Campbell Live and its Discontents: The Culture Industry, Repressive Desublimation, and Investigative Journalism in New Zealand

It beggars belief that in a liberal democracy there is such a passive acceptance of the inevitability of Campbell Live’s fate—why is a fundamental cornerstone of democracy being eroded away within a system that purports to actively champion it? I aim to offer a dual explanation for the general demise of rigorous news media under late capitalism by application of Theodore Adorno’s culture industry thesis, as well as Freudian psychoanalysis via Herbert Marcuse’s repressive desublimation thesis. These two theories when applied in tandem shed light on why this has not only willingly occurred by suggesting that it is in capital’s interest to orchestrate such a system, but that we accept this system because it caters for our deepest irrational desire for it.

There has been a plethora of media analysis of the situation Campbell Live is facing, and to trawl through all of them to give a comprehensive picture is beyond the theoretical application of this essay. However, I wish to draw attention to Gordon Campbell’s editorial that highlights the inevitable demise of investigative journalism on broadcast television as an inherent, and dangerous, reality in a market orientated environment. Campbell’s paraphrasing of Oscar Wilde to describe the market telling us the “price of everything and the value of nothing” should be to be considered pertinent rather than a mere quip.[1] Lord Darlington was answering the question: “What is a cynic?”[2] The Oxford English Dictionary defines cynical as:

Believing that people are motivated purely by self-interest … concerned only with one’s own interests and typically disregarding accepted standards in order to achieve them.[3]

Pay particular attention to these definitions in relation to the market—and both Campbell’s application of Wilde to the market, and how this relates to Adorno’s thesis (as well as Marcuse’s). Keep in mind that under capitalism producers and consumers are self-interested. The disjunction between intrinsic and exchange value touches at one of the contradictions of capitalism, both with regards to the aesthetic of culture highlighted by Adorno, as well as, more troublingly, the fundamental principles of democracy. While journalism can be said to have use value in terms of information content for consumers, at a higher level its relationship to maintaining a functioning democracy and distributing knowledge could be considered intrinsic.

                  The original aim of Adorno’s thesis was to show what we would perceive of as artistic culture—film, music, literature, radio, television—is being standardised in such a way as to increase its market value and well as undermine its critical element, all to the benefit of capital.[4] The underlying causal mechanisms that he exposed in doing so can be discerned, explicably, in every facet of late capitalist societies, including journalism. By using a more encompassing definition of culture within Adorno’s theory, investigative journalism (in this case within the context of broadcast television), has also become subject to the same marketability and standardisation that has subsumed artistic culture.^[5] The archetypal measure of success in business is sales volume, and in turn, repetition of the formula of success. The product is worthy only insofar as it can be sold to the largest possible market. It is beyond belief that Television New Zealand’s pseudo-journalistic venture Seven Sharp consistently has substantively higher viewer ratings than Campbell Live, nevertheless, the show has found a formula that guarantees higher advertising revenue than a more qualitative editorial enterprise. The show’s less contentious and predictable content appeals to a larger public and appeases advertisers. It is little wonder then that MediaWorks, Campbell Live’s producers, wishes to replicate this formula for its own commercial imperatives. Profit will always trump any higher value offered by journalism. This fusion of entertainment and information produces a muted critical thinking in its viewers that will feedback into supporting the capitalist media enterprise.

                  Surely within a highly educated society consumers would see this apparatus at face value and demand otherwise? It seems not. In order to understand this we must engage with Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis and Marcuse’s Marxist application of it. Freud suggests our deepest irrational desires for instant pleasurable gratification (the pleasure principle) is regulated by normative rules in our social sphere that we internalise (the reality principle).[6] Freud refers to the process of transformation of these desires into useful activity as sublimation. In addition to claiming civilization is driven by the process of sublimation, Freud argues that art as an end is a principle manifestation of sublimation. Marcuse, however, has suggested that late capitalism has reversed this notion. High culture, he claims, was originally a subversive dimension of society as the result of sublimation. However, the culture industry under late capitalism has flattened out any subversive element that it once had.[7]

While journalism does not explicitly fit the mould of art, and it can nevertheless be considered within high culture, as there is something to be said for the subversive element it can contain, namely, the critique of power. It is the changes in the mode of production under late capitalism that is rendering some forms of television journalism less antagonistic by blurring the distinction between its critical discourse, and trivialised news snippets and puff-piece journalism that satisfies instant gratification. This desublimation in turn generates the market demand that cynically demands this easy-to-digest and less subversive news content that capital, seeking to return a profit, is more than happy to supply.

