Buying into Cultural Capital

          I found this week’s supplemental reading excerpt from The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno to be interesting and illuminating, particularly when paralleled with Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation.  In The Culture Industry, Horkheimer and Adorno examine popular culture as a commodifiable good, which they maintain is used to manipulate society into rampant and essentially automatic consumption.  The authors introduce the concept of cultural capital, which they explain to be, “[A] model of the huge economic machinery which has always sustained the masses, weather at work or at leisure—which is akin to work” (1114).  The danger of cultural capital, they argue, lies in its ubiquity, a circumstance that becomes problematic when combined with the assertion that, “Marked differentiations… depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organizing, and labeling consumers.  Something is provided for all so that none may escape; the distinctions are emphasized and extended” (1112).  What is emphasized in these lines is the homogeneity of cultural capital, as well as the ways in which it is self-perpetuating and constantly around us.

            Although Horkheimer and Adorno do not discuss Bolter and Grusin’s concept of remediation explicitly, I found elements of their theories referenced throughout The Culture Industry.  In relation to cultural capital as a whole, Horkheimer and Adorno write, “How formalized the procedure is can be seen when the mechanically differentiated products prove to be all alike in the end” (1112), a statement that alludes the concept of remediation.  This is not the remediation of a specific technology, as Bolter and Grusin discuss, but rather the remediation of a medium (and in this case, a power structure) that has been honed and refined to near perfection by building upon its previous procedures and operations for the ultimate goal of perfection. 

            One instance of this power structure exists in a monopoly, about which Horkheimer and Adorno write, “Under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through.  The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows” (1111). This excerpt struck me as a distinct example of hypermediation, as the authors point out the ways in which acknowledging and even emphasizing the monopoly (medium) only adds to its power.  On the other side of the spectrum, the authors write, “The more intensely and flawlessly techniques duplicate empirical objects, the easier it is today for the illusion to prevail that the outside world is the straightforward continuation of that presented on the [film] screen” (1113).  Using film as a single example among many, Horkheimer and Adorno reference the concept of immediacy by illustrating the ways in which the effaced medium of cultural capital deceives consumers by blurring the distinction between themselves, the product (commodity), and “real life,” thus causing them to regard the act of consumption as merely another automated practice.

            The hazard of cultural capital, at least on an immediate level, is the threat of homogenization and erasure.  Copies of copies of various forms of cultural capital are promulgated as “new” when they are in fact reproductions of the old, perhaps in slightly newer packaging.  Through this practice consumers remain consumers who continue to be controlled, and nothing changes or advances aside from the precision through which they are advertised and sold to.  Power remains in the same hands, and the masses threaten to be dumbed down, if not dominated by the massive societal passivity that Horkheimer and Adorno caution their readers against.  Furthermore, the presence of Bolter and Grusin’s concepts of remediation, immediacy and hypermediacy highlight the power that is inherently built into these terms.