Art and Culture in the Age of Empire and the Time of the Multitudes

1. The critique of culture frequently repeats itself. Does it do so rightly or wrongly, with regard to our present situation? When, in 1947, at the end of the Second World War, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno published Dialectic of Enlightenment, a new critical model emerged, as singular as it was reproducible, both different and capable of being repeated. Reflecting upon the Europe devastated by fascism they had left behind and upon the American society that had taken them in as exiles, Adorno and Horkheimer considered the Enlightenment’s tendency to transform itself into its own opposite, not only into the open barbarism of fascism but also into the totalitarian subjection of the masses effected by the new seductions of the culture industry. European fascism and American commodification were treated as co-extensive. From then (the end of the Second World War) until today, that judgement on Western culture has been confirmed by the gradual constitution of Empire. The transformation of fascism into the commodification of culture was realized with unbroken continuity, spreading across the entire face of the planet as the systems of telecommunication became its main instrument of diffusion… The retouching of images was followed by the universal prostitution of tourism, and by a thousand other varieties of bad taste. Watch Murdoch’s television and you’ll find proof that Adorno’s model of cultural criticism genuinely uncovered the ontology of the new world. The restructuring of this world into fascism, its reconstruction by means of war, its corruption through degrading imagery: no doubt all of this is proliferating exponentially today… Now television has become interactive, producing trash culture and constructing an appropriate audience! Musical culture demands new trash productions and the circle closes perfectly. The neutralization of information follows the same laws as the levelling of affect: if the romantic and the classic have both been reduced to signs without sense, truth is now either imposed or vulgar. Adorno’s model has exhausted itself: whatever innovative elements its critique of culture may have contained at the end of the Second World War have become banal. Indignation is no longer possible. It is at this point, then, that the critique of culture necessarily becomes repetitive.