Adorno: Semi-Formation as Cultural Reconstruction of Society :: Culture Cultural Papers

Adorno: Semi-Formation as Cultural Reconstruction of Society ABSTRACT: The apprehension of the culture industry in its totality, as it is presented in Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, makes it necessary to turn to his Theory of Self-Formation, where the cultural domain of the constellation of society has an explicit formative dimension. The cultural formation, the German Bildung, expresses such a prism. It is not a national peculiarity, but it translates in the experience of delay of the German bourgeois society as the formative dimension of culture, generally hidden in the social constitution, facilitating the basis of immanent criticism. In the State interventionist society that follows the liberal order, with the manipulation of the totalitarian State and the society of mass consumption, the productive process does not tolerate the formative experience of autonomy: there is a social reconstruction of culture as culture industry, which turns out to be a political concept. Here there is not absence, but an eclipse of formation. It is semi -formation: only integration, without autonomy. When universality, instead of residing in ideals formed within culture formation, resides on universalization of given cultural goods, the mercantile ideals only integrate the masses. The culture industry is the chore of what appears as the cultural construction of society, in terms of the integrating semi-formation. The disintegration of the working class and its reconstruction en masse are a result of the formation process of which the culture industry is a part. Formation is concealed because the social construction is confounded with the cultural construction; society is itself ideology. The social organization obstructs the experience of the social formative labor in the integration. Society appears to be an extra-productive socialization. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1985), written with Horkheimer, Adorno analyzed the social formation of a State interventionist order, that followed the earlier liberal one. To the authors, then emigrated to the USA, the north-American experience of mass culture complemented the experience of cultural manipulation of the totalitarian fascism, conditioning the famous conception of culture industry. The manipulation of the masses by the totalitarian fascist State in its function as the main economic agent would be found again in the consumers' society. Such society, apparently did not need the support of a legitimating ideology. By representing the fulfillment of ideals as consumers goods the society itself becomes ideology. The rise of the living standards of the inferior classes, materially reprehensible and socially regretful, reflects itself on the hypocrite expansion of the spirit.