The psychological ways of manipulation on the cultural industry: the laughter and the tragic in the United States of the 1930's

Abstract

This research seeks to address some aspects of the cultural industrial question such as this theme appears on Theodor Adorno's work. Since the end of the 1920's, Adorno worries about the meaning of the new production means and distribution of cultural products. During his exile period in the United States, he gets surprised with the level of development of this process and looks for deepen his reflections about, elaborating the concept of cultural industry. The cultural industry is, for Adorno, a complex phenomenon, which involves different levels, problems and inter-related aspects. In this work, we approach two important aspects, both related to the manipulator character of the cultural industry: the laughter and the tragic. Almost opposite complementary, they are two ways through which people's psychology is achieved and manipulated. In the first case, the laughter, Adorno distinguishes two opposite possibilities: the laughter of reconciliation and the laughter of terror. Both follow the moment in which overcomes the fear, but they get differenced by the meaning of this overcoming - in the first, the laughter manifests the relief of the liberty reached against a threatening power, while in the second he expresses the submission to the potency and the negation of the liberty. The easy funny provided by the cultural industry works then as a way of renunciation to the happiness, since this last goes beyond the laughter. In this aspect, it is evident therefore the ascetic and misleading of the cultural industry, which seduces through promises, but denies the access to the things themselves. In the second case, the tragic one, we have a complement that serves to avoid the accusation of levity. The cultural goods have to include the tragic on pain of losing the capacity of attracting and convincing their public. But the manner how the tragic is absorbed and used by the cultural industry reverses its old meaning. Originally, he had the meaning of a desperate resistance in front of the mythical menace. Now, displaying the existing suffering, he starts to submit this suffering as natural and to invite to the acceptation of the existing conditions and to the submission in front of the established powers. The laughter and the tragic are shown, then, as two elements owners of ambiguous potencies, capable both of critical sense development and social order questioning and of manipulation of the individual and settlement of the current ideology according to the use made of them. Through the study of the laughter and of the tragic themselves ad of the transformations suffered by them after their absorption in the cultural industry, we can, starting from an analysis of the part to the whole, begin an approach of the cultural industry, in order to understand better Adorno's concerns.