Proletarian music

To continue the cultural theme taken up in the last post (for Adorno philosophy - or theory - and art were both part of "culture", the defining characteristic of which is the freedom from immediate pressures of utility - or social praxis, to use Adorno's terminology). In On the social situation of music Adorno wrote:

The immanent-aesthetic results of bourgeois history, including that of the last fifty years, cannot simply be brushed aside by the proletarian theory and praxis of art, unless the desire is to eternalize a condition in art produced by class domination. The elimination of this condition within society is, after all, the fixed goal of the proletarian class struggle.

The attentive reader will surely hear the reverberations with my writing on the European public sphere and I will not insult her intellect by explicitly stating them. The object of my scorn in this specific post will rather be cultural studies. I am not quite sure what to even call them, it is hard to imagine them as a discipline or even field, since they have neither a specific object nor method of enquiry. John Storey in his introduction to Cultural theory and popular culture defines their object as culture understood as the way of life of a given community - but that is already the object of anthropology. The methods cultural studies employ also show an elective affinity with anthropology when methods developed by sociology are not far more advanced. In the end cultural studies have managed to produce an astounding amount of purely descriptive work, lacking both the methodological rigour of positivism and theoretical rigour of speculative approaches like critical theory.

With a look to Adorno the hidden conservative bias in cultural studies, especially when treating the output of the culture industry, comes to light. The way they treat it is in accord with the way the positivist Lazarsfeld chose to research it in the Princeton radio research project - taking the output of the culture industry as a given and researching the reception side as a variable, ignoring how reception is shaped both by the social totality of capitalism of which the culture industry is an integral part and by the output of the culture industry itself (as Weber had already noted in Economy and Society, in capitalism needs are constructed by the economic system to a substantial amount). To avoid misunderstanding: this of course does not imply the distinction between "real" and "false" needs, a patently naive idea, just the fact that earlier economic systems worked with needs that were constructed outside of the economic system, while the capitalist economic system takes an active role in influencing and constructing needs. Adorno's point was that the fact that people consume products of the culture industry and derive meaning and a sense of enjoyment from them is not an argument for the culture industry, because both it and the tastes it caters to are part of the "untrue" society.

If we now look at the quote from Adorno, we can see that cultural studies stops short even of the position Adorno criticized, namely that bourgeois art is to be counterbalanced with proletarian art. Adorno here takes up an orthodoxly Marxist (and, seemingly paradoxically, orthodoxly bourgeois) standpoint - namely that emancipation can only be universal: for Marx the grand historical role of the proletariat was not that it would itself become a ruling class but that it would make class rule history along with classes themselves. For Adorno the promise of universality in bourgeois art is to be taken seriously, not dismissed as pure ideology in the face of the actual exclusivity of bourgeois culture. The reception fetishism - and fetishism here is to be read in its Marxist sense - of cultural studies has made even a proletarian counterbalancing of bourgeois culture obsolete. And this has happened not by induction from empirical proof but from the very decision to hypostize the productive side and treat reception as the variable.