paul apostolidis - culture industry or social physiogonomy; adorno's critique of christian right radio.PDF - Adorno - MKTK

Philosophy & Social

Criticism

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Culture industry or social physiognomy?: Adorno's critique of Christian

right radio

Paul Apostolidis

Philosophy Social Criticism

1998; 24; 53

DOI: 10.1177/019145379802400503

http://psc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/24/5/53

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The online version of this article can be found at:

Paul Apostolidis

Culture industry or social

physiognomy?

Adorno’s critique of Christian right

radio

Abstract A critical retrospective of ’The Psychological Technique of

Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses’ sheds new light on an often

underplayed tension in Adorno’s thought concerning the capacity of mass

culture to express resistance against domination. In ’Thomas’ Adorno

moved beyond denouncing mass culture as ’culture industry’ by approach-

ing early Christian right radio in a manner consistent (initially) with his

defense of the autonomous dimension of culture in general. At the same

time, ’Thomas’ accomplished groundwork for the culture industry theory,

and this theory ultimately guided the study’s conclusions. This critique

confirms Adorno’s ambivalence regarding the negative capabilities of mass

culture while suggesting a new way to analyze the contemporary Christian

right. This approach, which I illustrate, draws upon both the culture

industry theory and a modified version of Adorno’s method of immanent,

dialectical criticism to identify ideological elements as well as moments of

resistance in Christian right radio today.

Key words anti-Semitism Christian right critical theory Focus on the

Family Frankfurt School mass culture popular culture Theodor W.

Adorno

I Introduction

Social theorists from Weber to Habermas have viewed the secularization

of European culture as a central feature of modernity. In the United

53-

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States, however, religion has not been superseded by the cultural forms

of advanced capitalist society. Instead, it has been transformed along

with these new technological and stylistic modes of representation and

continues to survive openly within them. During the 19th and early 20th

centuries, religion and popular culture engaged in elaborate maneuvers

of mutual accommodation, as the theatrical performances of the revival-

ists and the offerings of the early film industry illustrated Today, the

radio broadcasts, television programs and publishing industries spawned

by a vast network of evangelical Christian enterprises make up a large

and dynamic domain of American mass culture.

Given the venerable history of religion’s involvement in American

mass culture, it is of little surprise - though not well known - that among

Theodor W. Adorno’s studies of mass culture can be found an analysis

of a religious phenomenon. In 1943 Adorno completed a critique of the

radio addresses of a fundamentalist preacher named Martin Luther

Thomas. Thomas’ speeches, which originally had been aired in July

1935, employed anti-Semitic rhetoric to promote Thomas’ rightist

politico-cultural organization, the Christian American Crusade.

Approaching Thomas’ broadcasts ’microscopically’, with sustained

attention to specific turns of phrase and other minute details of the

addresses, Adorno labored to illuminate within Thomas’ discourse the

imprint of the social totality in which it had emerged: a system charac-

terized by the growing concentration of political and economic power

in a small number of large corporations and a burgeoning state appar-

atus. For Adorno, Thomas’ radio program thus simultaneously embod-

ied, portended and hastened the emergence of fascism in the United

States.

Neither Thomas’ crusade nor Adorno’s study succeeded in carrying

its intentions to fruition. Major historical accounts of the American right

wing and anti-Semitism in the United States do not even mention

Thomas or his movement. Adorno, in turn, never prepared his study for

publication, and the piece therefore escaped the severe discipline of edit-

ing by which Adorno usually constrained himself. The result was not

pretty. While some parts of the Thomas study present a relatively

coherent argument, the work as a whole (which sprawls over some 130

pages) is plagued by incomplete thoughts and methodological inconsis-

tencies. In light of the effort required merely to plod through this unruly

document; considering in addition the difficulty of disentangling and

evaluating the divergent strands of argument which are wound together

throughout the text; and in view of the inconsequentiality of its object

in conventional political terms: it is understandable that the Thomas

study has hitherto received very little attention from scholars.

All of these inadequacies notwithstanding, however, ’The Psycho-

logical Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses’ deserves

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a critical retrospective today. This is so, in the first place, because of the

provocative tension which the study displays between Adorno’s desires

to illuminate the radical potential of culture through immanent criticism,

on the one hand, and to expose the intellectually petrifying and politi-

cally authoritarian powers of the culture industry, on the other hand. A

second reason for the study’s pertinence today, about which I shall have

more to say shortly, relates to its distinctive approach to the critical

analysis of the Christian right in the United States.

