Television and Everyday Life

INDUSTRY
The culture industry fuses the old and familiar into a new quality. In all its
branches, products which are tailored for consumption by masses, and which
to a great extent determine the nature of that consumption, are manufactured
more or less according to plan. The individual branches are similiar in
structure or at least fit into each other, ordering themselves into a system
almost without a gap. This is made possible by contemporary technical
capabilities as well as by economic and administrative concentration. The
culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers from above.
(Adorno, 1991, 85)

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The might of industrial society is lodged in men’s minds.
(Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972, 127)
Horkheimer and Adorno, fresh from the political and economic totalitarianism
of Nazi Germany, discovered a new form of tyranny in the United States in the
form of Hollywood and the cultural industry. Their analysis and critique of
this industry, an element in their forlorn interrogation of the punishing success
of advancing capitalism, provides, for all its imperfections, a starting point. It
does so because it plausibly, and remarkably presciently, identifies that industry
as the source of what they saw as the profound and pernicious remystification
of contemporary culture. And it does so because their critique, which insists
on the integration of political-economic and cultural analysis, provides (despite
its pessimism, or even because of it) a significant influence on a whole slew of
recent critics who similarly take changes in the industrial and technological
complexes of late capitalism as the key to an understanding of the contradictions
of post-modernity (Baudrillard, 1988; Harvey, 1989; Lash, 1990, and see
Adorno, 1991, 23).
In fact, of course, Horkheimer and Adorno do not engage in a detailed
analysis of the ownership and control of the cultural industry. Instead they
develop a post-Weberian analysis of the forms of rationality that are expressed
simultaneously within industrial organisation, technology and cultural forms.
That rationality is the punishing rationality of Weber’s iron cage and, in its
other expression, of Marcuse’s one-dimensional man. That rationality is
expressive and reinforcive of economic power (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972,
121) and of the structures of industrial production which define the logics and
the values of society under capitalism.
The cultural industry produces a standardised, homogenised mass culture in
which the market, like a lava flow, consumes everything of value in its path.
Citizens are turned into consumers. Culture and entertainment are fused.
Negation, the possibility of denying the seductions of affirmative bourgeois
culture, is rendered impossible. Consumers are classified and labelled in the
same way as, and in order to sell, commodities. The media, and especially the
new medium of television (they were writing originally on these matters in 1944)
provide a constant and de-differentiating flow: of repetitive, predictable, smug
and superficial programming. Real life is becoming indistinguishable from its
mediation in film and television. All is false: pleasure, happiness, spectacle,
laughter, sexuality, individuality. Amusement is structured according to the
rhythms demanded by the factory. And advertising is the litmus, both source
and symbol of the cultural industry’s triumph. Advertising offers signs without
meaning within an assembly line repetition of constant appearance, and
appearance without which commodities and objects themselves have no meaning:
The most intimate reactions of human beings have been so thoroughly reified
that the idea of anything specific to themselves now persists only as an utterly

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abstract notion: personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining
white teeth and freedom from body odour and emotions. The triumph of
advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy
and use its products even though they see through them.
(Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972, 167)
There is much still of value in these observations and in the trenchant savagery
of their critique. It provides, still, a significant obstacle for contemporary
theorists who find in popular cultural forms expressions of authentic pleasures
and fulfilled desires (see Caughie, 1991; Born, 1993). In the present context it
is of value in other respects, for it provides, even in its exaggerated and elitist
pessimism, an account of the media which does not depend on analysis only
of the media and, similarly, an account of consumption which does not depend
on analysis only of the consumer. The power of television is to be understood,
as Conrad Lodziak (1986, 3) later recognises, not in any analysis of its
decontextualised effects, but in its proper location within a political and
economic framework.
Their analysis is also of value because it identifies, from the point of view of
its particular rationality, commodification and consumption as keys to
understanding the dynamics and the logic of late capitalism. Within consumption,
its reifications and its repressive desublimations, the masses are constructed,
denied their freedom, denied their truths and denied their authentic pleasures.
Within the cultural industry’s hegemony the rhythms and routines of everyday
life are moulded to an industrial timekeeping. Consumption replaces production
as the visible marker of social life without, it should be added, denying
production’s fundamental, material, importance. Consumption is therefore doubly
significant: it is both the signifier and signified of the order of later capitalism.
But it is, at least in Horkheimer and Adorno’s view, still a second-order reality.
I have already argued (Chapter 4) for a view of television which requires
that it be seen as an element within a wider technological and political-economic
rationality. And I have already suggested that at least one major component of
its relationship to time and space is that defined by the schedules and their
expression and imposition of a public, industrial timekeeping in the private
sphere. Others have provided analyses of the current patterns of industrial
order: of transnationalism, vertical and horizontal integration, media
imperialism, information flow and flexible specialisation which mark the
present character of the cultural industry (Murdock, 1982, 1990; Garnham
1991). Implicitly those analyses endorse the main direction of the Frankfurt
School’s critique, by providing extensive empirical evidence of the trends and
consequences that they identified. Not all, of course, endorse their conclusions
or their lack of subtlety.
But they do sometimes betray the same absences and the same blindness:
the absence of actors and the blindness to the active participation of

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Television and Everyday Life
consumer-citizens in the creation, and recreation, modification and
transformation, of culture. They tend to presume that a cultural logic can be
read off from the analysis of industrial logic; to presume a homogeneity of
culture which is often more an expression of their own homogenising theories;
and they generally fail to acknowledge that culture is plural, that cultures are
the products of individual and collective actions, more or less distinctive, more
or less authentic, more or less removed from the tentacles of the cultural
industry.