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The Culture Industry

The Culture Industry. Globalisation, Culture and Lifestyle Lecture IX Daniel Turner and Jenny Flinn. Conceptualising cultural production and consumption. Globalisation creates a multitude of choices ... or... Postmodernism leads to freedom of identity construction... or

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The Culture Industry

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  1. The Culture Industry Globalisation, Culture and Lifestyle Lecture IXDaniel Turner and Jenny Flinn

  2. Conceptualising cultural production and consumption • Globalisation creates a multitude of choices... or... • Postmodernism leads to freedom of identity construction... or • Globalisation creates a homogenisation of culture... or • Post-Fordist means of production creates an illusion of choice in a world of limited freedom designed to deliver profit. • The Culture Industry: Capitalism uses culture as a means of propagating the social systems necessary for its continued operation and controlling the masses.

  3. The Frankfurt School • Institute for Social Research • Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse • Research as means of assisting in the emancipation of the masses. • Neo-Marxism – more than just economics • Culture hides behind the message that it is organised around the motives of business (Miles, 2001) • To organise you at the moment when you think you are free (Rojek, 1995)

  4. ‘Culture’ • Culture: ‘that which goes beyond the system of self-preservation of the species’ (Adorno, 1978:100) • Culture is inherently creative and free from value and ideology – so potentially the means through which revolution is delivered (O’Neil) • However – culture is the victim of an act of calculation which turns it into a tool of capitalism.

  5. Culture as deception and indoctrination • Culture industry breeds complacency and hegemony • Culture contains repeated messages to reinforce the status quo • “Pseudo-praxis” – explicit conservative and patriotic values inherent in culture. • “as soon as the film begins, it is quite how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished, or forgotten. In light music, once the trained ear has heard the first notes of the hit song, it can guess what is coming and feel flattered when it does come” (Adorno, 1991:125) • The imagery of freedom – the sporting star / celebrity (Giulianotti) • Predictability and spectacle to create cultural dupes. • The ‘One-Dimensional Man’ (Marcuse, 1964)

  6. Criticisms of Critical Theory • Hebdige – cultural dupes is naive • Bernstein – too crass and all consuming • Miles – massively elitest • Lyotard- nothing but Modernist

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