A Cottage Industry of Personal Prisons · Thursday November 16, 2006
In light of today’s posts, an interesting excerpt from Using Global Media, an Urban Honking blog:
Marcus drew our attention to aspects of the culture industry that might now be undermined by peer-to-peer, user-made cultural work. Adorno and Horkheimer describe “few production centers and the large number of widely dispersed consumption points,” a circumstance that is changed today. Marcus passed out statistics showing 26.6 million blogs on a growth curve turning exponentially upward. Philip, playing devil’s advocate, wondered aloud if anyone reads these blogs.
Colin reminded us that the prison Adorno and Horkheimer describe is constituted by a culture industry that invites us into repetitive, isolating relations within which we can never conceive of ourselves as subjects in social solidarity with other subjects; we glue our faces to the tube(s) and go to sleep happy. If indeed the path out of this prison is to create relations that connect us as subjects (that is, as individual people) in solidarity with other subjects, the radical democratization of production — no longer three channels; now 26.6 million blogs — might not mean much. Today we isolate ourselves within our own production, just as muffled and removed from the subjectivity of others, just as unable to shape social solidarity. In essence, the industrial efforts of the culture industry have been replaced by a pervasive cottage industry in which we produce our own prisons.
Also, it’s important to note that the culture industries are constantly moving to co-opt and commodify independent content. Although I find Adorno and Horkheimer’s take on culture to be overly pessimistic and obviously a bit out of date, there’s still something to be said for a continually evolving understanding/critique of how corporations are always hunting for the newest and coolest cultural trends and movements.
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