Speculative thoughts on spectacular democracy

The ruthless unity in the culture industry is evidence of what will happen in politics. Marked differentiations such as those of A and B films, or of stories in magazines in different price ranges, depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organizing, and labelling consumers.

- Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception

It is increasingly apparent that the ominous insights of Adorno and Horkheimer into the culture industry as precursor to absolute political homogeneity have come to fruition in our times. I intend to draw on the observations of these two German political philosophers and their colleagues in an attempt to interpret the elaborate theatrics known as liberal democracy, specifically that of United States.

For Adorno and Horkheimer the culture produced by liberal democracy is simply a tool for adherence to the dominant ideology that validates absolutely the control of power by a few at the expense of the many. While not a particularly novel observation, their idiosyncratic analysis of its workings and extent serve as a powerful tool for interpretation of the state society finds itself in today. Indeed while their observations may have been read as 'exaggerated for effect' in their day, today they simply offer a sober look at the status quo.

In their conception nearly every film, pop or rock song, news bulletin, classical music concert, advertisement, radio play, institution and even scientific theory rides a wave of tacitly acknowledged assumptions. These subtly but continuously bombard the citizen with the message that the control of production and resources being in the hands of an elite, for whom the rest of society should compete to labour, is the natural and thus morally right way for society to exist.

Auxiliary attitudes such as work ethic, leisure time, respect for authority and elders, family values and career ambition are simultaneously passed on with the base idea of domination. These in turn prompt neurotic tendencies that are encouraged and channelled to further the acceptance of the establishment order; jealousy, for example, being played on to promote mass consumption and the 'hard work' it necessitates, or alienation being catered for by the pseudo-camaraderie of a rock concert or the latest commercial cult. This ceaseless assault thus simultaneously instructs in the substance of the dominant ideology and undermines attempts to conceive of an alternative.

Grand spectacles such as a US presidential election serve to further integrate the nation's citizens from above, whipping up a tide of nationalism and rallying that overwhelms the individual's capacity to question; dazzling and distracting him with a highly elaborate and meticulously coordinated media campaign that oozes from every outlet the culture industry has devised.

Myspace, youtube, MTV, Comedy Central, World Wrestling Entertainment, 'Obama Mobile' and other 'mass media' outlets with high propensities to homogenise are ruthlessly engaged by candidates to intrude on every aspect of administered time. Actors and 'rock stars' are employed to further pedal the message on these forums, as if the fact that the culture industry has used these otherwise non-entities to perpetuate its own capital endows them with profound discernment the rest of society should pay close attention to when choosing a leader.

Thus, the age of digital reproduction has done for the liberal capitalists what the radio did for the Nazis and before them the printing press did for the Reformation. The omnipotence of this spectacle overrides any need for assessment of its substance; simply partaking in it is a moral imperative, for to not would be to exclude oneself from the only good the totality recognises - itself: "Life in the late capitalist era is a constant initiation rite. Everyone must show that he wholly identifies himself with the power which is belabouring him" [Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 153].

Culture industry clichés slit easily into the political realm - indicators that signal a network of social meaning. John McCain's war-hero credentials are indistinguishable from a maudlin war movie device; Barak Obama's Kenyan goat-farming father story is a sentimental overture to the 'American Dream'. Responses are conditioned and instantly elicited to ensure the citizen's imagination is nipped in the bud, lest he think something other than what he is told.

Language itself serves to thwart individual responses with a positivist 'common sense' that permits only the establishment meaning of words. Here the concept can only describe what is and does so with a fixed value. 'Democracy' can as such only refer to the liberal democratic system that exists in the United States (and its allies) at this time, and is the only moral form of governance. 'Justice' similarly means the result of the existing judicial process; 'freedom' denotes freedom to do what one is free (and appears free) to do under present conditions. Thus, language is practically tautological, perpetually referring to itself and denying reflection and conceptualisation outside of itself.

The ideology is complete in its realisation of the converse of its ideals. Just as consumers are presented with apparently infinite consumption and lifestyle choices that boil down to the one choice of commodity identity - buy to be - voters are fed the appearance of infinite choice while in reality having but one. The ideals resting on this 'choice' - freedom, democracy, rationality and the individual - are thus simultaneously lauded and denied, a permanent paradox the inevitable consequence of which is mounting orientation towards Fascistic tendencies.

The most conspicuous example of this contradiction is that of freedom of speech. The media may be legally free to report on whatever it wants from any perspective but the fact that the almost the entire media spectacle adheres strictly to ideology of capital and the righteousness of the status quo shows how little this means when capital is the ultimate determinate and precludes the discussion of anything other than its own perpetuation. As a Russian theorist noted in 1919, freedom of the press "is deceptive so long as the best printing works and the biggest paper supplies are in capitalist hands, and so long as capital retains its power over the press, a power which throughout the world is expressed more clearly, sharply, and cynically, the more developed the democracy and the republican regime, as for example in America."

