Lowenthal’s study “Historical
Perspectives on Popular Culture” brought to mind several aspects of Adorno’s
“On Popular Music” that I felt worth discussing, primarily with regards to
Lowenthal’s interest on the human need to create this ‘popular’ culture, and
how the creation of this culture problematizes the interrelationships that
exist between the individual, society (in all its forms, that is political,
economical, social, etc...) and the existence of ‘popular’ culture itself. Many
of the arguments that Lowenthal posits brought about another perspective to the
many questions that surfaced during my reading of Adorno’s seminal text.
The
first section of Lowenthal’s article consists of a collection of historical
references to popular culture as made by such philosophers as Nietzsche, Karl
Kraus, Pascal and Montaigne, especially with regards to the differing views on
leisure that these different thinkers held, and how these perspectives related
to Adorno’s mention of pleasure and leisure that surface in many of his
writings. In “The Culture Industry”, Adorno asserts that “pleasure always means
not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown.” With
this statement, Adorno seems to be arguing that with pleasure and leisure comes
the danger of ignorance as to the present state of the world around the
individual. In the opening paragraphs of “Historical Perspectives,” Lowenthal
seems to be making the claim that the ‘birth’ of popular culture, so to speak,
was the result of a collective desire on the part of most individuals to feel
part of something bigger, outside the monotony, stress, and boredom of their
daily existences. I found it interesting that even such thinkers as Montaigne
and Pascal were aware of the implications of ‘popular’ culture, even at a time
before effective mass media technologies such as radio and internet had been
established.
In
regards to this idea of the birth of ‘popular’ culture as stemming from the
individual’s desire to feel included in a larger, collective society, a series
of questions regarding the inextricable relationship that appears to exist
behind the idea of who creates who, and what drives what in the world of
popular culture immediately came to mind. That is, are individuals the product
of what they see and “digest” through ‘popular’ culture, or do individuals
actually have more control over what puts the ‘popular’ in popular culture.
This question, I suppose, takes on a bit of that age-old “What comes first, the
chicken or the egg?” quality, which in turn, caused me to question Adorno’s
notion of pseudo-individualization
and at what point this pseudo-individualization
begins to take form. Does the individual ever have the opportunity to drive
‘popular’ culture, or are they always at the mercy of the culture industry? One
of the facts that both Adorno and Lowenthal seem to have overlooked is that
this ‘popular’ culture machine is made up of a series of human cogs that keep
it functioning. What role--or perhaps, more importantly, what
responsibilities--do the individuals that work in this industry have in the
creation and dissemination of a unifying ‘popular’ culture? One of the truly
interesting points made by Lowenthal in the article had to do with his mention
of the Austrian critic Karl Kraus’s theory on language and its role in this
interrelationship between the individual and society. In one of his works,
Kraus states that “the hollowing-out of language that we can see is the
disintegration, and even the disappearance, of the concept and existence of the
autonomous individual, of the personality in its classic sense” (Lowenthal,
Page 11). Despite the fact that for Kraus, the emergence of language
automatically precludes the formation of an autonomous self, it brings up the
interesting dilemma that appears to exist side-by-side with the power of
‘popular’ culture. Humans appear to be a grand paradox in and of themselves in
this sense. We favor individuality (especially in the West), yet the very fact
that we seek relationships and inclusion into a greater community (made
possible through the development of language) seems to force us to give up, to
an extent, our full individual autonomy. Adorno’s idea of pseudo-individualization comes into power here in that it appears
to respond to the classic dissonance that pervades the human psyche--that
desire to remain part of a collective group, to fit into that collective group
(something made possible by the fabrication of a ‘popular’ culture which
creates that space by which individuals can find inclusion into these groups) while
still holding on to that desire to maintain a certain sense of an individuality
unfettered by the machinations of a mass, ‘popular’ culture.
