Culture and society in Adorno: between fetishization and resistance

Abstract

Adorno’s approaches are often associated with an apology of cultural elitism. However, a careful review of this theoretician’s ideas allows us to properly evaluate this accusation. This essay assumes that Adorno’s personal leanings were one thing, but his theory quite another. According to Martin Jay, the former undoubtedly shows cultural aristocratism, which can be explained by Adorno’s artistic training. But the same cannot be said of the second case. In his Critique of culture and society, Adorno denounced a general phenomenon that underlies the cultural industry: fetishization, arguing that this occurs when the dialectical relations between culture and society are denied. Thus, what sustains Adorno’s critique of mass culture is not contempt for manifestations of popular culture, as Jesús Martín-Barbero holds but, rather, a denouncement of the reification of culture; a reification that can be broken, it must be emphasized, if we recognize the links between the social and the cultural.