HOLLA! 11/1/09

In class on Thursday we discussed Adorno and his ideas on how culture has become what it is today and almost how it got there. One quotation in particular that sums up Adorno’s idea is, “The concept of a genuine style becomes transparent in the culture industry as the aesthetic equivalent to power” (47). This idea means that if you want to be in the ruling class its normal for you to have style. It goes back to Marx’s idea of how the individuals with material well-being are the ruling class. So if you have style you are materialistic well off, you are the leader, you are the haves who are producing style for the have-nots to internalize. The world functions on this notion of ideology how the stylish individuals in this world are the ones who really develop our culture. Even though Hebdige might say that subcultures become the new trend in many cases, it is the haves and the stylish who bring it to the forefront. Designers are who bring the “grunge” look into the mainstream for example, these designers are the haves producing this subculture into the new stylish idea that will be internalized by the have nots. This idea is what our culture focuses on and I believe that this is the idea that Adorno was trying to capitalize on. The standardized forms…were originally derived from the needs of the consumers…(42). The consumers, the haves, are who determine what will be the stylish in thing. Adorno also capitalized in his reading on the idea of, “Culture today is infecting everything with sameness” (41). Everything is the same in our culture, and we want the same things. So the haves produce the style that everyone else buys into, yet we are buying into these same ideas tat have been circulating for forever, this is based on Lyotard’s idea of Bricolage. I think Adorno had a lot of true thing to talk about on culture, and he really summed up how our culture functions as a whole.