Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

64
Chapter 4 Marxisms
it constituted another dimension of reality. This liquidation of two-dimensional
culture takes place not through the denial and rejection of the ‘cultural values’, but
through their wholesale incorporation into the established order, through their
reproduction and display on a massive scale (Marcuse, 1968a: 58).
Therefore, the better future promised by ‘authentic’ culture is no longer in contradiction
with the unhappy present – a spur to make the better future; culture now
confirms that this is the better future – here and now – the only better future. It offers
‘fulfilment’ instead of the promotion of ‘desire’. Marcuse holds to the hope that the
‘most advanced images and positions’ of ‘authentic’ culture may still resist ‘absorption’
and ‘continue to haunt the consciousness with the possibility of their rebirth’ in a
better tomorrow (60). He also hopes that one day those on the margins of society, ‘the
outcasts and outsiders’ (61), who are out of reach of the full grasp of the culture industry,
will undo the defeats, fulfil the hopes, and make capitalism keep all its promises in
a world beyond capitalism. Or, as Horkheimer (1978) observes,
One day we may learn that in the depths of their hearts, the masses . . . secretly
knew the truth and disbelieved the lie, like catatonic patients who make known
only at the end of their trance that nothing had escaped them. Therefore it may not
be entirely senseless to continue speaking a language that is not easily understood
(17).
But, as Adorno (1991b) points out, mass culture is a difficult system to challenge:
Today anyone who is incapable of talking in the prescribed fashion, that is of
effortlessly reproducing the formulas, conventions and judgments of mass culture
as if they were his own, is threatened in his very existence, suspected of being an
idiot or an intellectual (79).
The culture industry, in its search for profits and cultural homogeneity, deprives
‘authentic’ culture of its critical function, its mode of negation – ‘[its] Great Refusal’
(Marcuse, 1968a: 63). Commodification (sometimes understood by other critics as
‘commercialization’) devalues ‘authentic’ culture, making it too accessible by turning it
into yet another saleable commodity.
The neo-conservative critics of leftist critics of mass culture ridicule the protest
against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley
and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition
of the fact that the classics have left the mausoleum and come to life again,
that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics,
they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic
force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth. The intent
and function of these works have thus fundamentally changed. If they once stood
in contradiction to the status quo, this contradiction is now flattened out (63–4).