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Mass Mentality, Culture Industry, Fascism

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Mass Mentality, Culture Industry, Fascism KRITIKE VOLUME TWO NUMBER ONE (JUNE 2008) 79-94 Article Mass Mentality, Culture Industry, Fascism Saladdin Said Ahmed ome fashionable leftist movements and populist intellectuals habitually blame the sources of information for public ignorance about the S miserable state of the world. It could be argued, however, that the masses are ignorant because they prefer ignorance. A mass individual is politically apathetic and intellectually lazy. As a result, even when huge amounts of information are available, which is the case in this epoch, the masses insist on choosing ignorance. It is true that there is not enough information about what has happened in a place such as Darfur, but the masses choose not to access even the amount of information that is available. The great majority of people in China, Iran, and America, despite the fact that they have varying amounts of access to various types of “knowledge,” still tend to be misinformed. It seems that a mass individual is curious only about what directly affects his/her own personal life. I will explore the connection between mass mentality and the culture industry in order to capture the essential role of the former in the latter. I will also argue that a mass individual is the source of fascism although fascism as a phenomenon needs a mass culture in which to flourish. Culture Industry and Mass Mentality According to Adorno, the “industry” in the “culture industry” should not be taken literally. The term refers more to the standardization and techniques of distribution than to the process of production and actual creation.1 However, he seems to focus more on the manipulative character of culture industry as a system run by dominant groups. In fact, he says, “the culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers from above.”2 He rejects the idea that masses are the only source of mass culture and that is why the term “culture industry” is so crucial for him.3 This common interpretation of culture industry has been taken too far. This interpretation of the culture industry has become more like a kind of conspiracy theory that claims the masses as victims of a minority that dominates them from above through 1 Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge, 2001), 96. 2 Ibid., 98. 3 Ibid., 98. © 2008 Saladdin Said Ahmed http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_3/ahmed_june2008.pdf ISSN 1908-7330 80 MASS MENTALITY controlling the media and monopolizing all other canals of mass culture and ideology. Adorno himself is aware of this possible misunderstanding. For example, he and Horkheimer state, “the mentality of the public, which allegedly and actually favors the system of culture industry, is a part of the system not an excuse for it.”4 Culture is an embodiment of mentality in its collective form. It cannot simply be a product created by elites. Dominant groups can modify elements of popular culture, but they cannot determine its boundaries and content because the popular mentality has its own filters and internal processes. Mass media can observe the conditions of what becomes a part of popular culture and accordingly put their own agenda to work within the culture industry, but they cannot alone be held responsible for the “production” of the culture. Mass media can make a philosopher relatively popular, but they cannot make philosophy a popular field. The mass mentality is attracted to certain things and distracted by others, and the culture industry functions accordingly. In a consumer society, happiness is sought in commodities. There is always at least one more thing claiming to bring a consumer happiness, and since, of course, this is a psychological obsession, the chain of alienations and frustrations increases continually, which makes the consumer more submissive to the addictive system of consumption. Commercials have one major message for their obsessed subjects: this new item in particular is the key to your lost happiness; this item is unlike anything we have offered you before. Commercialism and commodity fetishism turn the mass individual into an apolitical individual who serves the system of advanced capitalism even in his or her “free time”. In “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” Adorno writes, “the masses are not the measure but the ideology of the culture industry, even though the culture industry itself could scarcely exist without adapting to the masses.”5 He also says, “the entire practice of the culture industry transfers the profit motive naked onto cultural forms.”6 Culture industry makes every cultural item just another commodity that subscribes to the principles of the capitalist market. The masses play a crucial role in the system of culture industry though that role is passive. Masses are the target and medium of commercialism. They sustain the system of culture industry with their passive apolitical role just as they sustain the bigger capitalist system of domination. Masses attract more masses and are used for that purpose in the capitalist society that is shaped by the dynamics of the market. Mass culture is market-based, fetishism is its driving power, and it is a major venue for commercials that persuade the mass individual to become a submissive consumer of endless commodities. Culture industry does not have a specific agenda to stupidize the mass individual; rather, it invests in the mass individual’s fetishistic attitude towards commodities. 4 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 96. 5 Adorno, Culture Industry, 99. 6 Ibid., 98. S. AHMED 81 Most corporations have one simple ideology and that is the basic ideology of the capitalist system itself: profit. Some fundamental principles of capitalism have not changed since Marx’s time and one of them is that the source of power in a capitalist system is accumulation of capital that depends on the principle of maximizing profit. The most essential principle of any non- non-profit corporation in the “free market” system is profit, otherwise it would simply bankrupt within the bigger capitalist system. That means corporations that control the media produce what is profitable: what is popular. Of course, the wants, desires, and values are also created or fueled within the system of the industry, but again, not according to a mono-dimensional power relation, but according to hegemonic process that involves both persuasion and consent. However, it would also be foolish to dismiss the role of domination in the culture industry. Adorno writes, “the customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object.”7 The theory of culture industry came about in the first place to emphasize the fact that there is a process of domination within the process of formation of culture. However “domination” should not be reduced to a direct political notion of domination, as I will explain later. Both simple interpretations, that which sees the masses as the source of mass culture and that which sees the dominant groups as the source of mass culture, are equally inaccurate. The relation between the mass mentality and the process of culture industry is a dialectical one. The culture industry is not a simple relation between manufacturers and consumers or between the dominant and the dominated. Rather, there is a two-fold relationship between culture as a monopoly and popular mentality within the system of the culture industry. In Adorno’s words, “the culture industry misuses its concern for the masses in order to duplicate, reinforce and strengthen their mentality, which it presumes is given and unchangeable.”8 Thus, culture circulates between masses and the dominant forces. It is more accurate to say that the mass mentality and dominant groups are the two folds of the culture industry. This discussion will become clearer when I look at popular culture later on in this essay. The question of domination, as Foucault would say, should be analyzed in its socio-historical context rather than in terms of the simple political domination of some class or group over another. Truth or knowledge itself is a matter of industry. We learn from Foucault’s genealogy that the question of domination cannot be interpreted in isolation from the question of knowledge and neither of them can be interpreted in isolation of the history of the subject. However, once we step into the realm of the masses, as opposed to individual subjects, the chain of the concepts will shift. With masses, “power” takes the form of fascism and “knowledge” takes the form of culture. 7 Ibid., 99. 8 Ibid. 82 MASS MENTALITY If Foucault’s arguments regarding, “power and knowledge directly imply each other,”9 are sound, then fascism and culture also always imply each other. There is more than one way to show this dialectical relation between culture and fascism from the point of view of critical theory. Horkheimer and Adorno assert the Freudian hypothesis that explains material production in terms of the fear from the outside. In this sense, “terror and civilization are inseparable.”10 A human being develops his or her individual defense system in response to the external resentence represented by every power figure. The collective outcome of this socio-psychological fire is what bakes culture over the course of history. In Horkheimer and Adorno’s words, “Culture has evolved under the shadow of the executioner.”11 They continue, “One cannot abolish terror and retain
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