SOCI 1002 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Slash Fiction
13 Jun 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Sociology of Media
Lecture 7
Theorizing the media
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944)
What is the relationship between the economy and culture?
The culture industry (or mass/ popular culture) has one function: to reproduce incessantly
the values of capitalist culture.
Offered a more in-depth critique of media as a ‘superstructure’.
They developed the “culture industry thesis” which has four parts:
Standardization
Pseudo-individualization
Maintenance of status quo ideas
Absorption of dissent
1. Standardization
a. Culture packaged in small number of predictable forms and genres
b. Produced by small number of large corporations
c. There is simultaneously NOTHING NEW and ALWAYS SOMETHING NEW
2. Pseudo-Individualization
• The audience response is “built-into” the cultural product
• our culture is “pre-digested for us”
• Audiences are passive
• Choice is an illusion
3. Maintenance of the Status Quo
• Media lulls the public into passivity
• Distracts from big social issues
• Maintains social ideas re: race, gender, class
4. Absorption of dissent
Critiques of culture industry thesis:
• 1) it’s elitist
• 2) historically specific
• 3) disregards alternative uses/ readings of culture
• i.e. slash fiction→
4) totalizing– i.e. “resistance is futile
Media ownership
Who owns the media?
Why does media ownership matter?
What might be the relationship between media ownership and Marx’s idea of the “camera
obscura”?
Public ownership & cultural sovereignty
Sovereignty: rule of the government over a territory.
Cultural sovereignty: the rule of specific cultural traditions, practices, artifacts, etc.
The CRTC (Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission)
Est. 1968
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
The culture industry (or mass/ popular culture) has one function: to reproduce incessantly the values of capitalist culture. Offered a more in-depth critique of media as a superstructure". They developed the culture industry thesis which has four parts: Critiques of culture industry thesis: 1) it"s elitist, 2) historically specific, 3) disregards alternative uses/ readings of culture i. e. slash fiction . Sovereignty: rule of the government over a territory. Cultural sovereignty: the rule of specific cultural traditions, practices, artifacts, etc. Radio= 40% as of 2009 must be canadian . Disney: cultural implications: childhood innocence, american values, race, gender. White people do not stand in for an entire people. Represents indigenous people as caricatures (one-dimensional), violent, uncivilized, stuck in the past. A dominant form of colonial discourse in which a mythologized east or orient becomes a site for the projection of western fantasies of otherness as well as a mechanism for western domination of actual non-western cultures (o"brien and.
