Abstract
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's concept of the culture industry remains a powerful description of the fate of art, literature and other cultural products in an era where media and information technology have made culture more industrial and reifying than ever before. We revisit this concept, tracing it forward from Walter Benjamin's initial contributions and proceeding onward the work of Herbert Marcuse against the backdrop of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism. We provide a brief description of historical origins with David Hawkes' works on the emergence of commodity fetishism in 16th-century England and carry this forward to Joseph S. Nye's discussions of the more contemporary phenomenon of soft power. Returning to Horkheimer and Marcuse's concerns for the logic underlying capitalist reification, as well as Adorno's longstanding concern that a culture industry could not produce a socialist consciousness (contrary to Benjamin's optimism), and recalling Marx's admonition that capitalism and nationalism are essentially the same road, we question whether there has ever been a socialist art or literature in China or anywhere else, whether one is possible, and whether we should concern ourselves firstly with products (e.g., soft power, media censorship, propaganda) or the mode of production that produces them.
First Page
146
Last Page
155
Recommended Citation
Josef, Gregory Mahoney. 2020. "Culture Industry and Mass Deception: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Concerns about Soft Power in China." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 40, (1): pp.146-155. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol40/iss1/4