Similarly citizens are ostensibly encouraged to express diverse opinions on everything from abortion to Zoloft, yet the showcasing of diversity reduces value to a solely values power and directs critique towards everything except that power. This 'diversity' is a mockery of the democratic ideal that finds legitimation in compromise between the genuine interests of each and every person. In the current state of affairs the compromise is simply between master and slave - elite interest and public opinion. That they are cynically referred to as equally valid interests allows the elite to rely on its overwhelming power while assuaging any dissent from the masses, a condition further illegitimated by the equalisation of the latter's mind-set to that of the former - the aspiration of ideology.

People know what they like because they know what other people like. In every speech made at every rally a throng of devotees frames the stately centrepiece with passionately assenting faces, fixated in semi-transcendental awe as if the every word of the great leader resonated with their most deeply cherished principles - attitudes and opinions that they manifested through their own efforts and are now finding a voice to realise them. And what a voice! It resonates like some divine pronouncement yet is familiar as a long-time buddy. The earnestly nodding heads are put there to believe that the tingle in their spine and the lump in their throat is the convergence of their (now unspeakably elevated) self and the celebrity/politician's meticulously placed words, and in turn to hearten the spectator to join them in their staggeringly befuddled moment of glory when truth and meaning merge into the brilliant figurehead with the shining white teeth. The natural impulse for community and a common cause is thusly hijacked for a mass mobilisation to serve the interests of the few.

The need for a leader to elect is itself a constructed need. Indeed as Herbert Marcuse posited, the very foundations of capitalist society rest on ever-expanding false needs:

The judgement of needs and their satisfaction, under the given conditions, involves standards of priority - standards which refer to the optimum development of the individual, all individuals, under the optimal utilisation of the material and intellectual resources available to man. These sources are calculable. "Truth" and "falsehood" of needs designate objective conditions to the extent to which the universal satisfaction of vital needs and, beyond it, the progressive alleviation of toil and poverty, are universally valid standards. But as historical standards, they do not only vary according to area and stage of development, they also can be defined only (greater or lesser) contradiction to the prevailing ones. [One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, Routledge (2002) p. 8]

While the realisation of true needs caters for the individual's development as a unique self, false needs under capitalism homogenise individuals to the abstract demands of the market. These false needs in turn ensure dependence on the system that satisfies them; their endemic and ever-encroaching prevalence undermining all attempts to conceive of alternatives.
Reflecting the realm of consumption, politics similarly imposes false needs that promote dependency. Protection from an obscure enemy that threatens the very existence of society is an age-old justification for subservience and has the convenient ideological advantage of indicating that anything that would challenge the status quo is necessarily evil.

The 'greatest democracy on earth' purports to urge its citizens to deliberate in perpetuum on every facet of the political personalities it poots forth, but the debate only serves "to perpetuate the semblance of competition and range of choice" [Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 123]. There is in fact nothing for the voter himself to analyse and classify - categories (there truly being only one) were established for him long before the aborted ideal of democracy was instilled in him. The sound of the pundits, analysts, experts, debating societies and the word on the street are just an ideology talking to itself.

In this one-dimension even cynicism plays an affirmative role, with satire being employed by both parties to attack the other's falseness, but never the falseness of that which both represent. The culture industry plays along with the gag, ridiculing all involved and dispersing resentment into manic laughter, the joke being on the grinning spectator whose distant fears of being duped are further allayed.

Indeed every supposed deviation can potentially be assimilated. Despite the ostensible and much extolled novelty of the 2008 campaign comprising of an elderly, a black and (at one point) a female candidate as evidence of the self-correcting evolution of liberal democracy, this self-congratulatory focus on surface irrelevancy serves to distract from the infinitely more pertinent issues a society faces while giving the impression of a revolutionary change that does not exist. As Adorno noted, the imposition of a universal content "can even go beyond what is quasi-officially sanctioned or forbidden." Like the anti-industry rebellion of punk-rock being commandeered into spawning industry-friendly post-punk and the pop pap of the likes of 'My Chemical Romance', apparent political deviations thus become assimilated into justifications for the system they purport to rock. Without the acknowledgement that race antagonisms are the irrational product of the established order, putting a black man in the White House is mere diversion. That Obama has proved consistently willing to reverse his stance on any issue not befitting a front-man for corporate America does not register in the minds of those who succumb to the dominant discourse playing on their impulse to get excited about 'change'.

In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so. [Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, Radical Thinkers (2006), p. 28]

It would be a mistake to conclude that the entire American public genuinely believes the hype they are sold, but as Adorno observed some 60 years ago "The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them" [Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 167]. Just as people swallow up a mass culture that is manifestly contrived to fool them into consumption, they compulsively play along with the political charades as if they fell for it. It is simply that they have been denied the tools to think anything else and are neurotically compelled to relieve any unease by further identifying with the system:

People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without admitting it they sense that even their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all. [Theodor Adorno, 'The Culture Industry Reconsidered' in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, Routledge (2001), p. 103]

What is never questioned by the entire spectacular coverage of the campaigns is the dominance of the few. "Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices," [Minima Moralia, p. 132] and the process of choosing a master upholds the system of master and slave. That the master is lauded as slave to the will of the people is the pinnacle of the doublespeak of liberal democracy. Whoever wins the megaspectacle of the 2008 elections, it will simply be the system submitting to a vote which it has itself commanded.



By Luke Manzarpour, Press TV