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Seeing, Seeing, Traveling, Traveling, and and Consuming:
Consuming:
An An Introduction
Introduction
Rudy Koshar
Not long ago, the critical theory of social philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer achieved an almost canonical status in scholarly interpretations of
leisure culture in the twentieth century. “Amusement under late capitalism is the
prolongation of work,” they wrote in Dialectic of Enlightenment, published first
in Amsterdam in 1947 but then reissued more than twenty years later at the height
of the European student protest movement. 1 Leisure was an “escape from the
mechanized work process,” but it was an escape whose content and form was so
indelibly stamped by the exigencies of capitalist production that one’s “experiences
are inevitably after-images of the work process itself.” “What happens at work, in
the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in
one’s leisure time.” 2 These passages occurred in a more elaborated analysis of the
so-called “culture industry,” the name for which captured the philosophers’ larger
point that time spent away from labor was inextricably caught by the demands of
mass production and mass consumption. On both sides of the Atlantic, this
approach not only shaped much New Left thinking about late modern society, most
notably in countercultural classics such as Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional
Man and Eros and Civilization, but also later left its mark on the emergent field of
“cultural studies.” 3
The historical moment in which Horkheimer and Adorno wrote explains
something of the sharp despair with which they castigated modern society. Exiled
from his position as founder and director of the famous Institute for Social
Research in Frankfurt, Horkheimer joined Adorno in Los Angeles during World
War II to write most of Dialectic of Enlightenment. It is unsurprising in this context
that the uprooted scholars focused on American cinema and radio to demonstrate
how “enlightenment” reverted to ideology, and how the modern media, organized
around principles of mass production, had come to perpetrate “mass deception”
on consumers. But what is striking is how comprehensive their analysis was:
“automobiles, bombs, and movies keep the whole thing together,” they remarked. 4
In their perspective, the world of leisure, whether symbolized by the motorized
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