culture industry on steroids

It would seem that contrary to popular belief that the chapter on the culture industry in Dialectics of enlightenment is too pessimistic - a symptom of a fundamental misunderstanding not only of the work, but philosophy in general - it was not pessimistic enough, as the contemporary fusion of culture and advertising demonstrates. Two cases in Slovenia are symptomatic. A few months ago a mobile phone network operating company (Mobitel) sponsored the broadcasting of a "concert" by the Gorillaz free of charge. As I am writing this post billboards are being covered with advertisements for a concert of the Killers, brought to us by the same company. The deal is this: if you subscribe to a specific price plan the company has to offer, you get the tickets free of charge. Horkheimer and Adorno had much to say about a culture industry that sells mass-produced products, aimed at eliciting prestandardised psychological responses from target audiences, thereby mimicking the productive process culture was meant to transcend. These recent developments are at once in continuity with the logic of the culture industry and an intensification of the tendencies Horkheimer and Adorno extrapolated. We are witnessing the cultural artefact becoming even more degraded, no longer does it even aim to achieve some standardised psychological response, like identification with a hero or heroine and their plight, but is merely a sideshow. The function of the cultural artefact in such a situation is not to be a product that is consumed for its own sake, but as advertising. Culture, in such instances, has truly become what Horkheimer and Adorno accused it to be: mere propaganda.

Practical mediation

In his first thesis on Feuerbach Marx charted out the plan for a theory of mediation that would find its full development only in Adorno's idea of negative dialectics. The first thesis reads:

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.

According to Marx idealism develops the active side, that is the synthesising activity of the subject, but frames it abstractly. Kant's transcendental subject has to be abstracted from any empirical detetrminants if Kant's aim was to be achieved, the aim to save objectivity through the workings of the subject. If this subject was to be a historical subject its categories and contemplative forms (Anschaungsformen) could not claim objectivity, hence the possibility of synthetic judgements a priori (that is judgements that are not tautological, but still have validity independent of any and all empirical reality), that Kant aims to prove in the Critique of pure reason, would not exist. Marx has shown us the flaws of an abstract idea of mediation of the object through the subject, as is present in Kant as well as Hegel. The popular slogan of Marx merely inverting Hegel is ridiculous because it misses this fundamental point. Marx did not just turn Hegel on his head, but has discovered history proper, discovered that all knowledge is not mediated through an abstract subject, but through its empirical historical manifestation. This actually existing individual relates to the world through social labour, hence mediation must be thought of as an inherently practical activity.

Dialectics of public opinion

In 1991 the translation of Habermas' Structural transformations introduced a term that became immensely popular, that of the public sphere. Critics pointed out that Habermas missed some rather obvious historical facts, namely exclusion of a large majority from political opinion forming processes and the embeddedness of communicative exchanges in relationships of power. This critique is at once correct and misses the point completely. Habermas was very much aware of exclusion, but argued - rather awkwardly - that the interests of the bourgeoisie coincided with the universal interest to such a degree that the identification of bourgeois reason with reason as such was feasible. Later this aporia was formulated more explicity with a resurrection of Kant's regulative ideal in the form of the "ideal speech situation" that is a purely communicative situation in which the speakers do not act instrumentally but communicatively, that is with the sole aim of establishing common understanding. As with Kant autonomy and freedom this regulative ideal is a curious chimeric creature. While both Kant and Habermas nominally treat it as pure counterfacticity, that is as something that is not empirically realised nor realisable, they use it as a supposition, that is as something empirically existing. Habermas tries to save the normative potential of public opinion by sundering it from its flawed manifestation in empirical reality. This path was left opened by his critics that were not radical enough in their critique, they questioned the historical accuracy of Habermas' account but did not go on to show how the negative side of public opinion - power, exclusion, dominance - is a constitutive moment of the phenomenon. What we are left with as a result is a sterile theory of public opinion - sterile, because it proceeds abstractely, not from actually existing individuals, to borrow a phrase from Marx - and an thoughtless praxis of public opinion polling that simply - as elisabeth Noelle-Neumann has done - denounces the normative ideal of public opinion because it does not correspond to empirical reality. What is needed is an immanent critique which would not abstract away the empirical foundation of opinion, but would keep the idea of public opinion it to its word, that is develop dialectically the tension between its pretense to rationality and its constitutive irrationality.

Ontology and dialectics

The crucial difference between Heidegger and Adorno, or between affirmative and critical thinking, is that the former hypostizes Being while the latter sees it dialectically as mediated through empirical being, or as a note Adorno wrote in the last year of his life reads: "There is no transcendence without that which is transcended."

Empty signifier(s)

Building on structuralist theories of language Laclau wants to convince us that in language there exist "empty signifiers". These are not signifiers without signifieds, which would not be signifiers at all, but signifiers which signify the constitutive impossibility of signifying. If - so Laclau argues - all identities in language are differential identities then the signifying of the borders of signifying would imply a distinction between language and non-language, would become another distinction and therefore part of language. But, as Hegel noted, to think the borders of a phenomenon is to go beyond these borders - and the signifying of the borders of language is therefore a signifying beyond the field of language - so there is an inherent impossibility of closure of language as a system, which is expressed in empty signifiers. There are a couple problems with such a formulation. First of all Saussure never claimed that all of language is based on purely differential identity, merely the signifier (the only identity the word "dog" has is that it is neither "god" nor "hog" nor "drag" nor "empiricism" ...) and even in this form the argument is problematic, as Plato had already shown in Kratylos (and as Poe demonstrated in the onomatopoeic lines: "A silken, sad uncertain rustling"). To top it of Saussure's "la langue" is an abstraction, a system of language that the linguist constructs, not an empirically existing system. It is already a concept, abstracted from the origins of language in mimesis (that the Greek alphabet was in its most archaic form mimetic bears testimony to that, so do the many instances of hieroglyphic writing). If there is an inherent impossibility of signifying to fully constitute itself, it is an impossibility the linguist, not the speaker faces. To add to the confusion Laclau has been unable to give a satisfactory example of an empty signifier. His examples include "emancipation" and "democracy", but these are merely contested and ambiguous concepts, they are by far not "empty".

