Hi! Okay, so.

This question is good, and necessary, to counteract my kneejerk shorthand in that post. Humanities/social sciences/cultural studies has largely disowned Adorno because of his (historically situated) hardline stance against the effects of popular culture, but as you mention, there’s tons of great and relevant stuff in it. I definitely think you’re correct that he’d agree with me (and vice-versa) on the “mediation all the way down” thing, though we’d part on what that means for individual autonomy and agency.

Some of the reaction to yesterday’s post sort of slots in here: I think that when people read me writing that we can’t approach music in an unmediated way, that I’m inching too close to The Matrix, or we’re marionettes, or what Adorno (with Horkheimer) says about another medium: “the sound film…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.” Obviously, these two were German expatriates writing in the era of Hitler, so the step they take is fully understood and historically justified, even though today we know that it’s not the case, that while advertising and mass media share common ancestors with totalitarian propaganda, what we get is a much, much (x1000) more watered down version.

This is really where most people have broken with Adorno: his insistence on popular culture creating an army of industrial clones with no further option than to do the bidding of the “culture industry” (that phrase itself drips with Adorno’s revulsion at the idea of state-run media of any sort). Consider this quote from his legendary piece on jazz as pop: “standardization…means the strengthening of the lasting domination of the listening public and of their conditioned reflexes. They are expected to want only that to which they have become accustomed and to become enraged whenever their expectations are disappointed and fulfillment, which they regard as the customer’s inalienable right, is denied.” Oof, right?

But also not without a lot of truth, too. There’s much to love about Adorno, just as there’s more to love about his expat compatriot Walter Benjamin (whose late 30s piece “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is still extremely relevant). To be sure, Adorno, writing near the start of the mass media boom, was extremely accurate in a lot of his predictions about the interrelations between industry and culture. Like his idea that “culture monopolies are weak in comparison” to industrial ones, and thus “the dependence of the most powerful broadcasting company on the electrical industry, or of the motion picture industry on the banks, is characteristic of the whole sphere, whose individual branches are themselves economically interwoven.”

Really, the only thing that Adorno is bad at is how far he extends this stuff. Again, we can all agree he sort of had a right to be dubious, while noting that empirical social science and theory has taken us far beyond it. I still re-read Adorno a lot, though! What I was getting at in that post is a much more ambivalent idea of how culture travels, and one that, to sign off on, people have to agree with me that there’s nothing outside mediation. It’s a big step to take, but it also opens up a lot of avenues to consider human agency in this mediation (not simply the top down model that Adorno posited). Another post coming soonish on the implications of this stuff for music.