1 - Redeeming contradictions: from critical theory to cultural studies

Summary

Adorno, culture, and film

The reification of a great work of art is not just loss, any more than the reification of the cinema is all loss … Both bear the stigmata of capitalism, both contain elements of change … Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up.

Theodor Adorno wrote these words from London to Walter Benjamin in a letter dated March 18, 1936. They articulate the promise of a unified culture that expresses “integral freedom” although they dismiss the possibility of realizing this promise as the simple addition of the two halves of culture, high and popular or mass culture, in a capitalist society. Some years later, in the essay “Cultural Criticism and Society,” written in the United States before his return to Germany at the end of the forties, Adorno expressed his reservations about the concept of culture itself, by which he means, in this context, high culture. He suggests that cultural criticism makes culture into a fetish by isolating it from larger social processes. Neither art nor philosophy, when they are true, are ever complete in and of themselves.