Expanding Territory: Culture Industry and Digital Media

Hybrid Discourse is a series of events investigating current cultural debates in the context of digital media. Focusing on key issues such as relations between art and industry, emerging cultural, commercial and hybrid practices as well as new models of institutional practices this program seeks to re-address critical terms of Adorno and Horkheimer's original concept of the culture industry in a current context.

In response to this invited speakers will explore various areas of cultural practice including cultural criticism, artistic, curatorial and entrepreneural practice.

Interested parties explain the culture industry in technological terms. It is alleged that because millions participate in it, certain reproduction processes are necessary that inevitably require identical needs in innumerable places to be satisfied with identical goods. The technical contrast between the few production centers and the large number of widely dispersed consumption points is said to demand organisation and planning by management. Furthermore, it is claimed that standards were based in the first place on consumer’s needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger. No mention is made of the fact that the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is the greatest. A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself.

[‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer]

In its original sense, ‘the culture industry’ (introduced by the Frankfurt School in 'The Dialectic of Enlightenment', 1944) –is in itself a contradictory term setting the culture against its antithesis in industry - referring to the production of mass culture and including such areas of mass communication as radio, TV, press, film/cinema. The account proposed by Adorno and Horkheimer suggests that consumers in late capitalism are deprived of free-choice, and that use-value has been brought under the control of producers due to the power of mass media and advertising in particular. This places the consumer in an awkward if not passive position, and characterises electronic media technologies as necessarily authoritarian (in one-to- many communication). On the other hand, the common view held by new media commentators is to argue that networked digital technologies break this power relation between producers and consumers (in many-to-many communication). However, Adorno and Horkheimer’s position is to argue that ‘consumption may serve to express a deep awareness of the damage that capitalism is inflicting upon consumers’ who, in turn, develop a range of effective strategies to use the system to their own advantage. Are these also the strategies employed by practitioners from various areas of cultural practice?

Hybrid Discourse aims to reconsider ‘the culture industry’ in response to an evolving cultural landscape shaped by the advent of new technologies.


Each of the events is free and open to the public. The presentations will be webcast and visitors to the website are encouraged to participate in the evolving conversations through the discussion forum.