desire and the power to create stories that legitimize their actions. Indeed, he argues, all elites, throughout history, have created the ideas that support their ascendancy. “The ideas of the ruling classes are in every epoch the ruling ideas,” he famously wrote (1978 [1846]: 172). These ideas have been developed by more recent thinkers who talk about how art forms can function as social control. Marxists believe that the cultural “superstructure” reflects the economic “base”, as we saw in the previous chapter. A related strand of Marxism sees the superstructure as an instrument of control. The superstructure, created by capitalism, shapes workers to fit better with capitalism.
Hegemony
An important contribution to this line of thinking was made in the 1930s by Antonio Gramsci (1971), who wrote about hegemony. Hegemony is a form of cultural control. In this view, elites rule through subtle persuasion, not (for the most part) through force, as the latter engenders greater resistance. As Marx (1978 [1846]) himself wrote, “The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships” (p. 172). But “each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled…to represent its interest as the common interest of all members of society, that is…it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones” (p. 174). Hegemony embodies the norms, values, and world views foisted on society by the dominant elites. Importantly, while these hegemonic ideals reflect the interests of the dominant elites who created them, they get their power from the fact that they are widely shared and largely unquestioned by most members of the society. Hegemony controls because people buy into it and come to take it for granted.
The idea of employment is one such hegemonic idea. Most people reading this book probably either have a job already or are planning to get one, perhaps once their education is finished. We could question the idea of getting a job and contemplate living off‐grid in simple harmony with the land, hunting or growing food, weaving cloth for garments, and forgoing luxuries such as computers or flush toilets. We could question employment, but for the most part, we do not. We want to work, for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which is that we have come to see quite a number of erstwhile luxuries as necessities. The idea of employment is hegemonic; not only do we fail to question it, we actively seek it out. As Marxists point out, however, this plays into the hands of capitalists, who want a source of willing labor to exploit for their own ends.
Hegemony develops through a variety of means, but what is important for the sociology of the arts is that elites are instrumental in the creation and distribution of cultural products. They are, therefore, able to place into art ideas favorable to their own interests. To continue the example, movies, television dramas, and sitcoms portray people in occupations. That is, most of the characters have some sort of job, even though you may never see them in a work setting. We can think of exceptions, of course. Housewives are shown at home (a different hegemonic idea), the idle rich are shown idling (we envy them and work harder), and down‐and‐outs are shown in their squalor (we wish to avoid their fate). There is also a “rebel” genre where men or women take to the road to escape (which may soothe our restless fantasies). But the idea that comes across in these cultural forms is that society expects you to get a job. Both fine art and popular art can have hegemonic effects.
The Frankfurt School
An important strand of critical theory was written by a group of scholars collectively known as the “Frankfurt School”. They wrote about the popular arts produced by the culture industries, those business firms which produce cultural products for profit. The mass culture produced by these industries is homogenous, standardized, and predictable. Indeed, they argue, mass culture resembles a commodity churned out through mass production techniques. Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, the idea that people value things in monetary terms, is central here. Cultural commodities are tainted by commodity fetishism, and unlike the authentic arts, they are not valued for themselves, but for their exchange value. Adorno suggests, however, that mass culture products are given some surface difference, a pseudo‐individuality to veil their commodified nature.
This standardized culture is easy to digest, as it requires no critical thinking. In fact, a key function of mass culture is to discourage critical thinking:
the total effect of the culture industry is one of anti‐enlightenment, in which, as Horkheimer and I have noted, enlightenment, that is the progressive technical domination, becomes mass deception and is turned into a means of fettering consciousness. It impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves…while obstructing the emancipation for which human beings are as ripe as the productive forces of the epoch permit
(Adorno, 1991 [1941]: 92)
Or as Strinati (2004: 51) phrases it, Adorno “thought that the promise of the Enlightenment to extend human freedom through scientific and rational progress had turned into a nightmare because science and rationality were instead stamping out human freedom.”
As we saw in Chapter 2, Adorno believed that popular music, which is standardized, reflects the mind‐numbing work of industrial capitalism. Further, capitalism requires numb minds. Stimulating the brains of workers, even outside the workplace, undermines this requirement. Popular entertainments have to be as soporific as daily work. As a result, the popular arts are “pre‐digested”—made easy to absorb through standardization—such that workers would not realize just how stupefied they were and would continue to show up day after day. Adorno also argued that the purpose of this mass culture is control and conformity: the very vacuity and banality of commodity culture fools workers into a passive acceptance of the world as it is. This demonstrates that Adorno, like other Marxist writers, saw reflection and shaping working dialectically. The economic base determines (“conditions”) the superstructure. In this way mindless art reflects mindless work. However, the superstructure also shapes the base. Mindless art is passively consumed, so workers do not develop their critical senses. This inability to evaluate their own conditions hides the true nature of capitalism from workers, who thus continue their dreary existence with no hope of release. Authentic art would sharpen their minds, but the workers do not seek out authentic art, because they are too exhausted from their work to attack authentic art with the vigor it demands, and so the cycle continues.
Marcuse (1972 [1964]) suggests that the cultural industries create false needs in consumers. People have true needs to be autonomous—to express themselves and to make decisions about their actions. The cultural industries substitute the false needs of consumption, which keeps workers from realizing that their true needs are not met. Thus, the cultural industries lull workers into a passive acceptance of capitalism, first, by stupefying them and then by convincing them that the freedom to buy one brand over another is an adequate substitute for the true political freedom they would find after casting off the shackles of capitalist production and wage slavery. The products of the cultural industries are imposed on workers, but they also act to hide the imposition and, indeed, encourage workers to actually seek out the distractions proffered.
The arguments of the Frankfurt School are not very flattering to the people who comprise the masses. Indeed, Adorno was accused in his lifetime of elitism. His response was to stress “the vacuity, banality and conformity fostered by the cultural industry. He sees it as a highly destructive force… To ignore the nature of the culture industry, as Adorno defines it, is to succumb to its ideology… [which] is corrupting and manipulative, and underpins the dominance of the market and commodity fetishism” (Strinati, 2004: 56). The Frankfurt school unashamedly favored the fine arts, because they believed that true art is part of an authentic culture that promotes clear and critical thinking. A rejection of the unsatisfying pleasures offered by the popular arts, they suggest, would allow the masses to comprehend their subjugation, it
