Exam 3 Response for PHL4020 Continental Philosophy, taught by Dr. Donovan Miyosaki
Exam 3 Response for PHL4020 Continental Philosophy, taught by Dr. Donovan Miyosaki
Andrew Correll
April 27th, 2020
1A.
Everyone knows someone who watches T.V. too much, but Adorno and Horkheimer explain why this is problematic. The culture industry works with the labor system to mass-produce content which creates ideological domination through normalization and conditioning.
Capitalism relies on mass-producing technology to try and make people’s lives more comfortable and efficient. However, Adorno and Horkheimer (A&H) think this “technology acquires power over society” (121)1 when, for example, we crave the new iPhone despite our old one working perfectly and when “older houses…demand to be discarded after a short while like empty food cans” (120). This behavioral and ideological power is why A&H claim a “technological rationale…is the rationale of domination itself” (121), and a similar mindset is created by the culture industry when people feel compelled to go see the latest Star Wars movie, for example.
People buying “identical goods,” like renting the same hit movie, only ostensibly means there were “identical needs” the culture industry was listening to during production (121). With the advent of “advertising in the culture industry” (167), “consumers feel compelled to buy” (167) because of “a manufactured need” (137). A&H pessimistically doubt if “standards [are] based in the first place on consumers’ needs” (121). The genius of McDonald’s is that the company uses commercials to make someone want the minty goodness of a Shamrock Shake who previously wouldn’t think of drinking something foamy and green. Here the viewer is
conforming to “the hierarchical range of mass-produced products” because of advertising which convinces him to “choose the category of mass product turned out for his type” (123). In other words, since “mechanization…so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods” (137), then at some point “the diner must be satisfied with the menu” (139) given by the culture industry as it is impractical to make a shake flavor or movie for the unique interests of every person on earth.
Since cultural goods like movies can be expensive to produce, “culture monopolies” (122) form. This centralization of advertising producers leads to normalization that affects people’s very individuality. A&H write that “pseudo-individuality is rife” in a culture where people express their unique personhood by “choos[ing] the category of mass product” (154). Clothing companies use “plus-size” models so that a literally expanding population can see potential clothing purchases as things in line with their identity. Few think about how ten other people in the world may be wearing that same trending Nike tennis skirt, which suggests this is a “false identity” rather than truly an expression of individuality (120).
However, a critic might argue that in a global “Amazon.com” economy the number of producers increases exponentially and thereby people have essentially all the choice they would ever want in their products—and are thus free to express their individuality. In response, A&H would reference how the deeply-established car and movie industries make products nearly “uniform as a whole and in every part” (120), citing how “the difference between the Chrysler range and General Motors products” or “Warner Brothers and Metro Goldwyn Mayer” movies “is basically illusory” (123). To support the disconnect between actual desires and cultural
products, why do I scroll through Netflix for minutes on end before finding something I just halfway want to watch when there are seemingly thousands of movies and shows? Autonomous choice at all can be called into question when companies like Netflix display content based on constructed (and necessarily inaccurate) ideas about “consumers [who] appear as statistics on…charts…[in] red, green, and blue areas” (123). Through the mere exposure effect in psychology, where the more you are exposed the more you like the concept, then it seems like “the lives…of every single person are transformed by the power of the generality” (154).
A&H may be most concerned with the mutually beneficial dynamic between the culture industry and the capitalistic labor system at large. “Films, radio and magazines make up a system” (120) which creates content that resembles mind-numbing factory labor in how “no independent thinking is expected from the audience” (137). This is because people just try “to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with” the brutal “mechanized work process” (137). Even the few hours in the evening you get to relax has an indirect goal associated with capitalist labor—to rest up for mind-numbing and backbreaking work—so “mechanization has…power over a man’s leisure and happiness” (137). The capitalist labor system creates tired people that the culture industry entertains and conditions with cultural products that “must not demand any effort” (137) so they can go back to their work to get tired again.
Furthermore, the culture industry gives people practice at being mindless in their off-hours so they can be mindless at work, and through mere exposure entertainment sends messages that indoctrinate people to put up with this system. It makes content that “hammer[s] into every brain the old lesson that…the breaking down of all resistance…is the condition of life in this society” (138). Daffy Duck gets a “thrashing” on the screen “so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment” (138). In addition to training people to be okay with difficult working conditions, the culture industry also trains people to get used to the withholding of actual happiness on a general basis. With so much consumption of fictional material on screen or paper, people become used to having fictional dreams in life. Movies show “brilliant names and images” to the burned-out worker so that when the credits roll and they realize it was all “spectacle…[and] illusory” they are more used to the “depressing everyday world” where this happens all the time (139).
Through normalization and conditioning, the culture industry creates power by mass-producing content which is complementary to the capitalist labor system. “Netflix and chill” might be more sinister than you thought.
2B.
More say in things is always better, right? The democratic argument says “nobody…is in possession of the truth and capable of defining what is right and wrong” (41).2 This is a popular view among people who want to uphold the freedom democratic ideals espouse and who want to justify how “options must be submitted to ‘the people’” (41). However, Marcuse makes the distinction that this democratic way of thinking is really desiring “tolerance [as] an end,” namely the “elimination of violence, and the reduction of suppression” (23). Marcuse says these idealists often let their end goal influence the means through which they try and achieve the goal, as they “refrain…from taking sides” (36) in a counterproductive passive or active tolerance.
