Week 9 - Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and the Culture Industry

Adorno and Horkheimer saw the fundamental operation of humans as a general progression towards reasoned thought, though believed that enlightenment had not yet been reached. Culture is described as a 'commodity[1]' that is affirmed and reaffirmed by public thought. This allows culture to 'cheat' its recipients with endless promises that leave us with a culture determined not by the inherent needs of its members, but by what they can be fooled into believing they want. This moves towards Adorno and Horkheimer's theory of Reification, the process by which culture is 'thingified' and therefore gains a type of divinity or respect that it would otherwise struggle to garner.

In the seminar, we applied this to the idea of 'fixed gender', looking at the ways in which we view women. Adorno and Horkheimer remind us that the things that make an individual 'female' in the public eye are not inherent or innate, meaning that we must establish and isolate the attributes culture imposes on a fixed viewpoint of gender instead of our own natural urge to distinguish the sexes.

This reminded me of the recend furore over 'girl' Lego. The toy has expanded into a range that divides normal Lego (cars, boats etc) from 'girl' Lego (shops, dresses, hairstyles). The identity of the lego my generation grew up with  has now changed, following culture's gender binary, meaning that we can look back and say, 'at seven years old, they only sold 'boy' Lego'.

Furthermore, the things that Lego have chosen to work as 'differentiators' between the gendered dolls are telling - the female doll has a pronounced chest and more sculpted face-shape than the male doll. The hair and clothing are both embellished to a far higher degree. Whereas previous 'female' dolls relied solely upon a different, removable hair-style to distinguish them, we now have a whole range of pseudo-biological differences.

I suppose Adorno and Horkheimer would tell us that imposing genders upon previously unisex dolls is an example of formal freedoms being circumvented by elements of social control. In the Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf tells us that for every positive feminist action, there is a negative one of social control that takes its place. Lego has taken steps to affirm to little girls that they will always be burdened by their difference, even when they are too young to understand.

[1] Horkheimer, Max & Adorno, Theodor W., Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. by Edmunt Jephcott, Stanford University Press, California, 2002