The Culture Industry and The Society of the Spectacle

In Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, the author discusses how culture has become commodified. In Theodor Adorno’s The Culture Industry, the author discusses how art became autonomous. In this essay, I will compare the two books and show how Debord’s theory of commodified culture and Adorno’s theory of autonomous art directly correlate with one another.
The mass production of commodities destroyed quality guidelines and broke down legal and regional barriers. Debord says, “The capitalist production system has unified space, breaking down the boundaries between one society and the next” (Debord, §165). One point Debord is making is that capitalism broke down spatial barriers.
When objects became commoditized, human circulation – or tourism – became the by-product. Debord says, “Tourism is the chance to go and see what has been made trite.” (§168) People travel to Rome to see the Coliseum, and travel to Egypt to see the Great Pyramids. These objects, reduced from historical masterpieces to the latest thing you must see before you die, fuel travel and break down geographic barriers. The distance between New York and Rome become significantly smaller. Cars did this in the United States on a smaller scale. It was easier and faster to travel farther in a car than it had been before the car was invented, making travel more accessible, and commodities more able to be made even more trite.
Another point Debord is making about mass-production of commodities is that when commodities began to be mass-produced, they lost quality standards. Back in the Middle Ages, society implemented a series of quality guidelines and standards to ensure products were made well. Products were made one by one and people wanted to make sure the items were crafted with care. When products began to be mass-produced, quality guidelines began to waiver because products were no longer made one by one, by hand. This is an effect of capitalism. The more produced a product is, the more generic its quality.
Debord also talks about how urbanization isolates people together. With the arrival of long distance mass-communication, isolation of people became very easy. People no longer had to visit the home of their friends to speak with them – they could just make a phone call and spend an hour talking with their friend, hang up, and call another friend across the country and talk with them for an hour. People began to join pseudo-communities; places like holiday camps, housing developments, and cultural centers. These pseudo-communities gave the impression that people were not isolated, but in the end everyone ended their socializing and returned home at the end of the day.
Another point Debord makes is that in the struggle between traditional and innovative, innovative always wins. Debord states, “The struggle between traditional and innovation, which is the basic principle of the internal development of the culture of historical societies, is predicated entirely on the permanent victory of innovation. (§181) When people are presented with the choice between something familiar and something new, Debord says people always pick the new choice. But cultural innovation is generated by none other than total historical movement, and when the movement becomes aware of itself, it goes beyond what culture thought it was going to.
Debord also talks about the positive significance and negative implication of the modern decomposition and destruction of all art. The positive significance is that the language of communication has been lost. The negative implication is that a common language can no longer be found in the form of conclusions that only affect one person without the other party agreeing. Just as language decomposes, so does art. Art becomes great only as real life fades away.
Baroque art was a response to a world without its center, and it led to romanticism and on to cubism, which is the negation of art. Eventually, all art becomes equal as all art loses distinction. Dadaism and surrealism are the theoretical ‘endpoint’ of art. They stand in opposition to each other but are fundamentally inadequate to deal with their self-derived questions. “For dadaism sought to abolish art without realizing it, and surrealism sought to realize art without abolishing it.” (§191) Culture is a commodity in the society of the spectacle. It has to be the ‘star commodity’ or the most important commodity. Culture will be and must be the driving force in the development of the economy. “A culture now wholly commodity was bound to become the star commodity of the society of the spectacle.” (§193) It has replaced the car and the railroad in its need to be the most important. Knowledge is used to justify a society without justification. Knowledge cannot and will not investigate its own material basis in the spectacular system. The spectacular critique, or the critique of the society of the spectacle, is part of the spectacle. Contemplation of the spectacle is submission to the spectacle. Sociology may be truly reformist, but it fails to grasp the reality beyond the empirical data. For example, waste functions as a necessary component of the spectacle, and it cannot be eliminated. A 'fair' society is past; making spectacular society fair is impossible and futile. The society of the spectacle ensures that the tendency to celebrate the current system as eternal and uncreated is realized. Adorno also discusses commodified culture.
For Adorno, commodification and autonomy stand in direct correlation. Autonomous art is art with no function in society. Autonomous artworks have social value, but no social function, much like when an object is commodified and people use it but it does not hold the same function it did before it was commodified. Music lost its direct social function with the ascendancy of bourgeois culture in the late 18th century; because aristocratic and church patronage was declining, a new version of music, a non-functional ‘art-music’ developed. No longer did music have to serve a purpose in the church or aristocracy. Music was simply music, for the enjoyment of people or otherwise. The social function of music therefore vanished. Adorno says that art became free from the church and other bindings and thus art became autonomous and commodified through entry into the capitalistic marketplace. Pre-bourgeois art had a direct social function, but this new autonomous art’s purpose is essentially to create something without purpose. Modern art is a good example of this. In the pre-bourgeois days, art had a purpose. Paintings and theater were more than just something to look at or watch. Music served a purpose in the church or in aristocratic functions. With modern art, you could have an empty room, and the ‘artistic’ point is that there’s nothing in the room. That would never have gone over in the pre-bourgeois days, back when art had a purpose and function in society. Art stopped serving a purpose. Adorno recognizes that all art has a social function in some sense though – the dialectical opposition of autonomy and commodification reflects this fact. Commodification implies an economic function – the artist acquires a means of living in exchange for their artistic labor. Particular concerts, for example, will have various social functions; the Adornian claim under consideration is that in general they have no intrinsic or direct social function of the kind that characterizes heteronomous music. Since music no longer fulfills a direct social function, Adorno says that autonomous artwork can create its own inner logic, which does not refer to anything external. In its consistency and total integration, form and content become identical; the work is its idea. In contrast, heteronomous art imitates, represents, or expresses things outside itself. So now music can be an idea in itself – it no longer must draw on an outside idea. A good example of this is current lyrical music. In lyrical music, the words can convey its own idea. Back before the time of autonomous art, music had to draw from a religious or aristocratic set of ideas. It is in autonomous art’s lack of social function that, according to Adorno, autonomous music (and art) acquire a critical function. Autonomous art could provide a critique of society and other things that heteronomous art could not. For Adorno, critique was dependent on autonomy, on the distinction between, in this case, art and social steering mechanisms or art and other forms of reason. The distinction, framed in Adorno’s work through the negative dialectic, makes it possible for art not only to be critiqued, but also to function as a critique of existing social institutions. Yet some modernist art movements, in particular the historical avantgarde, pursued a form of social criticism and aesthetic practice that specifically attacked the autonomous institution of art in bourgeois society. These movements sought to put art into life in order to effect an aesthetic transformation of everyday life. Whether through unmasking the irrationality of an overly rationalized bourgeois society or through direct involvement with either fascist politics or socialist production, the attack on aesthetic autonomy was part and parcel of a program of social transformation and critique.

Works Cited

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Brooklyn: Zone, 1994. Print.