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The relevance of the theory of pseudo-culture

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Abstract

Some 60 years separate us from Theodor W. Adorno’s “Theory of pseudo-culture.” Yet Adorno’s analysis might never have been as pertinent and as compelling as it is in the present moment. The dawn of the “post-truth” era, and the persistent impact of the culture industry on human sensibility and capacity for critical self-reflection, call for a return to Adorno’s critical theorisation of pseudo-culture. This paper revisits Adorno’s assessment of pseudo-culture and proposes a reconstruction of some of his most compelling arguments on the subject in light of the present socio-historical circumstances. The paper starts with a concise discussion of the notions of Kultur, Bildung and Halbbildung in relation to Adorno’s thought. It then discusses the effects of pseudo-culture on human experience by looking into the role of opinions—in particular, what Adorno terms “delusional” opinions—in contemporary late capitalist reality. Finally, the paper ends with a juxtaposition of the barbarism of the banal and neoteric barbarism. I argue that, whereas the former stuns culture and impels it to regress to a state of pseudo-culture, the latter gives it new impetus by opening up new theoretical and practical paths.

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Notes

  1. Max Horkheimer (1993), “Beginnings of Bourgeois Philosophy of History,” 362.

  2. Jacques Rancière and Christine Palmiéri (2002), “Jacques Rancière (2000): ‘Le Partage Du Sensible’,” 40.

  3. Walter Benjamin (2008), “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian,” 124.

  4. Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture (1959),” 33. Adorno (2001), “The Schema of Mass Culture,” 96.

  5. In this regard Marcuse too remains particularly actual today. See Marcuse (1991), One-Dimensional Man, 3–6. It should be noted here that the English interpretation of the term Halbbildung as “pseudo-culture” can be somewhat misleading. On the one hand, this is due, as Deborah Cook rightly pointed out when she translated Adorno's article into English, and as will be discussed below, to the fact that Adorno uses the word Bildung to convey several different meanings (see Cook's note in Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture (1959),” 15). On the other hand, the first root of the compound word Halbbildung (i.e. Halb-) is rendered in English as “pseudo-” instead of the more literal “semi-”. While “pseudo-” succeeds in communicating the falsity of culture within late capitalist reality, “semi-” can better express the idea of a true (or truthful) yet incomplete cultural education, that is, from the point of view of the historically attained practical and theoretical human knowledge. Hence, the English reader may want to read Halbbildung at the same time as “pseudo-culture” and “semi-cultivation.”

  6. On this, see Raymond Geuss, “Kultur, Bildung, Geist ,” History and Theory 35, no. 2 (May 1996): 151–164 (especially 153–154). Also, Ringer “Bildung: The Social and Ideological Context of the German Historical Tradition.” History of European Ideas 10, no. 2 (1 January 1989): 193–202.

  7. Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture (1959),” 19.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Ibid. Also Adorno (1967), “Cultural Criticism and Society,” 30–31.

  10. Ibid. Also, Marcuse (1969), “Repressive Tolerance,” 95.

  11. See for instance, Matthew Fisher, Mariel K. Goddu, and Frank C. Keil, “Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General Online First Publication (March 30, 2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000070. From now on the German terms Bildung and Kultur will be used instead of their English counterparts when deemed appropriate, so as to avoid any ambiguities with regards to Adorno’s use of these words in the original texts.

  12. It remains to be seen how Adorno would have perceived these new socio-historical developments, given his apparent inability to reconcile his critical social theory with the militant movements of his time. One should probably begin by acknowledging that Adorno's reluctance to follow his critical social theory to its logical practical end stemmed from his staunch commitment to negativity and the complete rejection of all forms of instrumentality, rather than from a lack of confidence on his part in (the need for) social transformative praxis. Susan Buck-Morss captures this aspect of Adorno’s social-political attitude well when she attributes Adorno's reservations regarding the practical dimension of his critical social theory to the effectiveness of the insulation he establishes between thought and instrumentality. As she puts it, “Adorno ensured perhaps too successfully that reason did not become ‘instrumental’. For instrumental reason preserved a moment of ‘use value’ which negative dialectics had to abandon. The result was that as opposites, they too converged: instrumental reason lost sight of rational goals, ceased to be a means, and became an end in itself; but negative dialectics abrogated political utility, and thus became an end in itself as well” (Buck-Morss (1979), The Origin of Negative Dialectics, 189). Cf. Vangelis Giannakakis (2019). “Adorno, Badiou and the Politics of Breaking Out.”

  13. Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture (1959),” 15.

  14. See also, O’Connor (2013), Adorno, 131.

  15. Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture (1959),” 16. See also, Adorno (2001), “The Schema of Mass Culture,” 67.

  16. Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture (1959),” 16. Also Adorno (1967), “Cultural Criticism and Society,” 23–25. Cf. Marcuse (1972), Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, 93–95.

  17. Adorno (2018), Aesthetics, 170. See also Jameson (2007), Late Marxism: Adorno or the Persistence of the Dialectic, 136–138.

  18. Marcuse (1991), One-Dimensional Man, 9–12.

  19. Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture (1959),” 17.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Ibid. Also Bauman (2000), Culture as Praxis, xxxiii.