A common critique of the trivialisation of television media suggests that the sphere of interactive discourse has shifted to the medium of the internet. While somewhat true, the desublimation hypothesis still suggests a required critical thought to actively engage with this sphere; a concerted effort is required to seek out and critically analyse news media and editorialised writing. However, a desublimated consumer will defer this critical thought via various modes of instant gratification: referring to websites of television news media such as TVNZ or 3 News; corporate dominated print media websites such as the New Zealand Herald or Fairfax; social media feeds such as Facebook or Twitter; or in an unfortunately increasing number of consumers, even the need for trivalised journalism is trumped by less critical forms of entertainment of which the internet offers an almost bottomless pit of. Any engagement with news media is still taken at face value uncritically, whether in agreement or not, instant gratification is satisfied and the matter is seldom engaged further than satisfactorily necessary.

Both Adorno and Marcuse had something important to say in the critique of late capitalism, and no doubt features of their theory are seen not just in artistic culture, but all culture. 'I don't want to think; I want to feel' is the epitome of the consumer under late capitalism. What Adorno and Marcuse have shown us is that the passive acceptance of this system, because of capital's manipulation of it, is destroying the 'think' supplied by investigative journalism, and exacerbating the 'feel' supplied by predictable and formulaic infotainment. The market becomes the measure of everything and offers the (intrinsic) value of nothing. We have become astonishingly self-interested and cynical as a consequence.

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[1] Gordon Campbell, "Gordon Campbell on the Demise of Campbell Live," Scoop Media, last modified April 10, 2015, http://gordoncampbell.scoop.co.nz/2015/04/10/gordon-campbell-on-the-demise-of-campbell-live/.

[2] Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan (Cambridge: ProQuest LLC, 1996), 95.

[3] Oxford Dictionary of English, Third Edition, 2013, s.v. “cynical”.

[4] Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 2010), 120-167.

[5] Precise definitions of culture are numerous and debatable, and vary between sociological and anthropological disciplines. I intend to utilise Ian Buchanan’s definition of culture as a “set of beliefs, practices, rituals, and traditions shared by a group of people”, which within a democratic society would include journalism as valued for its contribution to political accountability. Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), s.v. “culture”.

[6] Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. David McLintock (London: Penguin, 2004), 16-20.

[7] Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London: Routledge, 2002), 59-86.

———————————————————————————————————————— "... we can explore space together, both inner and outer, forever in peace." —W. M. Hicks.

Colonisation of the Lifeworld: The Tragic Consequences of the Bureaucratisation of Social Welfare in New Zealand

On August 2nd 2014 the Ashburton Guardian published an article about local man Russell John Tully's desperate plight to find domestic accommodation despite an overwhelming number of physical, economic, and political factors stacked against him.[1] A month later, on September 1st, he walked into Ashburton's Work and Income New Zealand branch, killed two workers with a shotgun and critically injured a third. He was apprehended later in the day and subsequently charged with the murders.[2] As of writing this essay Tully's defendants are still waiting a psychiatric assessment on his mental state while he is remanded in custody.  However, given the desperate circumstances that led to this event, it would not be implausible to hypothesise they contributed to, or exacerbated existing, psychopathologies. Tully is suffering from a skin disease which has rendered him unable to work, and had "come home to die", so was seeking assistance to live out his untimely fate.[3] In engaging with this event on a deeper level is not an apologist stance towards Tully's actions, but attempting to understand the broader social, political, and economic contexts of why such a tragedy could occur through the lens of what Jürgen Habermas refers to as the colonisation of the lifeworld. I will attempt to discern to what extent Habermas' theory is valid in this specific circumstance. Firstly, I will offer an explanation of Habermas’ work in his Theory of Communicative Action and how this relates to the concept of the lifeworld. Secondly, I will trace the concept of social evolution through to what Habermas refers to as rationalisation of the lifeworld. Thirdly, I will discuss Habermas’ adaptation of systems theory to provide an account for how the lifeworld becomes colonised. Finally, for the remainder of the essay I will provide an application of Habermas’ theory to the circumstances surrounding Tully’s actions within the context of the modernisation and rationalisation of societies.

