ABSTRACT
With their essay on the culture industry in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno established a paradigm which, from the 1940s to today, has provided the indispensable reference point for every critique of aesthetic production in its relationship to the economy. This is not to say, however, that the most urgent task today in the debate around the culture industry theory would be to prove its continuing productiveness, nor would it be, conversely, to underline the theory’s shortcomings – that it fails to differentiate between popular and mass art, and thus does not recognize the possibilities of subversive pop art; that its distinction between high and low culture feeds off the self-consciousness of an educated elite; that it disparagingly characterizes cultural consumption as an illusory satisfaction.2 Rather it seems necessary to me today, after the almost total retreat of class-specific consciousness, after a radical transformation of the economic significance of aesthetic production, and after the transition since the 1950s into a new phase of capitalism, to pay our respects to the culture industry theory by reconstructing it in the light of these changed conditions. I recommended such a reconstruction several years ago in my “Sketch of an Aesthetic Economy,”3 and I will begin here by recapitulating that sketch in condensed form. The aesthetic economy starts out from the ubiquitous phenomenon of an
aestheticization of the real, and takes seriously the fact that this aestheticization represents an important factor in the economy of advanced capitalist societies. The concept of aesthetic labor must first be developed if this situation is to be grasped. Aesthetic labor designates the totality of those activities which aim to give an appearance to things and people, cities and landscapes, to endow them with an aura, to lend them an atmosphere, or to generate an atmosphere in ensembles. With this term, the qualitative valuation of the products of aesthetic labor, and with it the distinction, so essential to the culture industry theory, between art and kitsch, is quite consciously abandoned. The assumption that a gulf separates the creators of art or culture from artisans, cosmeticians, and advertisers is also left behind. The concept of the aesthetic laborer encompasses rather the entire spectrum from painter to artist, from
designer to music producer; it embraces all human activities that lend to things, people and ensembles that more which goes beyond their handiness and objective presence, their materiality and practicality. Because this more has attained its own economic significance, the concept of staging value (Inszenierungswert) was coined. With this term, the Marxist dichotomy of use and exchange value was expanded to include a third value category. The use value of a commodity consists in its practicality within a determinate context of use. The exchange value of a commodity consists in the value it is accorded within the context of an exchange process, and is abstractly measured in money. In order to raise their exchange value, however, commodities are treated in a special way: they are given an appearance; they are aestheticized and staged in the sphere of exchange. These aesthetic qualities of the commodity then develop into an autonomous value, because they play a role for the customer not just in the context of exchange but also in that of use. They are certainly not classical use values, for they have nothing to do with utility and purposiveness, but they form, as it were, a new type of use value, which derives from their exchange value insofar as use is made of their attractiveness, their aura, their atmosphere. They serve to stage, costume, and intensify life. It is decisive for the aesthetic economy that a quantitatively significant
sector of the national economy be geared to the production of values for staging and display, or rather that giving commodities a staging value makes up an essential part of their production. As such, the values produced by the aesthetic economy are to a large extent not actually needed. The aesthetic economy thereby proves to be a particular stage of development of capitalism. Capitalism, along with every other economic form, is usually regarded as an organization for overcoming human needs and satisfying material requirements. There have certainly always been very clear-sighted theorists, such as Veblen4 or Sombart,5
who explicitly connected capitalism with luxury production, and their books must be judged today as the beginnings of a critique of the aesthetic economy. But, on the whole, capitalism was and is seen as a highly serious business, to be assigned, borrowing Marx’s terminology, to the realm of necessity, not to the realm of freedom. At a certain stage of development in which the material needs of society are generally satisfied, capitalism must bet upon another type of needs, which calls for the appropriate term desires. The third fundamental category of the aesthetic economy is thereby named. Desires are those needs which, far from being allayed by their satisfaction, are only intensified. Needs in the narrower sense, for example the need to drink, to sleep, and to find shelter from the cold, vanish the moment they are stilled. Desires are quite different: the powerful want ever more power, the famous still more fame, and so on. It is important to note that there are desires that can be directly commercially exploited, namely those that are directed toward the staging, and hence the intensification, of life. There are no natural limits to presentation, glamour, and visibility. Each level, once reached, demands instead its further intensification. Because growth belongs intrinsically to capitalism, when capitalist production attains a particular stage of development typified by the fundamental
satisfaction of people’s material requirements, it must henceforth explicitly turn to their desires. The economy thus becomes an aesthetic economy.