The solution of the riddle of the empty signifier is provided by Adorno. In his lectures on Ontology and dialectics he also comes upon the inherent impossibility of signifying. But for him it is not a problem of the linguist, he sees this inherent impossibility in the fact that the concept, which is an abstraction, can never fully grasp, can never fully represent, or signify, its object. In Kant this impossibility is pushed aside in the idea of the infinitely heterogeneous "Ding an sich" - and the price he has to pay is that the object and the subject are radically sundered, objects becoming merely the infinitely malleable raw material for mind to work with - Hegel on the other hand relegates the problem to totality. But it was Heidegger who tried to solve the problem with reference to an empty signifier. As Adorno argues in his lectures, the concept of Being is at once the ultimate concept, aiming to signify everything - nuomena as well as phaenomena - thereby erasing the distance between concept and object, but at the same time it is the ultimate anti-concept, beacause as the highest form of abstraction it is the least able to signify anything particular. The concept of being is the empty signifier. Laclau erroneously talks about empty signifiers in the plural and he has an instinctive understanding of the matter, because the examples he gives are very much abstract. What he fails to see is that his examples represent only a move toward the empty signifier, the signifier signifying the limits of signification, which is to be found only at the highest level of abstraction in the concept of Being as Heidegger formulated it. But the limits of signification are not inherent to language as a sytem, they spring from the relationship between subject and object (Laclau's philosophy knows neither), the grinding of mind on matter, which it can never fully grasp. It is no wonder then that Laclau in a lecture he had on Saturday here in Ljubljana, tried to erase both nuomena and the Frankfurt school from the history of modern philosophy.

Mein Kampf

One of the most destructive myths of the twentieth century is the one about Hitler's pathological personality. There is an almost unanimous consensus that the man was a monster, less human than any other historical persona, save only perhaps count Dracula, who had to relinquish his real existence to be fully incorporated into myth. Hitler remains firmly rooted in both myth and history and that is no coincidence. That the myth of his personal monstrosity is probably correct does not render it less problematic. It is the apology of society which refuses to acknowledge its own monstrosity. Hitler erroneously called the untrue society by its true name. The myth of Hitler today is merely an inversion of his personality cult, an explanation of totality via the particular, when in fact fascism was the manifestation of radical subordination of the particular under totality. It is the form that makes the true myth a lie. Adorno made a similar point in Minima Moralia 94 - Staatsaktion:

[Drama] interprets the seizing of power by the most powerful harmlessly as machination of rackets outside of society, not as the self-realization of society by itself.

Marx and natural science

When Immanuel Wallerstein gave a talk titled "The heritage of sociology. The promise of social sciences," he identified six "challenges" to the traditional thinking of the social sciences. The fourth of them, so Wallerstein, stems from the natural sciences, specifically from the chemist Ilya Prigogine, who claimed that Newtonian physics had a limited applicability, it was applicable only to integrable systems, which are an exception among existing systems. In The end of certainty Prigogine claimed that most systems include "deterministic processes (between bifurcations) as well as probabilistic systems (in the choice of branches)".

What does this imply for one of the central postulates of Marxism, namely that "all of history is the history of class struggle." At first glance this would imply a completely deterministic social system, functioning according to objective laws. A second glance, especially one informed by the aforementioned "challenge", helps us to interpret Marx in a more productive way. If we were to accept that all history is the product of the dialectics between relationships and means of production, what would that imply for Marx' own intervention? Would it not mean that it was according to its own postulates futile, a mere reflection of the real base of society, which itself functions according to its inherent internal laws, unperturbed by the phantoms spooking the superstructure? Marx was of course not so naive to blindly saw off the branch he was sitting on, his intention was far more ambitious: the whole tree had to go, because it is - if we paraphrase Hölderlin - obscuring the young blossoming life underneath. The distinction between deterministic and probabilistic systems can help us to distinguish two types of history. One is the history of "business as usual", when a certain mode of production is dominant and a ruling class successfully maintains its hegemony. These stages of history can be analysed with a reference to the laws of class struggle. These are the stages between bifurcations. But there are also points when deterministic laws are not applicable, these are the moments of revolutions. The outcomes of revolutions are not arbitrary, or as Marx put it at the beginning of the Eighteenth brumaire: "People make their own history, but they do not make it as they please, not under self-selected circumstances, but under found, given and inherited circumstances." The important point though is that people do make their own history, that is, the outcome of revolutionary upheavals is not determined by the laws of history. Adorno seized upon the implications of this fact in Minima Moralia 100 - Sur l'eau: "As the inevitable question [of how an emancipated society would look like] is illegitimate, so is the answer inevitably repulsive and arrogant". The question is illegitimate precisely because the outcome of revolutionary upheavals is not determined, but springs from freedom. This freedom at once implies that the choice for a return to slavery is always a viable outcome of emancipation. A determined emancipation is no emancipation at all.