meaning to our lives, they may also take them away. Thus, it is not having dreams or giving them up that is most crucial. Most importantly, accept the passing of dreams. Old dreams die to be replaced by newer, often less exalted ones. As we age, so do our dreams decay. But still you must hold on to them, to give them up later or perhaps to even realise them. That is what we really live for—the chance, however small, to see some of our dreams realised, or to fight again another day until we breathe no longer.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Big picture, small picture—who the hell knows anyway?

Posted by moses @ 20:18 • , , , , • 0 comments



More technocratic or elitist discourses on governance often bring up concepts like 'the big picture' or the 'the long view'. I won't dispute the fact that these terms have meanings (albeit relative ones). But they don't seem as clear as they are made out to be in those instances. It's always worth asking what the big picture or the long view is, and how anyone knows what it is. Otherwise, it would only serve as a cover that allows the powerful to explain things away with a wave of the hand.

The problem in thinking in terms of the big picture becomes clear when there are competing claims about the same reality, typically with some grounded in experienced reality and others in more abstract or socially-constructed terms. For example, it is possible to enjoy a period of posted economic growth and rising nominal (or even real) wages while having people report decreasing standards of living in their everyday experience. Of course, facts grounded in experienced reality are often fragmentary and contentious—they are typically anecdotal and it is easy to find examples that contradict each other. To the rationally-minded, such facts might therefore be unquestionably devalued.

However, this does not mean that they are necessarily untrue or unreal. Everyone sees reality through the veil of a particular (and partly self-imposed) perspective. However, this reality is also the reality that each of us knows. It's cold comfort to be told that some abstraction or another person's reality can free our perceptions from the constraints of the experienced. What we experience is necessarily treated as true because we experience it. That is a fundamental tautology in epistemology.

Of course, ontologically this is a problematic position. Yet in practical matters, the empirical is the most directly relevant to the individual. Small epistemologically-determined problems can culminate in an ontological crisis. After a certain point, we just don't know if a claim that has been 'proven' to be ontologically true is indeed true. It becomes increasingly difficult, for example, to hold on to a traditionally held view that something is good when we are finding so many little things that are wrong with it.

The epistemological/ontological divide translates into a small picture/big picture divide in the socio-economic realm. What I call the 'small picture' is obvious enough to each individual, as it concerns the present and immediate reality around him. But how do we derive the big picture? Are we able to see how all the small things, consisting as they are of an insurmountable mountain of conflicting data, form the big picture? The long view is even more complicated as time constantly introduces change.

What people wind up doing is simplifying the reality that they see. They abstract reality, deriving theories, numbers and indicators to allow them take stock of it in a convenient and concise way. When they need to think about the future, they make projections based on these abstractions. This is a powerful and useful method, but it's not without its risks. If experienced reality is affected by perspective, what exempts our visions of the big picture from the same influence? In fact, most if not all attempts at abstracting reality are acts of interpretation—we are interpreting reality according to a certain framework or paradigm.

In governance, the tendency to abstract and derive the big picture for policy purposes has led governments to pursue numbers. They rely on indicators to measure the effectiveness of their policy, the welfare of the people and virtually everything that pertains to their business. This is often a necessary measure in their position, yet the problem with these indicators is that they are interpretive. The real problem, however, comes when people are not aware of this. Numbers and abstractions become totalitarian teleologies, imposing an "iron cage", as Max Weber put it, of rationalism on the lives of individuals. And worst of all, they become held as 'truth'.

The elitism regarding the big picture is a manifestation of this rationalist arrogance and its obliteration of the hermeneutic. What individuals think and feel is completely unimportant beside the data. Unfortunately, the people who champion the big picture often neglect to ask how the data is derived. Emptily they claim to be bastions of reason and lovers of wisdom, and those who disagree they declare to be contrarian or oppositional. Hence, the position of the unthinking rationalist is readily assumed by the most dangerous ignorant people of all—the pseudo-educated, the body of the reactionary middle class.