Habermas' interpretation of critical social theory is grounded in his theory of communicative action: communication between two or more people with the intention of establishing meaningful social relationships.[4] Communicative action, Habermas argues, is a form of action that transcends other instrumental forms of social action in that "actors seek to reach an understanding about the action and their plans of action in order to coordinate their actions by way of agreement".[5] Participants, through language, intersubjectively test each other's claims for validity in order to reach understanding as opposed to reaching success.[6] The process of communicative action "takes place against the background of a culturally ingrained preunderstanding".[7] This background, the lifeworld, a theory initially developed by Edmund Husserl in the phenomenological tradition, and sociologically developed by Alfred Schütz, is what Habermas draws upon for his account of how societies create and sustain themselves.[8] The lifeworld is a background of skills, knowledge, and competences that serves to maintain social relationships, and communicative action is what serves to reproduce the lifeworld "by way of the continuation of valid knowledge, stabilisation of group solidarity, and socialisation of responsible actors".[9]

Habermas has drawn upon Niklaus Luhmann's systems theory of sociology to develop a social evolutionary explanation of the rationalisation of the lifeworld (which I will discuss below). As societies evolve they become increasingly complex, however, Habermas is not claiming this is an inevitable process by way of differentiating institutional sub-systems out from the lifeworld, but that humans within societies bring about these changes themselves.[10] What Habermas is attempting to do is engage with, and form a symbiosis of, two different theoretical perspectives to form a more comprehensive analysis of modern societies: systems theory developed by Luhmann and Talcott Parsons, which discerns societies from the outside as a series of component systems, including the lifeworld; and a participant perspective that encompasses a "hermeneutic approach that picks up on members' pre-theoretical knowledge".[11] Habermas is not casting off systems theory but merely advocating it with an understanding that "what [fundametally] binds sociated individuals to one another and secures the integration of society is a web of communicative actions".[12] It becomes important to conceptualise the rationalisation, and subsequent colonisation, of the lifeworld in terms of both the social integration of societies and the systems integration of societies.[13] Social integration conceives of societies as "normatively guaranteed or communicatively achieved", whereas systematically integrated societies use "nonnormative steering of individual decisions [that are] not subjectively coordinated".[14]

Max Weber referred to rationalisation as "the pillar of both the modern State and of the economic life in the West", which has differentiated societal systems so far that they have taken on an autonomy that is no longer grounded in normative moral principles but their own inner workings.[15] These autonomous institutions, although rooted in the lifeworld, "steer a social intercourse that has been largely disconnected from norms and values".[16] This process is referred to by Habermas as the "uncoupling of the system and lifeworld".[17] Because of the increasing demands placed on language in complex societies an overburden occurs that has the effect of differentiating out various modes of exchange between systems: what Habermas refers to as "delinguistified media"—specifically money and power.[18] These institutional economic, bureaucratic, and political systems place demands on society so much so that it becomes almost impossible to avoid conforming to their dictates. This penetration of dehumanised systems, initially a product of humanity's modernisation, into the process of social integration is what Habermas argues is the colonisation of the lifeworld.

I will now turn to an application of Habermas’ theory to the surrounding circumstances of Russell John Tully’s actions on September 1st 2014. Closer inspection of modern society’s rationalistion reveals how institutions have differentiated from the lifeworld what was once the domain of charitable groups and communitarian concern.[19] This is not to say poverty or unfortunate circumstances such as Tully’s did not occur before the modernisation and industrialisation of society, but the channels to ameliorate these circumstances were less institutionalised and relied on the communicative action Harbermas suggests is integral for a socially integrated society. Because of globalisation, increase in complex technological communication, and population growth of the modern era, especially later half of the twentieth century, the role of the socially integrated community has vastly diminished and has been handed over to larger political structures. Almost every facet of modern life adheres in some way or another to larger systems that are devoid of communicative action. In a hypothetical scenario of a socially integrated society one could place Tully in, he might see his plight addressed by family members, friends, local charitable organisations, church groups, even local community political authorities (at least to some extent). With a modest amount of social resources at hand and through a process of communicative action Tully’s needs could be addressed more readily. Where appeals are dealt with through a smaller number of channels that are socially integrated, the face-to-face deliberation would yield at the very least tangible results.