The problem with this passive tolerance as a means is that it allows “the preservation of the status quo” (34) even if “[its] damaging effect on man and nature is evident” (35). While it may sound counterintuitive that increasing the number of viewpoints can actually lead to suppression, Marcuse thinks the process of passively and neutrally examining the options makes you oblivious to underlying problems and hidden intolerance. Marcuse thinks “the issue [is] only the degree and extent of intolerance” (36) within a society that remains covered, as even though “all points of view can be heard: the Communist and the Fascist, the Left and the Right” and so on, Marcuse thinks that “the affluent discussion prevails” (41). After all, the rich are the only ones with the money and free time to invest in and create cultural content. Since there are relatively few sources of such money, there is a “rule of monopolistic media” (42). This causes “effective dissent [to be] blocked where it could freely emerge” (42) because ideas are normalized when everyone gets similar messages. Whereas a little girl may want to play soccer, her unique desire is normalized when she learns from classic Disney movies a girl’s “proper” behavior. Also, messages “are immediately ‘evaluated’ (i.e. automatically understood) in terms of the public language” (42) to Marcuse, which “determines…the direction in which the thought process moves” (42) regardless of whether bias actually exists in the conforming messages themselves.
Active tolerance of “movements of aggression as well as…movements of peace” is another problem with the democratic argument because “rational…persuasion to the opposite is all but precluded” (42). In other words, when the suggestion of injecting disinfectant is heard by as many people as the message to stay six feet away, “the stupid opinion is treated with the same respect as the intelligent one” (41). It is simply not realistic to expect people to be “capable of defining what is right and wrong” in the first place if they are always impartial and have no practice “deliberating and choosing” (41). To add to the problem, Marcuse writes that “objectivity…tends to obliterate the difference between true and false” (43), which means our concepts become muddled with falsities when all definitions are valid so that “peace is redefined as necessarily…including preparation for war” (42). An example of this is the concept of freedom of speech becoming intertwined with vehemently calling people you have never met before “sinners” on campus.
Marcuse thinks people can “become autonomous” by “get[ting] information slanted in the opposite direction” (44), meaning that information should have an allegiance to a side. When impartiality is explicitly stated or implicitly assumed, then “the whole truth…cannot be accomplished with the established framework of abstract tolerance” (44) because people have let their guards down. Creating cultural goods that take a stance against regressive ideas accustoms people to rationally choosing a side and can help alleviate the aforementioned issues of a manipulative and monopolistic media, people not having practice at deliberating ideas, and irrational anti-thesis concepts being treated equally.
A critic might point out that often times news sources present statistics alone with no subjective remarks. This kind of reporting might solve the issue with the democratic argument by presenting information without bias. However, Marcuse, like Foucault, might respond that even much scientific information is subject to bias masquerading as impartiality. Different headlines on what is healthy to eat come out almost every other week reporting conflicting findings from nutrition studies. A scientific study funded by the “American Egg Board” in 20143 produced misleading results4 when they concluded eggs don’t increase a stroke-associated TMAO compound in the blood 12 hours after eating eggs. The slight of hand is that previous studies5 have shown the toxic chemical is indeed generated by eggs in the gut but that it is eliminated after just 4 hours—so their 12-hour test wouldn’t have showed anything. Marcuse would say the potentially manipulative design producing a favorable conclusion for the American Egg Board is a perfect example of monopolistic capitalism under the guise of impartiality. Such fraud is not the norm, but just a small amount of masquerading bias leads to many just throwing up their hands in confusion about nutrition and what is healthy to eat. The existence of such confusion supports how passive abstract tolerance can’t expose impartiality and thus “foster[s] a mental attitude…[that] tends to obliterate the difference between true and false” (43).
A critic might argue reporting purely objective stats would be as effective as Marcuse’s stance-taking counter-bias in stimulating autonomous thinking in people. Here, Marcuse might agree that reporting statistics may be effective at spurring rationality, but capitalism’s money-driven information delivery system still colors how the objective information is received. He claims that even “when a magazine prints side by side a negative and a positive report” and tries to be objective in their reporting, people are still subject to capitalism’s indoctrination as “the chances are that the positive [report] wins because the image of the institution is deeply engraved in the mind of the people” (43).
To counter, a critic might still argue a stat like “300,000 people currently have Coronavirus in New York” may be interpreted with indoctrinated bias by a small number but the vast majority would interpret it essentially free from capitalism’s influence because of its factual nature. However, A&H might point out that five minutes before the stat they would have heard news stories of people disappearing from their concerned families into hospital wards and never coming out again. A news company is inherently partial to a degree because instead of Coronavirus fallout they could have been showing videos of a similar number of people dying each day from flu or heart disease. Thus, the very term “Coronavirus” becomes inculcated with meaning by the powers that be in only a matter of months after originally having almost no relevance save as an obscure term in Virology. When pastors re-opening their churches are questioned by news reporters as to why they aren’t following CDC guidelines, there is an implied message the pastor is being reckless. This may indeed be true, but with the increase in news consumption the way news reporters and people “are no tabulae rasae” (44) becomes apparent. Interpretations of cold facts become colored, for good or bad, in a brain full of neuronal connections harboring partially biased messages. More say, especially from sources with conflicting interests, is not always better.