L.I.S.A.: What does “ideology critique” mean, particularly in relation to products of the culture industry? And what theory or theories do you refer to in your study?
Dr Babenhauserheide: It is precisely here, with this significance for individuals in late capitalist society as explained in the last answer, that we can apply ideology critique aided by the critical theory of the culture industry according to Theodor W. Adorno. Roughly speaking, ideology is the confirmation of social power relations, which can nevertheless arise in different forms, be it as justification, concealment, whitewashing, or duplication – as Adorno calls positions like “it is the way it is”. However, here ideology is not thought of as something that is used in a targeted way, primarily by the privileged, to consolidate their own position of power, but rather emerges first from the fact that social power relations appear to be different than they are and are not immediately transparent. Secondly, they come together with specific psychological motives of people, for example the desire to also identify with conditions in life that have been forced upon them in order to give themselves greater value. Ideology comes in where the wishes of the individuals and social requirements no longer fit with each other; it attempts to cement both sides together. Yet regardless of the form, according to Adorno this cementing “does not go smoothly”; rather, it is always fragile and contradictory in itself, partly because society itself is contradictory and irrational. We get material for these attempts at cementing from the culture industry. Thus, critical theory now refers not simply to the large corporations, but rather to the commodity-like structuring of culture and thus also of people’s experience and leisure.
To make it a bit clearer, perhaps: Some time ago a radio journalist wanted to interview me. He told me I shouldn’t use difficult words like “power relations”, because then people wouldn’t immediately understand it and would switch off. This had to be avoided, he said, because the station was funded through advertising revenue, which is dependent on ratings. This is interrelated to the need for as little strenuous sprinkling as possible, which stems from the fact that culture fulfils certain social functions regarding the relationship between leisure and work: In leisure time, people should and must recover through relaxation and exercise for example, in order to regain their strength for work. Yet by making radio this way, the listeners naturally get used to the fact that there cannot be anything new, alien, unforeseen. Here, it becomes clear how the commodity form affects the content. This kind of tailoring also determines education or semi-education; Adorno also talks about “culture according to the side of its subjective appropriation” and says that here the public taste becomes a pretext for keeping the consciousness of the masses who listen to the radio, for example, at the status quo. The way in which society, culture, but also education policy is organised leaves almost no scope for the promises of the New Humanist ideal of education, which themselves were not without their problems. If now, roughly speaking, young people who feel excluded in school, for example, take comfort in reading the Harry Potter series and in wearing T-shirts with slogans like “Just a Wizard Girl Living in a Muggle World” or “I Solemnly Swear That I Am Up To No Good”, which enable them to keep going in spite of everything, then that also fulfils an ideological function to a certain extent: They integrate themselves this way. Robert Pfaller writes that we need second worlds in order to be able to live in the first. Now, there are various interpretations of the theses put forward by Horkheimer and Adorno on the culture industry; on the one hand the culturally pessimistic reading, which imagines the culture industry as a uniform system of delusion (and thus as the absolute antithesis of art, education, and emancipation), and on the other, the understanding that, for example, the cultural scholar Sonja Witte represents and which my study confirms, namely that because of the ideological contradictoriness not least, emancipatory potential is also inherent in the delusion.