Risk and Extortion XXXVI: The Critique of Cultural Marxism 2:

Blinded by Electricity

When Adorno and Horkheimer referred to Verblendung with reference to the Enlightenment, they meant it literally. The unfolding of the Enlightenment is both a repetition and a perversion of Plato’s allegory of the cave. By associating knowledge with light, they also implied that common sense is shrouded in shadows of truth, which blend into the darkness of superstitions (including those of religion). This is very similar to Plato. However, unlike Plato, they do not assume that the blinding effect of the light is merely a temporary inconvenience that will be overcome by adaptation. Instead, they maintain that the production of this light is tied to the industrial-capitalist mode of production, which they referred to as the culture industry.

Whereas Plato’s light of truth came directly from the sun, the light that is cast by the culture industry is electric and extracted from fossil fuels. Foster is absolutely right to point out that Cultural Marxism suffers from a lack of interest in the dynamics of extractivism and the industrialization of agriculture. This, however, is not a fundamental critique. It is easily repaired. The culture industry of the 1930s and 1940s relied on the extraction of fossil fuels to produce electricity, which in turn produced the light that blinds and deceives the masses. While creating a parallel universe that was seemingly detached from reality (e.g., television, cinema, jazz, protest songs), it was extracting a vast amount of material resources from this reality. That is to say, the reality produced by the culture industry is already a form of deception in its very mode of production.

Electricity seems to be of very little interest in the humanities and social sciences. Even those that focus on digitalization, for example, are rarely interested in the energetic infrastructure that enables it. Electricity simply comes from a socket. However, the word culture industry has industry in it, and industry connotes an organization of technicity that relies on the extraction of energy from sources more commonly associated with “nature” – the earth, the movements of water, wind, and the sun. Indeed, industry implies a transformation of energy from extraction to mechanical and/or digital processes to heat.

The adjective culture is often misunderstood as referring to something “merely” superstructural, a veneer over the real, hard underlying reality of the mode of production. That, however, is because the actual meaning of culture – as the collectivized ability to solve problems – has been neglected. Culture derives from praxes, and praxes are historical, material, and dialectical. The Marxist base-superstructure opposition violates the logic of dialectical historical materialism; indeed, it is much more like Feuerbach’s spectatorial materialism.

Culture, as the collectivized ability to solve problems, is praxis and cannot be reduced to ideology or representations. Ideological and representational practices are of course cultural, but they have to be understood not as abstract functions, but instead as derived from attempts to solve concrete problems. Abstraction is also a cultural practice that emerges to solve specific problems, such as those related to commodification. With the expansion of Western consumer culture, for example, we can see how consumption became a major practice of problem-solving, which triggers that of abstraction, as it derives from commodity fetishism: the commodity to be consumed is alleged to solve the problem that one has encountered because of its internal properties, from which its exchange value derives. The fact that the causal relationship may have been reversed – i.e., a problem has been created and transformed into a need for a commodity – disappears through real abstraction, as the commodity itself obliterates the creation of needs and presents them as always-already-there.

Hence, the culture industry is not merely some excessive superstructural addendum, but operates at the core of the mode of production: it transforms the relations of production through the manipulation of needs. The working class has been transformed into the consuming mass. Of course, this does not mean that the working class – let alone class struggle – has ceased to exist. The condition of having to sell one’s labour in order to exist is still a major determinant for the lives of most (but not all) earthlings today. However, Western imperialism has also enabled the accumulation and, above all, hoarding of sufficient wealth within Western nation-states that they could afford their workers to become consumers, which enabled them to become entangled in complex webs of dependencies that are often framed as credit and debt, but which always relate to consumption.

The concept of the worker-consumer is very astute when considering the condition of the majority of the working class in the West, even if a growing subsection of those are currently facing increased proletarianization. This is something that Marcuse had already described in One-Dimensional Man. Thus, it does not apply to the condition of the working class worldwide, especially in the Global South. That is, a fundamental component of contemporary imperial capitalism is the sharp divide within the working class between worker-consumers and disenfranchised workers who work and live from hand to mouth (whom Arendt would perhaps label as animal laborans). Worker-consumers can be punished and rewarded with the commodification of solutions; the disenfranchised workers are less susceptible to the industrialization of culture, but therefore more subjected to repression and state violence.

To be blinded by electricity, one needs to be exposed to media that work with light. Screen-based media enable a synaesthetic experience of how commodification affects the formation of subjectivity, as they combine sound and image. Electricity itself, however, is also a tactile medium. That is, affectivity may actually also be invoked in the sense meant by McLuhan in relation to television as a cool medium. That is, the blinding that might be understood in relation to Plato’s cave is not merely visual; it is synaesthetic – a numbing effect that washes over the public and at once engenders massification and pacification.