The Capitalist Society

Reading the articles, “The Work of Art in the Age Mechanical Reproduction” and “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” by both Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adjorno got me thinking the way people are today and at the pedestal we put pop culture today, and the term “cultural chaos.” Not realizing (some realizing and not caring) that the entertainment industry is just as its name states, an industry. An industry that caters to the individual, while at the same time catering to everyone, we are living in world where everything we buy, we watch, we listen to, is in some way being recorded, jotted down, noted somewhere. So it can later be reproduced in a different vision but in the same essence. We live in a world of consumers and producers, we consume, they produce, they are the capitalist who seems to be getting richer and richer, while we struggle to maintain ourselves every day. This was best highlighted in Adjorno’s article in which he talks about slums and city dwellings, designed to make the individuals who can’t afford any better feel like an individual. Here, the capitalists come in with their suggestive marketing as the new found individuals “are drawn into the center in search of work and pleasure.” With poorer getting poorer and the richer getting richer, reproduction has become an ever-increasing way of the industry. And has completely overshadowed the value, as stated in Benjamin’s article about reproduction, “They brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery…” Meaning that as we go to the movies for example, and we praise the blockbuster, the outcome of the feature itself isn’t what people go out of it, but, what did the companies get out of it? Meaning box office, product placement, they later take that back, and reproduce the next Spider Man installment.

In this sense, it is proven that we are not living in cultural chaos because we live in highly monitored lifestyle, everything that we want to see is shown to us and we are able to take it home with us and everything that has been determined not so pleasurable is thrown away and forgotten. So to say we live in a cultural chaos isn’t true because we are only given what we love. The only victim here is unfortunately the art itself, with mass reproduction letting us take home everything we see and here, and with the reproduction only producing what we want, it leaves little space for the value of the product, versus the value of the product. Meaning the meaning, the art, the essence of anything is now drowned out by how much it can sell for or how much revenue it can bring in. In this sense, art now depreciates itself in the era of mass production because simply put when something is overly duplicated, it loses itself. We put pop culture on a high pedestal of highly anticipated releases, but the art in pop culture remains dormant, and we don’t even see it because we’ve conformed.