If all forms of music and culture can be commodified, then they also must have the potential to resist commodification independent of musical style. Music is a common good in the sense that new music reflects the history of music and is influenced by other music. The logical consequence should be to treat all culture and music as commons instead of as commodity. The Internet partly decommodifies music and culture by file sharing and partly creates new strategies of commodification (e.g. iTunes, Spotify). All of this takes however place within capitalist society, which creates contradictions between fans, the culture industry, amateur and professional artists, as well as between the content industry that tries to police copyrights and the ‘openness’ industry (e.g. YouTube) that sells advertisements and therefore welcomes free and open culture as strategy for attracting audiences whose attention is sold as commodities to advertisers.
Heinz Steinert (2003) reminds us that the point of Adorno’s theory of the culture industry is not to criticise specific artistic practices, forms, or contents, but the abstract ‘principle of commodity-form cultural activity’ (10). So we cannot say that Adorno’s view of jazz was racist. His essays on jazz were rather concerned about the commercial form of culture in general.
3.3.6. Knowledge and Communication
We can now try to generalise the conclusions from the debate about aesthetics between Lukács and Adorno for knowledge in general. All individual and collective knowledge takes place in the context of both nature and society. These contexts condition, but do not determine the form and content of knowledge. Humans are part of social systems, in which they communicate, i.e. they exchange knowledge and can thereby create new individual knowledge and reproduce existing individual knowledge. Social groups, organisations, social systems, and society at large also create based on individual knowledge and through communication of collective knowledge that represents and describes important features of these systems. In class-based and dominative societies, these knowledge structures also represent class structures and structures of domination, as well as the struggles for defining how and what these systems communicate to the social environment. Knowledge in class-based societies is class knowledge, which does not mean that the knowledge of the dominant class is always false and the one of the dominated class always true (the opposite can be the case), but rather that knowledge in class-based society is shaped by struggles about how to and who can define reality. Individual knowledge, communication, and social knowledge have specific contents, in which human relationships to nature and society are reflected. This reflection is however not a mirroring, but a complex, non-linear relation, whose character depends on the kind of knowledge that is being formed. So for example paintings can be very realistic trying to portray a part of nature and society in a photographic manner or very abstract so that there is no intention to map nature or society, but where nature and society are only experiential contexts of the artist, who creates abstractions from ideas that are situated in social and natural contexts.
Theodor W. Adorno and the Critical Theory of Knowledge
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