The Culture Industry part 2 | Complacency’s Death Knell

If you missed the first part of this two-part column, never fear—I will bring you up to speed! First question to clarify: what is “The Culture Industry?” A: it is the ideas of “popular culture” and “counterculture” sold to consumers that both reside under a single umbrella. More or less.

This means that hating—let’s say—American Idol, Call of Duty (the Modern Warfare series, specifically), Twilight, Justin Bieber, Apple products, etc./et al solely because they’re popular is essentially equal to loving them. [lolwut?] It’s all equal in the eyes of fatcat marketers and financiers. They’re pockets invariably get lined either way. Enough negative hype still generates revenue; there’s no such thing as bad press, and all that.

Or to use another example: videogames. This is where those annoying unabashed “fanboys” (and girls) and “haters” come into play. If you own an Xbox, you might take every opportunity you can to make jabs at people who are “dumb enough” to buy a Playstation 3. Or if you are in Sony’s camp, you might take every opportunity to expound upon the evils of Microsoft. (Nintendo gets thrown under the bus by both camps for [almost a direct quote from a gaming forum somewhere] “not making games suitable for ages five and up.”) Exclusive platform titles notwithstanding, most games play—if not look and sound—almost identically. But superior/inferior gameplay is not the real point here—it’s really boils down to affiliation, a sort of imagined “us” versus “them” and a point of contention (among many, many) for “us” to validate “our” own decisions at the expense of decisions made by “them” (and so on and so forth).

But no matter what, the consumer ultimately spends their money on one or the other of (for all intents and purposes) the same damn thing. As H. & A. (the Marxist cats from part 1) say, “The advantages and disadvantages debated by enthusiasts serve only to perpetuate the appearance of competition and choice… The details become interchangeable.” It’s the enthusiasts who seek some kind of enlightenment from dissecting two very similar things (products?) and proclaiming one or the other to be superior.

So I submit that I say a lot of things. And I personally hate it when people say, “Like I always say, (insert wisdom or witticism here:_______)”. I really hate—no, I loathe, I abhor it. Hunter S. Thompson once said, “A word to the wise is infuriating.” But I’m not much one for following rules, even if they are my own, so I’m going to offer something I, in fact, have a tendency to repeat with some regularity: never apologize for liking what you like. The term “Guilty Pleasure” should be considered a four-letter word. If you like “bad” 80s rock music, mullets and Camaros, then—by god!—either rock out with your cock out, or jam out with your clam out! Be proud of that shit; own that shit! Rock/jam out fiercely, I say!

I think there are far too few people who get to fully enjoy what they really like. I.e. the alpha male type who, on any given occasion, would rather be at a dive bar with his buddies telling dick and fart jokes rather than going to art gallery openings or indie film premiers because they are (or at least they might be) interested in the hip, alternative chick who wears thick rimmed glasses and a wool stocking cap, even throughout the summer. You shouldn’t have to try to like people, and by the same token, you shouldn’t have to try to get people to like you. I mean, what happened to letting things happen naturally and organically?

The problem is that we think we do—we think we have to try, that is. It’s a sort of square peg/round hole [N.B. no, that’s not what she said] kind of deal. But we all want to be liked. And we all wanted to be respected and have our tastes and decisions validated. This is where the Culture Industry pops in: pick one of, say, for argument’s sake, ten different archetypes of person (in this example, we are supposing there are only ten), buy the products commonly associated with your chosen archetype and—abracadabra!—say hello to the you that is still you, only better and more popular!

Now all of a sudden, I am a skinny jeans- and scarf-wearing, Thomas Pynchon-reading (though, on second thought, I actually do like Pynchon so maybe he’s not the best example—maybe Gaddis? or Joyce? Let’s say, hypothetically, my favorite book of all time is the nearly incomprehensible Finnegan’s Wake.), art gallery-attending, wholly metro-sexual and postmodern American male. The kicker is that I’d have to try to be this guy. For some people, that is who they are; for others, they feel compelled to become someone else.

I only mention the particular type above because it’d take a lot of work for me to get there, to “be” that guy. My own style is more along the lines of a hoodie with loose, boot-cut jeans, a baseball cap and, most likely, a pair of Sketchers because I hate spending a lot of money on uncomfortable shoes. (I used to rock Chucks since I was little but they do absolutely nothing for shock absorption and what that does to the degenerative disc I’ve got in my lower back.) But I happen like Pynchon and art galleries (well, sometimes), and bad 80s rock music and Ninja Turtles and UFOs and Quantum Mechanics and all kinds of other shit that sits on the fringes of what’s considered cool and what’s weird; shit I “should” be embarrassed to admit I like—but I don’t because I’m not.

H. & A. write: “Each single manifestation of the culture industry inescapably reproduces human beings as what the whole has made them.” I would argue: only if we let it.

