The culture industry and Freud

The interpretation of dreams was for Freud an important element of psychoanalysis. What Roland Barthes later claimed about art, namely that there is no "noise", was for Freud the basic premise for entering the dream world. Phenomena that were believed to be banal, arbitrary and inconsequential, like dreams or slips of the tongue, fascinated Freud; not in and of themselves but as symptoms of unconscious mental processes. What happens when we dream, according to Freud, is that some elements of our waking life (e.g. experiences, persons, events) are selected and arranged into a new whole, which is the manifest content of the dream. To the naive observer, even to the dreamers themselves, this manifest content seems chaotic and without meaning, it is all "noise". Actually it is all signal, because there is a latent structure underlying this apparent chaos: dreams fulfil repressed wishes in a symbolic manner, where elements of the manifest dream content represent objects of the wish. Because the superego censors these wishes, they can be expressed only indirectly as symbols. Freud mentions the example of a lady patient who dreamed of a friend, who had just recently married. From the context in which this person appears in the dream (the dreamer had bought some theatre tickets early and found out she could have latter bought them at a better price, like her friend did), Freud interprets the friend to represent a repressed regret of the patient: she had gotten married too early. If she had just waited, she could have snatched a better husband.

Perhaps you are expecting that I will now furnish examples of how products of the culture industry cater to these repressed desires, reducing art to a sort of phantasmal wanking off, perhaps explaining how Popeye represents repressed aggression towards sexual competitors (Bluto always behaves in a manner that legitimises aggression, circumventing the cultural taboo and enabling the male audience to live out their aggression in a way that is not sanctioned by the superego):



What I am more interested in are the changes the models of the culture industry are going through. Surely Freud's analysis of how suppressed desires are being satisfied through art is correct enough. But at the same time it fails to grasp the truth of the phenomenon. One part of that is the new guise Hollywood has given standard formats. Advertising nowadays likes to tell us that a picture is "epic" and I guess this is meant as praise. The funny part is that advertising is telling the pure and simple truth here (it rarely tells outright lies, but it tends toward using hyperboles lavishly). Motion pictures today might most adequately be described as "epic", a few recent examples:

Ninja assassin:


The road:


2012


Sherlock Holmes (a bastard child of James Bond and Night of the living dead)


The perplexing thing is that epic forms abound today, when none of the social circumstances that gave them meaning in antiquity are present. In Greece for example the epic form developed under the auspices of warlords, it was a sort of propaganda for their great deeds (mostly consisting of murder, rape and plundering). The warrior hero ethics were also a way of promoting enlistment, recruiting soldiers who would willingly give up their lives in battle ("May you live forever" was one of the most insulting things you could say to a man in Sparta). When the merchant class gained power in city states like Athens, culture was becoming more refined, focusing on feeling and creativity, largely abandoning the heroic epos of yore.

What, then, is the charm contemporary epos exhibits over contemporary audiences? Surely the events portrayed are utterly alien to their lives and their perception of themselves. In complex societies, one can hardly imagine oneself as a heroic figure, which is able to change the course of the world with its solitary actions. One is rather embedded in the many subsystems of society, which mediate our actions and make it nearly impossible to gauge their final consequences: we are told that buying a more efficient vehicle will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, that our contribution to a charity will benefit some village in Africa, that responsible consumption habits can contribute to a more humane economy, that our vote counts, but the effectiveness - even the meaningfulness - of our actions remains utterly opaque to us.

Whose story is the contemporary epos telling? If the answer can not be found on the side of the users, it must be on the side of the producers. Yet what aim could the producers be following in serving audiences contents they can not meaningfully relate to? Is there a secret plot to militarise our societies with Hollywood as the vanguard (the epos of the Third Reich comes to mind)? It would seem that art should be distinguished from dreams (a distinction Freud never made) in that its manifest content is determined by two layers of latent factors. If we only focus on the psyche of producers and recipients, we are unable to achieve insight into the workings of the culture industry. The second layer of latent factors is the economic system. The products of the culture industry are exactly that, namely products. Individual desires are an important determining factor in the production process since they determine use value, as Marx called it, without which exchange value could not exist. Yet individual desires are qualitatively transformed once they become an impetus for consumption. They become a variable in the equation of profitability and in this sphere achieve a striking independence from the minds of individuals that gave birth to them.

Karl Marx painted a picture of the world in which the living individual is passive, while dead labour (capital) is active, determining the life of society. The hero of contemporary epos is none other than capital itself, an exquisite parody of the dialectics of spirit, as told by Hegel (history does have a talent for parodying Hegel, does it not?). Producers are merely following through the logic of the market: since substantive innovation is too risky a business the culture industry exhibits a tendency to follow certain proven stereotypes (today's plots basically repeat those from the 1920s, albeit in a more sophisticated manner) - with stereotypical cultural formats the investors can anticipate future profits, and advertisers know what type of audience to expect (by the way, do you really believe MPAA ratings were instituted to protect children?). Innovation in Hollywood is rather showcasing the sheer might of productive forces: grandiose special effects are the main difference between the pictures of today and those 50 years ago. The grandiose Mannerist style of Hollywood is not a fad, the epos is not a symptom of nostalgia: it is the ideology of capital, told by capital itself.

The unease, which the first Terminator movie is still able to cause, stems from the melting away of borders between humanity and its productive forces and the - not at all imaginary - feeling that the unleashed productive forces have grown far beyond our control. The terminator is the best metaphor for the culture industry of today: a machine, masquerading as a human. The Academy awards its Oscars to outstanding individuals. Truth be told, the true recipient is never on the stage of that festive event.