ABSTRACT
Since they were surrounded by a culture whose manifestations they could all too fearfully perceive but whose ‘logic’ persistently eluded them, the famous German culture critics, quite understandably, fell back upon the aesthetic paradigms of their native land in order to provide themselves with a theoretical foothold on this terra incognita. Employing European modernism’s philosophical underpinnings to comprehend the American version of capitalism’s rationalizing process, they ‘dialectically’ contrasted the ‘manipulation’ of American ‘mass culture’ to the ‘utopian’ resistance which they believed to inhere in European ‘Art’, interpreting the former as the frightening and degenerate shadow of the latter (TABLOID, 1980). Steeped in the traditions of European ‘high culture’, the German ex-patriots believed that ‘Art’ could evoke the liberation of ‘human essence’. Hence, by implicitly and necessarily juxtaposing the imaginative possibilities (re)presented in ‘work of art’ to the material limitations of (American) history, they described the aesthetic experience as providing individuals with a critical-if not ‘shocking’— awareness of the oppression inhering in their historical situation: ‘In giving downtrodden humans a shocking awareness of their own despair the work of art professes a freedom which makes them foam at the mouth’ (Horkheimer, 1982: 280). Mass culture, on the other hand, could only manipulate the individual’s ‘real needs’ leading him or her to seek ‘solutions’ in the frenetic pleasures proffered by commodity culture: ‘What today is called popular entertainment is actually demands, evoked, manipulated and by implication deteriorated by the cultural
industries (Horkheimer, 1982:288). American mass culture, as seen through the eyes of these European intelligentsia (and it was, for them, an entirely ‘spectacular’ approach), (re)presented only degraded, dehistoricized, or defiled ‘real’ human needs finding their ‘false’ solutions in cars, clothes, movies, magazines, etc., etc., etc.
