Sarah Frank Week 7

From "The Culture Industry," Adorno and Horkheimer.

Adorno and Horkheimer's framing of culture as an industry has aged well, although I do think some of their concerns opine an inherited culture—embodied by quintessential figures like Mozart or da Vinci—that is integrally invested in the high/low art divide. To hell with synergy or revisionist interpretations, any crossover between Beethoven ("high" art) and B.B. King ("low") taints the former. Adorno and Horkheimer go so far as to indict the jazz-inflected syncopation of a Beethoven minuet as constitutive of a "system of non-culture" and "stylized barbarity" (410).

Question: Adorno and Horkheimer are concerned with culture as an industry, but they also seem to resist or ignore at a more subterranean level the democratizing nature of cultural platforms, such as emergent music forms, which seek to push and play with "style." They resist jazz, Hollywood, and syncretism between high and low. The acknowledgement of culture as industry aside, is the deeper gripe expressed by these theorists perhaps the erosion of entrenched boundaries, shored-up definitions of "style" and "art" which popular culture questions, revises, and moves beyond? How might cultural studies take the points about the articulation of culture and industry, while acknowledging the impulses of culture to evolve, even at the expense of fervently believed-in understandings of art?   

Question: Adorno and Horkheimer naturally did not foresee social media, a constellation of communication systems that reinforces but also destabilizes the culture industry. Social media reinscribes the monopolies, the "caricatures of solidarity" (413), and the "mechanical" (412) reproductions of beauty, power, and lifestyle that Adorno and Horkheimer resist. But side by side with these reinforced milieus are formidable counter-movements, counter-milieus, championing skepticism and resistance to the dominant strain. Social media is both an ailment and an antidote, negative and positive potential, ever engaged in the ostensible process of kicking against goads of its own creation. How can cultural studies appropriate the unwieldy and contradictory articulations implicit in social media to understand current conjunctures as they take shape (historical, social, political, etc.)? 

 

From “Encoding, decoding,” Stuart Hall.

This chapter was fascinating. Throughout, I kept wondering how Stuart Hall would respond to the way TikTok and meme culture appropriate encoding while also reshaping and naturalizing codes, sometimes in a subversive and veiled way.

Question: Does Hall’s (and Barthes’ and Saussure’s) configuration of encoding/decoding work in the social media era? Might social media complicate the encoding/decoding relationship, to the extent that TikTok and meme culture tend towards a signifier/signified relationship that doesn’t actually have that “some degree of reciprocity” that Hall suggests exists between encoded/decoded moments (100, emphasis original)? Is there something integrally subversive to the articulation of texts besides images for which there is no “naturalized” code that explains the signifier/signified relationship?