Adorno strenuously defended immanent criticism as vital to a dialec-

tical analysis of culture, though not as exhaustive of dialectics as such.

Any cultural object, in Adorno’s view, necessarily reflected and repro-

duced in its formal, compositional tensions the structural antagonisms

of society. However, Adorno refused to reduce culture to any kind of

superstructure, to a mere epiphenomenon of capitalism. Instead, he saw

culture as preserving the hope for liberation and therefore as indispens-

able to any revolutionary project. Adorno argued that the power of a

cultural object to express and inspire resistance against social domi-

nation depended first and foremost upon the resistance of its internal,

particular elements to subsumption under a facile aesthetic harmony. For

Adorno, immanent criticism (which identified the patterns of order and

moments of disorder which might subsist in the object’s internal struc-

ture) together with ’transcendent’ criticism (which considered the object

in light of the empirically definable social relations characterizing its

historical context) made up the two poles of genuinely dialectical

cultural criticism. Such dialectical criticism (or ’social physiognomy’, as

Adorno sometimes referred to this method, since it interpreted the

surface features or physiognomy of an object in relation to social

conditions) enabled the theorist to elucidate the object’s expression, rein-

forcement and perhaps contestation of social domination.2

Adorno pursued this mode of interpretation in his reflections on

classical music, literature and philosophy. In his studies of popular

music, film, television and radio, however, Adorno rarely allowed that

mass-cultural phenomena produced as such could possess the qualities

of constitutional integrity (those aspects of deliberate construction

connoted by the notion of an artistic ’work’) that would have made them

amenable to immanent criticism in the first place, and thus to dialecti-

cal criticism at all. Rather, especially in his earlier writings, Adorno

nearly always treated mass culture as the standardized output of an

industrial apparatus which was manufactured solely in accordance with

the intention to maximize mass consumption and corporate profits.

Thus the essay on the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlzghtenment as

well as (for the most part) the related essays ’The Schema of Mass

Culture’ and ’Culture Industry Reconsidered’ viewed mass-cultural

objects as wholly determined by the commercial enterprises which

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produced and distributed them. Other essays subsumed these objects

under generic categories which were each analyzed as a whole - for

example, ’jazz’, rather than, say, Duke Ellington’s ’Harlem’ suite.3 Of

course, given Adorno’s theory of dialectical criticism and the crucial role

of immanent criticism within it, this precluded from the outset the very

possibility that mass-cultural objects might express some kind of protest

against the political and economic status quo.4

Observing Adorno’s general tendencies to view mass culture as

entirely ideological and to confine his interpretation of mass culture to

the technological and institutional conditions of its production and

reception, contemporary theorists in the field of Cultural Studies have

repeatedly cast Adorno in the role of the father who, though he has given

life to the critical analysis of mass culture, must nevertheless be slain if

this endeavor is to mature. Defenders of Adorno have responded in two

ways. First, they have drawn attention to Adorno’s tentative modifi-

cation in some writings of the relentlessly denunciatory stance toward

mass culture which he takes in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Examining

in particular the essays ’Transparencies on Film’ (1966), ’Prolog zum

Fernsehen’ (Prologue to Television, 1953), and ’The Form of the Phono-

graph Record’ (1934), these scholars have argued persuasively that

Adorno at least occasionally took up in earnest the problematic of how

mass-cultural phenomena might have an immanent construction that

would grant them ’mimetic’ capabilities of a ’utopian’ (rather than just

a ’perverted’) form.5 Second, some have reasserted the validity of the

original critique of the culture industry, although not as a comprehen-

sive and conclusive interpretation of mass culture but rather, as Miriam

Hansen puts it, as one indispensable half of a

stereoscopic vision that spans the extremes of contemporary media

culture: on the one hand, an mstrument for the ever more effective simu-

lation of presence and relentless remscription of difference and identity; on

the other, a matrix for a postmodern culture of difference, for new,

syncretistic forms of experience and unpredictable formations of public

life.6

A critical but sympathetic reading of ’Martin Luther Thomas’

provides a different and complementary foundation on which to raise

the first contention, while also reinforcing this second line of argument.

In the Thomas study, Adorno devoted a level of sustained and detailed

attention to the immanent particularities of Thomas’ discourse which

was highly uncharacteristic of his predominant approach to mass

culture, but which unmistakably evinced steps in the direction of social

physiognomy. Here Adorno does not merely reflect in general terms on

the possibility that certain practices of production (such as montage)

might favor the emergence of negative potentialities within mass culture,

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