{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","title":"Critical Theory of Communication New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781911534044","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","id":"dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","uuid":"dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","title":"Critical Theory of Communication New Readings of Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet","normalized_title":"criticaltheoryofcommunicationnewreadingsoflukácsadornomarcusehonnethandhabermasintheageoftheinternet","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781911534044","isbns":["9781911534044","9781911534051","9781911534068","9781911534075"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":236,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Critical%20Theory%20of%20Communication%20New%20Readings%20of%20Luk%C3%A1cs%2C%20Adorno%2C%20Marcuse%2C%20Honneth%20and%20Habermas%20in%20the%20Age%20of%20the%20Internet","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/dadb939e-7360-4727-a1fb-be08c2f7a611/search"},"page":{"printed_page":77,"pdf_page":81,"physical_index":81,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"d9ceb784dc5ec53f7c4d672f19e13300087751050025e3e9e6d40f8330831c3f"},"chapter":"C H R I S T I A N F U C H S CRITICAL THEORY OF COMMUNICATION","content":"• For Horkheimer and Adorno, mass culture means ‘citizens are turned into a passive mass of consumers […] In this world of mass culture, all is false and inauthentic because it is tainted by the hand of production, commodification and exchange’ (du Gay, Hall, Janes, Mackay and Negus 1997, 87).\n\n• ‘Unfortunately, the force of the Frankfurt School’s critique was weakened by their apparently elitist dismissal of forms of popular culture’ (Longhurst 2013, 75).\n\n• ‘Adorno is often (and rightly in my view) accused of not understanding TV’s manifold pleasures, and at the same time of taking it too seriously (During 2005, 115).\n\n• ‘Adorno will be presented as a (Marxist) high culture gladiator’ (Walton 2007, 48). For him, popular culture ‘pacifies the masses and encourages them to confirm to their humiliating conditions. The exploited masses (consumers) are seen as victims of depoliticization and impoverished, materially, intellectually and emotionally’ (Walton 2007, 53).\n\n• ‘Like the perspective developed by Arnold, Leavisism and some of the American mass culture theorists, the Frankfurt School perspective on popular culture is essentially a discourse from above on the culture of other people (a discourse of “us” and “them”)’ (Storey 2008, 70).\n\n• ‘The Frankfurt School also applied a transmission mode, though messages were intrinsically ideological; media messages always carried the political interests of the elites who generated them. Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse believed, it would seem, that the masses were passive and unidimensional victims of the overbearing power of state and media institutions’ (Lewis 2008, 109).\n\n• ‘The commodification of culture, then, was a much more ambivalent process than was allowed for by Adorno and Horkheimer’s pessimism. […] there is a constant sense in Adorno and Horkheimer that the battle has already been lost, that culture has been already subsumed both by capital and by an abstract system of “instrumental reason”’ (Hesmondhalgh 2013, 25).\n\nSuch passages are likely to keep readers from engaging with Adorno’s work, rather than encouraging interest because they label them as being pessimistic, deterministic, and elitist.\n\n3.2.2. Was Adorno a Cultural Pessimist?\n\nAdorno, who is vilified by many cultural studies scholars as the prototypical cultural pessimist and elitist, had a positive vision for a medium like TV. For television (in German, Fernsehen means literally ‘to watch into the distance’) ‘to keep the promise still resonating within the word, it must emancipate itself from everything within which it – reckless wish-fulfilment – refutes its own principle and betrays the idea of Good Fortune for the smaller fortunes of the department store’ (Adorno 1998, 57). Adorno frequently acknowledges the need and potentials of emancipation. In the case of TV, he points out that enabling watching into the distance beyond capitalism is a good fortune. This is indirectly a call for the creation of alternative media that question the status quo.\n\nTheodor W. Adorno and the Critical Theory of Knowledge\n\n77","previous_page":76,"next_page":78}