While the emergence of the modern welfare state in New Zealand has meant a greater and more equitable access to social assistance—and this has waxed and waned depending on the ideological perspective of successive governments—it has passed over this to institutions whereby communication is instrumentally orientated rather than orientated toward mutual understanding. Applications for unemployment, disability, or accommodation benefits have to adhere to a strict set of criteria that has the result of very little impetus for providing assistance, empathy, or discretion. Every social welfare client’s needs are complex, yet the system treats them as a number, and fails to address pressing concerns such as health issues or need for affordable accommodation—or even the ability to discern potentially dangerous mental health issues. Social workers at the coalface such as those murdered by Tully no doubt personally share some psychological empathy towards their clients, yet they are ultimately bound by guidelines dictated to them by the machinations of the bureaucracy that stands above them. In the despondent eyes of Work and Income’s clients they are just another part of a dehumanising system that they have no other choice but to adhere to. These extraordinary pathologies may be indicative of a system so far removed from the lifeworld that it is failing to engage and address its needs in a meaningful and socially integrated manner.

The modern welfare state is just one of a myriad of systems “in which the demands of communicative action are relaxed … within legally specified limits”.[20] This characteristic of bureaucracy is also shared by capitalist monetary system, which Harbermas argues not only has the effect of regulating social environments, but also absorbs the state apparatus so that “power becomes assimilated to money”.[21] This is the delinguistified media that Habermas argues has become the new standard of exchange between systems. The state’s bureaucracies become steered by markets as does every day social systems that we interact with. Evidence of this can be seen when we analyse Tully’s circumstances in relation to the market and state bureaucracies. The market determines if his labour will be purchased by capital—which negatively affects the value of labour of those disabled such as his—as well as directing the market-accepted value of welfare assistance. Welfare policy is not determined by a mutual understanding of what is a socially accepted level of socio-economic subsistence, but by autonomously driven market forces (as well as hegemonically prevailing ideological perspectives). Tully was also forced to orientate his actions towards the autonomous real estate market in searching for accommodation; the quality and availability of this was limited by his low income as dictated by the labour market. This penetration and reification of the market system and bureaucracy so far into determining every facet of our lives—both negatively and positively—rather than communicative action is the concern Habermas shows towards the colonisation of the lifeword thesis. In this warning he argues that the rationalisation of the lifeworld “becomes so hypertrophied that it unleashes system imperatives that burst the capacity of the lifeword they instrumentalise”.[22]

Russell John Tully's story is not unfamiliar in our present society and there are numerous examples where a desperate, and often mentally unstable, individual irrationally and violently vents their anger at what they perceive is the system that is the source of their trouble. The vicissitudinous nature of modern institutions are no longer orientated to deal with these negative social pathologies in a holistically constructive manner. Modernity has pulled our social systems so far beyond our grasp we no longer recognise the humanity in them. They have become faceless and alien to our innermost and fundamental needs. It would appear because of our markets and bureaucracies, New Zealand is not exempt from the colonisation of the lifeworld.

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[1] Otago Daily Times Online News, "Interview reveals suspect's desperation," Allied Press Limited, last modified September 1, 2014, http://www.odt.co.nz/news/national/314429/interview-reveals-suspects-desperation.

[2] Sophie Ryan et al., "Ashburton Work and Income shooting: Suspect arrested," APN New Zealand Limited, last modified September 1, 2014, http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11317243.

[3] Otago Daily Times Online News, "Interview reveals suspect's desperation."

[4] Andrew Edgar, Habermas: The Key Concepts (New York: Routledge, 2006), 21.

[5] Jürgen Habermas, "Social Action and Rationality." In On Society and Politics, ed. Steven Seidman (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 143.

