The logic of culture often runs behind the changes in economy – so while modularity has been the basis of modern industrial society since the early twentiteh century, we only start seeing the modularity principle in cultural production and distribution on a large scale in the last few decades. While Adorno and Horkheimer were writing about "culture industry" already in the 1940s, it was not then - and its not today - a true modern industry.[7] In some areas such as production of Hollywood animated features or computer games we see more of the factory logic at work with extensive division of labor. In the case of software enginnering (i.e. programming), software is put together to a large extent from already available software modules - but this is done by individual programmers or teams who often spend months or years on one project – quite diffirent from Ford production line assembling one identical car after another. In short, today cultural modularity has not reached the systematic character of the industrial standardisation circa 1913.
But this does not mean that modularity in contemporary culture simply lags behind industrial modularity, responsible for mass production. Rather, cultural modularity seems to be governed by a diffirent logic than industrial modularity. On the one hand, “mass culture” is made possible by a complete industrial-type modularity on the levels of packaging and distribution. In other words, all the materials carriers of cultural content in the modern period have been standarised, just as it was done in the production of all goods - from first photo and films formats in the end of the nineteenth century to game catridges, DVDs, memory cards, interchangeable camera lenses, etc. But the actual making of content was never standardised in the same way.[8] So while mass culture involves putting together new products – fims, television programs, songs, games – from a limited repertoir of themes, narratives, icons using a limited number of conventions, this is done by the teams of human authors on a one by one basis. And whiile more recently we see the trend toward the resuse of cultural assets in comercial culture, i.e. media franchising – characters, settings, icons which appear not in one but a whole range of cultural products – film sequals, computer games, theme parks, toys, etc. – this does not seem to change the basic “pre-industrial” logic of the production process) For Adorno, this individual character of each product is part of the ideology of mass culture: “Each product affects an individual air; individuality itself serves to reinforce ideology, in so far as the illusion is conjured up that the completely reified and mediated is a sanctuary from immediacy and life.”
0 comments:
Post a Comment