I should firstly say that Adorno would never deny any medium in its entirety the
possibility of becoming art. However, the extent to which Adorno denies photography and film the status of
an artwork refers to the manner in which what he refers to as the ‘culture industry’ invokes the technical
constitution and possibilities of these mediums. The culture industry refers to a particular development of
industrial society wherein people are compelled to seek relaxation in order to restore the labor-power spent
in the alienated process of production. This need is the mass basis of culture industry and on it has arisen
powerful amusement and entertainment industries, which adopt the mediums of photography and film. Here,
aesthetic taste and receptivity have become predigested and standardized, and as such, art, as a means of
filling out leisure time, has become entertainment. His critique of the culture industry is directed at the
claim objectively made by its products to be aesthetic formations and thus representations of truth.
For Adorno, the truth of a work of art consists in its aesthetic autonomy, or in its ability to express
freedom from that which is merely the case. The theme of Aesthetic Theory (1970) asks how can something
be more than what it factually is? This is the artwork’s utopian content. Adorno answers this question
by positing art as a critique of domination, a critique of the rationally destructive social whole
through a non-discursive presentation of truth. Art’s constituent elements are drawn from the ideal of
humanity as freedom. Through its form, art expresses an unease at fulfilling a social function, use, or
intention. Through aesthetic autonomy, artworks detach themselves from the empirical world and bring
forth another, or at least the possibility of another. Since human freedom exists beyond need or
survival, artworks oppose reality to the extent that this structure of mere self-preservation or utility
has emerged as the barbaric content of contemporary reality.
However, art’s rejection of the empirical world nonetheless sanctions the primacy of reality and asserts
something in its detachment. In this way, art both turns against what exists and comes to its aid by
giving form to its elements. Said another way, artworks communicate with the materials of reality, yet
also negate the rational determinations stamped upon the empirical world. If rationality has dominated
nature, art invokes the possibility of reconciling this subordination by conceding truth to the object
and thereby reinstating nature. Adorno refers to this as ‘the domination of the dominating’, or as ‘the
social antithesis of society’. By virtue of its “uselessness,” its wish to be solely for-itself and to
elude the laws of universal exchange, the artwork frees nature from its role as a mere instrument or
means.
In glaring contrast, the culture industry subsumes the purposelessness of art into the realm of purpose.
For Adorno, the mediums of photography and film drag art from its immanent purposiveness to the purposes
of the culture industry. These mediums then elicit mass psychological behavior, that is, a form of
pathological projection and identification in which people strive to adapt to models and stereotypes.
This is accompanied by a set of standardized reactions.
For Adorno, the resulting reification of the audience is a degradation of human perception. It does this,
first and foremost, through a certain domesticated naturalism for which the photographic image is
disposed, infusing empirical life with false meaning: “the duplicity of which viewers can scarcely see
through because the nightclub looks exactly like the one they know.” The continuous presentation of what
exists is the sole possible horizon. ‘Such a photological proof is of course not stringent, but it is
overpowering.’ The ideology of the culture industry therefore has the world as such as its subject. ‘It
exploits the cult of fact by describing bad existence with utmost exactitude in order to elevate it into
the realm of facts. Through such elevation existence itself becomes a surrogate of meaning and justice.
Beauty is whatever the camera reproduces.’ This ‘pseudo-realism’ as Adorno refers to it, resides in the
limited sensuality of the photographic image. The limited resources of photography consist in the lack
of spatial depth, of absolute scale, and the absence of movement or dynamism, which, must be instead
hallucinated and projected by the observer. We give the photographs content it doesn’t have. Within the
infinite abundance of information residing in a photograph, the ability to extract significance out of
the tiniest detail of sensorial content is thoroughly obstructed. As a mode of sensorial deprivation,
the detail of the photograph expresses less the residue of of the free human hand, than the technical
imperatives of the camera and of photochemical processes and pixel saturation. In contrast, within a
painting for example, the human trace is abundantly contained within the tiniest detail, the result
bearing no relation to normal calculations of means and ends.
Within a photo, the wandering eye is obliged to compete with the situation depicted. Photographic details
are always completely defined by the purpose they serve within the schema. For Adorno, this formula
exemplifies the domination of universals over the particulars, of society over its members. Unlike a
painting, photography will not put the eye to work. Everything is reduced to recognition, therefore
stunting the power of discernment. Within photography, there is an absolute emaciation of perception.
Photography becomes a substitute for the contemplative or reflective act of observation. Instead,
photography amounts to a mechanical process that leaves little room for imagination. At best,
photography is a means of communication, journalism, or reportage, not that of aesthetic
construction.
Film of course follows the pseudo-realism of photography and equally speaks to this immaturity of
experience by accommodating various layers of behavioral response patterns. The effects of film are
specifically designed for the unconscious, eluding the control of the conscious ego as the product
prescribes each reaction through signals. Here, the spectator accustoms his senses to a new tempo of the
moving image and its narrative, one in which developments emerge from the directly preceding situation,
not from any idea of the whole.
Further, the culture industry trains its audience to identity film directly with reality. The more
densely and completely its techniques duplicate empirical objects, the more easily it creates the
illusion that the world outside is a seamless extension of the one which has been revealed in the
cinema. In this way, the culture industry is geared to mimetic regression, to the manipulation of
repressed impulses to copy. Its method is to anticipate the spectator’s imitation of itself, making it
appear as if the agreement already exists which it intends to create. ‘Immediacy, the popular community
concocted by films, amounts to mediation without residue, reducing men and everything human so perfectly
to things, that their contrast to things, indeed the spell of reification itself, becomes
imperceptible.’ The film succeeds in transforming subjects so indistinguishably into social functions,
that those wholly encompassed, no longer aware of any conflict, enjoy their own dehumanization as
something human, as the joy of warmth.
The physiognomy of the culture industry is essentially a mixture of streamlining, photographic hardness
and precision on the one hand, and an individual’s pathological identification with standardized
formulas and clichés on the other. Here, ideology is split between the photographing of brute existence
and the blatant lie about its meaning, a lie which is not articulated directly but drummed in by
suggestion. Within the culture industry, art adopts the meaning of entertainment itself: as society’s
apologia. To be entertained means to be in agreement. The culture industry replaces artistic form with
representational function and the packaging of standardized models. The entire system is justified on
the basis of an infantile public which it itself has created.
This process has abolished aesthetic autonomy that, for Adorno, presupposes purposelessness and a
rejection of instrumentality. After all, when culture is culture (rather than industry), it arises out
of the capacity to suspend purpose and constitute the idea of freedom. The true subject in art must be
the work and that which speaks through the work, not the artist’s intentions nor the work’s
subject-matter. In this way, artworks invite imaginative reflection. The capacity to think, the power of
concentration, itself depends on its object and the coherence of its particulars. The truth of the
artwork depends on the tempo, the patience and perseverance of lingering with the particular, a faculty
obstructed through the entertainment of the culture industry. The culture industry asks artworks to do
away with the truth of their objectivity for the sake of a laboring subject disposed to adapt themselves
to the social whole.
1. Adorno, Theodor W. ‘Television as Ideology’, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Tr.
H. W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. p.62.
2. Adorno, Theodor W. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Tr. E. W. Jephcott.
Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2002. p.118.
3. Ibid, p.119.
4. Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Tr. E. Jephcott. London: Verso,
2005. p.206.
Additional resources:
The Value of Art
History of Art Goes
Pop
Art & Science: Beyond
the Balance