[6] ibid., 153-7.

[7] ibid., 154.

[8] Ian Buchanan, Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 294.

[9] Jürgen Habermas, " The Concept of the Lifeworld and Hermeneutic Idealism." In On Society and Politics, ed. Steven Seidman (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 173.

[10] Edgar, 139.

[11] Habermas, “The Concept of the Lifeworld.” 184-7; Habermas, "The Uncoupling of System and Lifeworld." in On Society and Politics, ed. Steven Seidmam (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 188; For Habermas a hermeneutical approach encompasses an interpretation of the whole social, historical, and psychological world.

[12] Habermas, “The Concept of the Lifeworld.” 184.

[13] James Bohman, and William Regh. "Jürgen Habermas." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Last modified 2014. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/habermas/.

[14] Habermas, “The Concept of the Lifeworld.” 185.

[15] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, 2nd ed. (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1976), 16; Habermas, “The Uncoupling of System and Lifeworld.” 189.

[16] Habermas, “The Uncoupling of System and Lifeworld.” 189.

[17] ibid.

[18] ibid., 190, 205.

[19] John Scott and Gordon Marshall, Oxford Dictionary of Sociology, 3rd ed., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 630-1, 803.

[20] Bohman and Regh.

[21] Habermas, “The Uncoupling of System and Lifeworld.” 205.

[22] ibid., 190.

———————————————————————————————————————— "... we can explore space together, both inner and outer, forever in peace." —W. M. Hicks.

Quote of the Week: Jürgen Habermas

"The state apparatus becomes dependent on the media-steered subsystem of the economy; this forces it to reorganise and leads, among other things, to assimilation of power to the structure of a steering medium: power becomes assimilated to money."

Theory of Communicative Action , Volume Two, 1987.

———————————————————————————————————————— "... we can explore space together, both inner and outer, forever in peace." —W. M. Hicks.

Cultural Capital or Cultural Cringe:A Critique of the 2014 FIFA World Cup

“There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means …”

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.[1]

In 1949, George Orwell Painted a bleak picture of a vast totalitarian government in the future, influenced by his witnessing of both totalitarian governments in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Orwell’s vision, although unrealised, shares some similarities with twentieth century capitalist democracies, namely what Theodor Ardorno and Max Horkeimer called the “Culture industry”—the deliberate manufacture of mass-produced and largely homogeneous artworks not simply for consumption, but for systematic ideological control.[2] Adorno and Horkheimer’s perceivably righteous and sustained critique of mass culture was part of a wider project aimed at what they believed was an underlying totalitarianism that was built into the supposedly liberating philosophical movement of the Enlightenment.[3] The culture industry is undoubtedly alive and well today; its pervasiveness is nothing short of ubiquitous. Nowhere is this more present than the multi-faceted cultural spectacle of one of the world’s largest sporting tournaments: the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup. This essay will approach the FIFA World Cup in the same guise that Adorno and Horkheimer's critical theory assesses the culture industry, specifically the tournament's fusion of culture with Capital as a form of effective marketing for the purpose of creating a docile consumer culture. I will assess, and critique, two of the official songs commissioned for the tournament against the backdrop of its entirety.

Adorno and Horkheimer have argued that the same objectifying of knowledge throughout human history as a means of control over nature, and other humans, is no less different in the means of Enlightenment thinking. The rationality of the Enlightenment uses abstraction as its methodology: the process of characterising reality with quantifiable properties.[4] This allows the mathematical characterisation of the reality we perceive, but reduces reality to a multiplicity of objects that are just representations, with the result that "factuality wins the day; cognition is restricted to its repetition; and thought becomes mere tautology".[5] This has the presupposition of distancing the subject from the object, allowing for its domination by a master.[6] Adorno and Horkheimer have criticised this rational domination as merely a replacement of pre-Enlightenment conceptions of knowledge and therefore subsumed into myth itself. In agreement with Hegel, they have argued that the Enlightenment's abstraction of reality has reduced knowledge to numbers for manipulation, and in doing so has over looked the cognitive process of determinate negation: rather than conforming the perceivable to absolutes, the truth is derived by a process of dialectic.[7] From the outset Adorno and Horkheimer point out the implications of the Enlightenment's "axiomatic self-restriction" in thought as "an automatic, self-activating process; an impersonation of the machine that reproduces itself so that ultimately the machine can replace it".[8]