  22. Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture (1959),” 17. For a contemporary example of this can be found in Jon Ronson, ‘How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life’, The New York Times, 12 February 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html. Also Meghan O’Gieblyn, “Ruin,” Boston Review, April 10, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/lcmcl3j.

  23. Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture (1959),” 18.

  24. In point of fact, Adorno calls attention tot he relationship between opinions, culture and cultural criticism in Adorno (1967), “Cultural Criticism and Society,” pp. 20–21.

  25. Adorno (2005), “Opinion Delusion Society,” 105.

  26. See, for instance, Vicario et al. (2016), “The Spreading of Misinformation Online.”

  27. Adorno (2005), “Opinion Delusion Society,” 106.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Adorno (2005), “Opinion Delusion Society,” 110. There is a strong parallel here with Debord’s description of the society of the spectacle. See Debord, La Société Du Spectacle,156.

  30. Adorno (2005), "Opinion Delusion Society," 109. In this respect, Adolph Reed is right to claim that “[s]truggles for racial and gender equality have largely divested race and gender of their common sense verisimilitude as bases for essential difference. Moreover, versions of racial and gender equality are now also incorporated into the normative and programmatic structure of ‘left’ neoliberalism. Rigorous pursuit of equality of opportunity exclusively within the terms of given patterns of capitalist class relations—which is after all the ideal of racial liberalism—has been fully legitimised within the rubric of ‘diversity’. That ideal is realised through gaining rough parity in distribution of social goods and bads among designated population categories. As Walter Benn Michaels has argued powerfully, according to that ideal, the society would be just if 1 percent of the population controlled 90 per- cent of the resources, provided that blacks and other nonwhites, women, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people were represented among the 1 percent in roughly similar proportion as their incidence in the general population.” See Reed (2013), “Marx, Race, and Neoliberalism,” 53–54.

  31. Manzerolle (2010), “Mobilizing the Audience Commodity: Digital Labour in a Wireless World| Ephemera.”

  32. Adorno (2005), “Opinion Delusion Society,” 107. On this, see also Mason (2018), “Ideologues without Issues.”

  33. Boltanski (2012), Énigmes et Complots, 277–282.

  34. Adorno (2005), “Opinion Delusion Society,” 108.

  35. Ibid., 119.

  36. For example, Schmitz (2018), “Local TV Forced to Denounce “one-Sided News” by America’s Largest Media Company.”

  37. Adorno (2005), “Opinion Delusion Society,” 120.

  38. Ibid., 121.

  39. Ibid.

  40. Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture (1959),” 27.

  41. Ibid., 26–27. Also Bauman (2000), Culture as Praxis, 138.

  42. Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture (1959),” 26–27. See also Cook (1996), The Culture Industry Revisited, 46–50, and Rancière (2000), Le Partage Du Sensible: Esthétique et Politique, 15–16.

  43. Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture (1959),” 29. And Adorno (2001), “The Schema of Mass Culture,” 82–85. Negt and Kluge also offer some interesting remarks on this point, see Negt and Kluge (2016), Public Sphere of Experience, 172–174, 184.

  44. Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture (1959),” 29.

  45. Ibid., 30.

  46. Adorno (2005), “Opinion Delusion Society,” 121.

  47. Ibid. Adorno (2001), ‘The Schema of Mass Culture’, 91–92.

  48. Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture (1959),” 33.

  49. Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture (1959),” 35. See also Debord (1992), La Société Du Spectacle, 26–27. Cf. Wellmer (1991), “Truth, Semblance, Reconciliation, Adorno’s Aesthetic Redemption of Modernity,” 32–34.

  50. Adorno (1977), “Sociology and Empirical Research,” 85. Also, Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 243–244, 237.

  51. Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture (1959),” 37. The distinction drawn by Raymond Williams between “dominant culture” and “residual and emergent cultures” is informative here. See Williams (2005), “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” 40–42.

  52. Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture (1959),” 37. Again, for Adorno art is paradigmatic in this sense, see for example, Adorno’s discussion of the concepts of “shudder,” “defamiliarisation” and “ugliness” in progressive art, in Adorno (1997), Aesthetic Theory, 331, and, Adorno (2018), Aesthetics, 78–79, 108–110.

  53. With regard to Wikileaks see Slavoj Žižek, “Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks,” London Review of Books, 33 (2011), 9–10 and Slavoj Žižek, “How WikiLeaks Opened Our Eyes to the Illusion of Freedom,” The Guardian, 19 June 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/19/hypocrisy-freedom-julian-assange-wikileaks.

  54. Adorno and Horkheimer (2002), Dialectic of Enlightenment, 100.

  55. Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture (1959),” 38. Cf. Hammer (2006), Adorno and the Political, 94–97.

  56. Buck-Morss (1979), The Origin of Negative Dialectics, 186–187. Adorno's unwavering commitment to negativity came at the cost of his inability to fully appreciate the positive dimension of socio-political praxis, although this did not make him entirely blind to it. See also n.12 above.

  57. Ibid., 189.

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  1. School of Philosophy, University College Dublin (alumnus), Dublin, Ireland

    Vangelis Giannakakis

  2. External Collaborator of the Laboratory of Artistic and Cultural Education, University of the Aegean, Rhodes, Greece

    Vangelis Giannakakis

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Giannakakis, V. The relevance of the theory of pseudo-culture. Cont Philos Rev 52, 311–325 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-019-09467-8

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