“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.
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. 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. 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. 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". This has the presupposition of distancing the subject from the object, allowing for its domination by a master. 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. 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".
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". 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". The capitalist division of labour and imposition of alienation requires individuals to conform "their body and soul according to the technical apparatus". 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. 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. 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. 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
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”. 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”.
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”. 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”. 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. 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.
———————————————————————————————————————— "... we can explore space together, both inner and outer, forever in peace."
—W. M. Hicks.