Adorno and Horkheimer have asserted that the hyper-rationality of positivism—the paradigm thought of Enlightenment—has allowed the domination and alienation of humans through economic means. Humanity, robbed of its subjectivity, is absorbed into the capitalist "economic apparatus ... [which] equips commodities with values which decide human behavior".[9] With the onset of modernity it is the market's objectivity that dictates all social life and "whoever resigns himself to the life without any rational reference to self-preservation would according to the Enlightenment—and Protestantism—regress to prehistory".[10] The capitalist division of labour and imposition of alienation requires individuals to conform "their body and soul according to the technical apparatus".[11] The rational domination of instrumental reason serves to meet economic ends. This is the foundation for Adorno and Horkheimer's argument, which suggests art is being absorbed into, and conforming to, commodification to serve Capital and cement a consumer ideology in society.

I will now turn to the FIFA World Cup itself and apply Adorno and Horkeimer's theoretical analysis of the culture industry to it. This will include an analysis of two of the tournament's officially commissioned songs: 'We Are One' by Pitbull, Jennifer Lopez, and Claudia Leitte; and 'Vida' by Ricky Martin.[12][13] Adorno and Horkeimer's views on modernity’s commodification of art are nothing short of scathing, and their remarks are justified when one looks behind the veil of the culture industry. For its one aim is not to offer any intrinsic or aesthetic value embedded in it, but to offer a cultural product that is congruent with the aims of capitalism—profit.[14] The officialdom of FIFA's musical accompaniments to the World Cup are not conceived in an intrinsic manifestation of culture but to justify their manufacture to its own ends.

Adorno and Horkeimer have drawn attention to Kant's aesthetic theory of ‘purposiveness without purpose’ to criticise the intent of the culture industry. For Kant, an artist will produce a piece with purpose, that is, some conception of the final product, but the final product has no further purpose other than aesthetic. Adorno and Horkeimer have suggested the culture industry has reversed this notion and has made systematic control for profit the final purpose of the modern artwork.[15] Ricky Martin's performance of 'Vida' bears all the hallmarks of a product for consumption: Martin was the established musical icon chosen to perform a song that was largely not by his own pen, but hand-picked by judges from thousands of compositions submitted into a competition that sought the song's choosing. The judges knew the standard they were looking for even before they found it: mass appeal, and therefore, profitability. There have even been some accusations that Sony Music Entertainment had beforehand chosen 'Vida' and encouraged the song's writer to enter the competition, nevertheless offering some prefabricated semblance of culture[16]

The marketability wrought by the homogenisation of these two songs becomes apparent upon closer critical inspection. They offer catchy melodies and hooks with basic lyrics that repeat many of the same themes: solidarity, unity, competition, and cosmopolitanism. While these values are undeniably important, the manner in which they are expressed is far from genuine—they are just the face of a product. Adorno and Horkheimer suggest the familiarity, and therefore the ability to be easily swallowed by the average listener, is what has consigned manufactured popular music to the “worn grooves of association”.[17] This is not Martin’s only contribution to official the FIFA World Cup soundtrack; in 1998 he provided vocals for ‘The Cup of Life’, also not written by himself. Vida is Spanish for ‘life’ and not coincidentally, ‘The Cup of Life’ translates to Spanish as ‘La Copa de la Vida’, recycling similar motifs for their ability to be grasped easily. “No independent thinking must be expected from the audience: the product prescribes every reaction” through the use of what corporate manufacturing dictates so that “any logical connection calling for mental effort is painstakingly avoided”.[18]

