CONTRADICTION, CRITIQUE, AND DIALECTIC IN ADORNO A ...

In this situation, autonomous ego-control becomes impossible. Mass culture takes over
the roles of ego and super-ego and makes the instincts of the id more compliant than the
internalized authority ever could, for the internalized authority at least remained in
unresolved tension with the unconscious. 118 Without the conflict of drives that results
from internalization, the social apparatus reaches the individual’s unconscious directly,
through mechanisms such as popular entertainment, the mass media, and
advertisement. 119 The result is the reduction of the individual to a mere consumer. The
118 See Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung, in Max Horkheimer: Gesammelte
Schriften, Vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997), 234:
Was der Einzelne jeweils tun soll, braucht er sich nicht erst mehr in einer schmerzhaften inneren
Dialektik von Gewissen, Selbsterhaltung und Trieben abzuringen. Für den Menschen als
Erwerbstätigen wird durch die Hierarchie der Verbände bis hinauf zur nationalen Verwaltung
etschieden, in der Privatsphäre durchs Schema der Massenkultur, das noch die letzten inwendigen
Regungen ihrer Zwangskonsumenten in Beschlag nimmt. Als Ich und Über-Ich fungieren die
Gremien und Stars, und die Massen, selbst des Scheins der Persönlichkeit entäußert, formen sich
viel reibungsloser nach den Losungen und Modellen, als je die Instinkte nach der inneren Zensur.
English translation (mine):
The individual no longer needs to wrest a decision of what he or she should do from an initial
painful inner dialectic between conscience, self-preservation, and drives. For the human being as
wage earner, the decision is made by a hierarchy extending from trade unions to the national
administration; in the private sphere it is made by the schema of mass culture, which monopolizes
even the innermost stirrings of its coerced consumers. The committees and stars function as ego
and super-ego, and the masses, divested of even the appearance of personality, are molded more
smoothly [frictionlessly] by the slogans and models than the instincts ever were by the internal
censor.
119 Although Adorno’s psychoanalytic model is problematic, his point that modern social pressures
affect the unconscious directly and bypass mediation by the conscious ego is worth attention. The
contemporary American is, according to various sources, exposed to an average of 3,000 advertisement
images per day. (The most conservative estimates place the number between 500 and 1,000, but they
usually count only advertisement images to which the consumer does or could pay conscious attention.)
Clearly, the sheer number of images makes it impossible consciously to decide how they affect the
consumer’s thoughts and behavior. In fact, the multi-million marketing industry openly invests in
psychological research aimed at developing strategies that target individuals below the level of active
conscious scrutiny, for instance by fostering the association of a specific emotional reaction with a specific
product through contiguous presentation of images that evoke the reaction and the name brand for the
product, or even, more insidiously, through the use of subliminal stimuli.
113