Human beings’ innate need for acceptance creates a situation where we might mold ourselves to what we think society expects of us. [N.B. See the epidemic-like phenomena of Photoshopping of already gorgeous celebrities to make them appear thinner, fitter and more beautiful, more “appealing”. (N.B.2 See the epidemic-like influx of bulimia and anorexia nervosa among younger and younger women, girls.)]

A question like, ‘Why would someone be so desperate to fit into a society known to ostracize and exclude on a whim want to “pray the gay away,” misses the point completely. The real question is, ‘Why was there ever a desire to invent something as self-effacing and character compromising as “praying the gay away;” why should someone have to change who they really are?’ The Culture Industry is polarizing and binary; things are either black or white; things are either right or wrong; there is not room for gray, for outliers.

You are either with us, or against us. [N.B. comma intentional to give pause and designate separation.]

The problem with that kind of binary logic resides in the fact that, where human beings are concerned, outliers are more the rule than the exception. It’s only because we [society] take[s] those outliers and pushes them toward whichever pole they are naturally close to. People can’t even really be segregated into something as simple as male and female. [It isn’t that humans haven’t tried to simplify their own classifications—just take a look at Nazi Germany c. 1942. (You kind of see where I’m going with that, right?)]

True originality does not come from how many tattoos you have, how many piercings, the kind and brand of clothes you wear, the music you listen to, the books you read—any of that. Those are just things we occupy our time with. True originality comes from knowing who you are and being OK with that person—being more than OK—fucking loving that person! Respecting that person enough to let them live the way they want, enough to pursue their dreams with ferocity and gusto [N.B. I’m bringing gusto back.]

The Culture Industry would have you believe success is measured by the amount of money you earn, your career, your number of friends, the size of your house, how much shit you acquired you didn’t need but felt compelled to buy. The Culture Industry says that success is making six or seven or eight figures, it’s working 60 or 80 hours a week, never sleeping, never spending “free time” indulging yourself with the items you’ve bought—you’re only supposed to indulge yourself by buying said items; keep spending; yes, spend, my friend, spend!—you don’t waste free time on leisure because that time could be better used accumulating more wealth. That’s success, goddamnit.

I say fuck The Culture Industry.

In my opinion, the most successful people in the world do what they love for a living, irrespective of wealth (because if we’ve learned anything from Wall Street, it’s that the value of a dollar is nothing if not capricious). Simple as that. For me, my beacons for success followed their passion and inherent abilities and the wealth simply followed.

I submit that there must be more than a few brokers who trade commodities at the New York Stock Exchange who genuinely love—and excel at—making money. Gaining wealth for its own sake can be a genuine passion. I just happen to think that most people get locked into doing things to pay their bills because of the convenience of a steady paycheck. Therein lies the other problem: The Culture Industry is impossible to escape entirely.

The Culture Industry is both #OccupyWallStreet and the the 1%. Gil Scott-Heron was probably wrong: the revolution will be televised; it’s being televised as we speak, or at least parts of it; the Culture Industry wants you to see what’s happening and it wants to tell you how to feel about it, which side you are on. The Culture Industry is ubiquitous.

This is not going to turn into a rant against Capitalism. As far as I can tell, it might be the best economic system we’ve got. But the simple fact remains that, unless you are willing to find unclaimed land in the middle of nowhere and live off only what you can hunt and gather, you are all but required to participate in The Culture Industry machine. Which, I should add, is not entirely a bad thing—as long as you make it work for you. The way to do that might be simpler than it seems.

Do what you want, not what’s expected of you. Trying to be the person others want you to be never works. It leads to heartache and disappointment.

A long time ago, I said, I want to be a writer. It’s all I’ve really ever wanted to do. As a consequence, I’ve never treated writing like an impossible long shot. I’m 30 and I don’t really have a career. I’ve been to grad school (English and Journalism), I’ve freelanced, I’ve written grants and even created newsletters for nonprofit companies. I’ve done a lot of things that aren’t exactly writing but I’ve also never stopped believing it was going to happen, that I was going to be a writer. Before I turn 31, I’ll officially have my first book published by a small, but legitimate press (a collection of essays and true’ish stories, mostly). Hopefully I can parlay that into something more resembling a career. That might not happen but I won’t stop writing, I can’t stop.

What you do for a living is not who you are. You are who you are. You and me—we’ve been told over the years that a lot of stuff is the way it is because “it’s always been that way,” an answer that has always felt to me like a cop out and wholly unsatisfying. At some point in everyone’s lives, they have to make a decision to either suck on the candy-coated lollipop of the Culture Industry machine until they finally get to the chewy bullshit center, or they can start asking themselves, “Why am I doing this?” and “Is this really how I want to spend an entire third of my life?”

Everyone should, however, keep this in mind: complacency can be a death sentence.