These songs and their associated videos paint (or impose) an idealised version of Brazil, with sun, beaches, happy children, and scantily clad tanned and toned women, interspersed with footage of the exhilarating moments of previous tournaments to remind the viewer of the product they are consuming. They present a homogenised and stereotyped representation of Latin American culture, ignoring the myriad of localised cultures that make up the continent. While both songs have the appearance of Latin American musicians—and unashamedly the culture industry has crafted this appearance with ethnically Latin American musicians—they are, inexorably in one way or another, the product of American commercial interests: Pitbull being from Miami, Jenifer Lopez from New York, and Ricky Martin from Pueto Rico (an American territory). They have provided a token amount of lyrics in Spanish and Portuguese—which are just repetitions of the English lyrics—despite the fact that the vast majority of the tournament's participants do not come from English speaking countries. This is a product carefully manufactured for the English-speaking consumer—the lucrative power of the American market is not exempt from FIFA's glare. However, these songs would not dare mention the uncomfortable costs the tournament has brought to the Brazilian people, or the juxtaposition of its material wealth with the slums of São Paulo—the elephant in the room FIFA conveniently chooses to ignore.

The ubiquitous blinding gloss of the tournament’s multimedia presentation conceals the inconvenience of capitalist exploitation; FIFA’s mechanisms of control are too powerful to be resisted, or even contemplated, en masse. The multi-faceted audio-visual components of the tournament can be clearly discerned as what Adorno and Horkheimer link to the Wagnerian concept of Gesamkunstwerk—“the fusion of all the arts in one work”. [19] It is not surprising then to regard the FIFA World Cup as a perfect “alliance of word, image, and music … because the sensuous elements which all approvingly reflect the surface of social reality are in principle embodied in the same technical process, the unity of which becomes its distinctive content”.[20] The necessity of control dictated by Capital has the consequence of expanding its commodities to include every possible object and subject of which culture is not exempt.

The sacrosanct of artwork, in the minds of Adorno and Horkheimer, has been subjugated by mere commodity fetishism and stripped of its truly human function, a pure aesthetic value, in order to dominate them with a blindfolded consumer ideology. Undoubtedly, their critique of the culture industry is soul-crushingly pessimistic, and they have every right given the endless cycle of predictability that is offered to consumers as popular culture, but their criticisms can be construed as somewhat pretentious and even Eurocentric.[21] Despite this, Adrono and Horkheimer could be forgiven, given the manipulative power of the Nazi propaganda machine that eventuated in the barbarity that took hold of their homeland; for their concern is not culture itself, but its absorption into the technical apparatus that serves to reproduce it in ways so as to create a docility among citizens. Mass production for mass consumption.

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[1] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (New York: Penguin Books in association with Martin Secker & Warburg, 2008), 45-6.

[2] Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming. London: Verso, 2010, 120-4.

[3] ibid., 6.

[4] ibid., 13.

[5] ibid., 27.

[6] ibid., 9.

[7] ibid., 24; Lambert Zuidervaart, "Theodor W. Adorno," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, last modified October 10, 2011, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/.

[8] ibid., 25.

[9] ibid., 28.

[10] ibid., 29.

[11] ibid., 29-30.

[12] Martin, Ricky, “Vida,” Ricky Martin, Salaam Remi, and Elijah King, recorded 2014, One Love, One Rhythm – The 2014 FIFA World Cup Official Album, Sony Music Entertainment.

[13] Pitbull, Jennifer Lopez, Claudia Leitte, “We Are One (Ole Ola),” Armando Christian Pérez, Thomas Troelsen, Jennifer Lopez, Claudia Leitte, Daniel Murcia, Sia Furler, Lukasz Gottwald, Henry Walter and Nadir Khayat, recorded 2014, One Love, One Rhythm – The 2014 FIFA World Cup Official Album, Sony Music Entertainment.

[14] Ian Buchanan, Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 106.

[15] Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 124.

[16] Carolina Moreno and Mandy Fridmann, "Sony Accused Of Fraud In FIFA World Cup SuperSong Contest," The Huffington Post, Accessed August 15, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/23/sony-supersong-lawsuit_n_5201298.html.

[17] Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 137.

[18] ibid.

[19] ibid., 124.

[20] ibid.

[21] ibid., 127-8; Even Jazz—much to the dismay of its American aficionados—is not exempt from their criticism, which may even be interpreted as a righteous insult to the African roots to which it traces its cultural origins.

———————————————————————————————————————— "... we can explore space together, both inner and outer, forever in peace." 

 —W. M. Hicks.