Passage Explicated

"In adapting itself entirely to need, the work of art defrauds human beings in advance of the liberation from the principle of utility which it is supposed to bring about." (Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno, from Dialectic of Enlightenment, page 128)

In this chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which Horkheimer and Adorno elaborate on the mechanics of the culture industry, the two thinkers weave a complex argument about the function of art in contemporary society. For them, power exists immanently to culture, a power which becomes regulated by numerous systems. These systems comprise the architecture of society, which assumes the status of second nature, a given, as something self-evident. Instead of individual subjectivities manning the helms of those various systems, the systems become autonomous and run silently in the background, but they require tune-ups. Science becomes the mechanic, the regulator, that sees to the maintenance of those systems, assuring the masses that science alone needs to know the intricacies of the systems' functionings. As the only entity with access to the inner workings of the machinery, science regulates the circuitry and writes the programs that govern the day-to-day production of infrastructural needs. The artwork finds itself circulating as a commodity in the flows of the economic system, where the principle of exchange value regulates the pace of the flow. Use value derives from exchange value, as Horkheimer and Adorno explain in the sentence directly following the one above: “What might be called use value in the reception of cultural assets is being replaced by exchange value [...] Everything has value only insofar as it can be exchanged, not in so far as it is something in itself. For consumers, the use value of art, its essence, is a fetish, and the fetish—the social valuation which they mistake for the merit of works of art—becomes its only use value, the only quality they enjoy.” Bourdieu picks up on this concept in his theory of cultural and symbolic capital in The Field of Cultural Production, and retrospectively we can see Marx elaborating on this concept in Capital, the source, no doubt, of Horkheimer's and Adorno's thinking on this matter.

By parsing the syntax of the epigraph above, we start to see various performances enacted by the artwork. For example, we read that the artwork adapts itself to need. It makes itself seem needed. Its need becomes its value, and as a commodity of value the artwork legitimates its entrance into the circulation of goods and concepts in the economic system. The passage also declares that the artwork defrauds human beings. The artwork dissembles by way of the disguise it dons in order to adapt itself to need. More specifically, the artwork defrauds human beings of the liberation from the principle of utility. In other words, the artwork has no use value. It is only through deploying a strategy of deception that the artwork can survive in an economic system fine-tuned to admit and allow to circulate commodities with specific exchange values that generate and emit an aura of usefulness. Without that aura, the commodity becomes defunct and marked as useless, pathetic, and inert.

There are high stakes to the artwork's play of deception. Bourgeois artworks function through and intrinsic drive of mimesis that culminates in the formation of a shiny surface that can reflect the reality of second nature back to he or she who possesses the work of art. In this way, the bourgeois artwork confirms the tautology of the market, which circulates commodities in order to circulate commodities ad infinitum and in order to perpetuate the myth of usefulness. This idea resonates in a quotation from page 127: “That character is not new: it is the fact that art now dutifully admits to being a commodity, abjures its autonomy and proudly takes its place among consumer goods, that has the charm of novelty.” For Horkheimer and Adorno, there is no debate about whether or not the work of art has become completely commodified. There is, however, an alternative to the bourgeois artwork. This alternative appears in the negative space between sentences on the machinery of the culture industry. The alternative is precisely the artwork that dissembles. The work of art that produces for itself an aura of usefulness and infiltrates the flows of commodity exchange carries within it a type of virus, one that attacks the economic mechanisms regulated by exchange. Horkheimer and Adorno refer to this virus as the pure work of art. The pure artwork negates the commodity character of society by simply following its own inherent laws (127). The pure work of art is, in this way, tuned to a different pitch and can create a type of dissonance that erodes the economic system from within. Whereas the bourgeois artwork replicates itself through the means of mechanical reproduction and eradicates any trace of the labor that goes into its construction, the pure work of art would make the labor of its birth explicitly visible; it would sound-off arrogantly and in an ugly voice. In order to infiltrate the system, however, the pure work of art needs to lower its voice and send its eyes to the ground as it walks past the sentinels. Once in circulation, the pure work of art may become fond of its disguise and lose its desire to throw a shoe into the machine. Once complacent, the system subsumes the artwork and renders it harmless. This is, unfortunately, the risk the pure artwork must run. The culture industry, with its rapid circulation of commodities and the smiling face it shows to its eager consumers, breaks down all resistance and develops vaccinations to protect against the free radical.

To return to the quotation at the start of this paper, we can say that the key performance of the work of art is its ability to defraud. With a fraudulent identity, the pure work of art can work to liberate the mind from the monotony of everyday life. It wears this mask with a risk, however, because the keepers of the status quo, those who regulate the machinery, seek out any identity that includes a difference. The pure work of art is by no means invincible to the leveling mechanisms of the culture industry. Its radicalism can be tamed. Though Horkheimer and Adorno do not specifically address the avant-garde movements of the radical work of art in this chapter, they do appear to be delimiting the boundaries of the field through which those artworks move. By rendering visible the terrain and the man-made obstacles of society, the authors present a map that can help us to navigate the pitfalls of culture and the dead-ends that appear at first glance to be freeways.