Discuss Adorno and Fiske’s view on popular culture
Adorno (1903 – 1969), is a cultural theorist who analysed the media and our society. He stated that the power of the mass media over the population was enormous and damaging to our society. He stated that culture is a social creation to serve a capitalist regime, where an audience consume the media to gain cultural capital. There are two types of culture, high and low culture. High culture is intellectually stimulating to active audience, whereas low culture is stimulating to a passive audience. Cultural theorists study and analyse the popular culture ingrained into the society in which we live in.
Theodor Adorno was a member of the Frankfurt School of German academics working in the 1920’s and 30’s. Their hostility to the mass media was due to the rise of Hitler throughout the Second World War, where the dictator used the mass media to dehumanise and turn a whole nation against the Jewish population through the use of media outlets for example advertising and propaganda. This was the main tool in Hitler’s success to try to exterminate a whole religious race in order to create an Arian race. Adorno describes the mass media as the culture industry to emphasise that the true and only purpose of the media and the media outlets is to make profit and money. He also argued that the products created from the culture industry, both low and high culture items, are all the same, as they all reflect the ruling class ideology of the established order in our modern day society. Each product may give the impression of being their own individual product with their own USP, (unique selling point), but in actual fact this is an illusion which the ruling class oppress on the masses as the purpose of the popular culture is to maintain the established order at the top of the social tower, where they control the power and wealth in the country, and oppress the proletariats, (working class), with falsification of the capitalist hope which states that if people work hard they can be successful and wealthy. However this is just a false promise and it actually oppresses the people as, they think to be successful in life you have to work hard, but actually all they are doing, is working hard to keep the rich owners rich and the poor people poor. This is a similar idea to the hypodermic needle theory, a communications theory in the media, which suggests that an intended message in the media product, e.g. a television advert, is directly received and wholly accepted and affirmed by the receiver and reader of the media text. The norms and values of the ruling class and established order are encoded into the media text by the media institution, and are then directly decoded by the audience with the preferred reading intended by the media institutions. Overall Adorno’s is basically stating in his theory of culture and the media that the products from popular culture create false needs and products which are presented to an audience as a need in our modern day society but are in actual fact, just an way of presenting the ruling class ideology. He also states that popular culture pacifies an audience as the audience absorb the norms and values which is justification of the oppression of the working class, and finally the culture industry’s sole purpose is to make a profit for media industries and to take control of an audience by establishing false needs for a passive audience.
Fiske is another cultural theorist. Unlike Adorno’s theory whereby the power lies with the media institutions and producers and the audience are passive to the media, Fiske argues that the power is held by the audience themselves. He states that popular culture is made by the people not produced by the culture industry. All the culture industries can do is produce a repertoire of texts or cultural resources or the various formations of the people to use or reject in the on-going process of producing their popular culture. The power of the audience to interpret texts and determine their popularity in our society and culture is a much greater power and force than that of the media institutions to send a particular message or ideology within their med texts. Fiske also points out that we cannot talk about, ‘the audience’ as one mass of people who are all passive to the media texts and have little or no individuality and which all people have to same norms and values suggested and imposed by the media institutions, namely the ruling class ideology which is passed down through the media texts. A singular mass of consumers in our post-modern society of choice, fluidity and uncertainty, does not exist. This contrasts with Adorno’s theory as he suggests that in our society there is not individuality and we are all like robots, absorbing the ruling class ideology through the products made by the culture industry. However Fiske argues against Adorno stating that the range of individuals with their own changing tastes and beliefs are in control of the culture industry. Finally Fiske states that the, “Culture is a living, active process: it can be developed only from within, it cannot be imposed from without or above”. Culture is created in the act of the interpretation by the audience and only from the audience can a culture society be established. Through the gained choice and individuality in our postmodern era, we can choose or reject or accept products of culture according. Encoding and decoding, theorised by Stuart Hall is similar to Fiske’s theory of the culture industry. Encoding and decoding lies the power with the audience instead of the culture industry, which is the same as Fiske’s theory. It suggests that a media institution encode a media text with norms and values of the ruling class and insert them into the media text. The text is then shown to an audience who interpret the text in their own way, and ‘decode’ the text. The way the audience member interprets the texts can be dependant of a number of factors including their life experience, religious position, political stance or gender/age.
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