Technologised consumer culture: The Adorno–Benjamin debate and the reverse side of politicisation

Abstract

This paper reanimates the Adorno-Benjamin debate to investigate the potential of contemporary technologised consumer culture to become a space for bottom-up political agency and resistance. For both Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, the technological advancement of the twentieth century had an inherently irrational character, as evidenced by the self-destructive tendencies of humanity during the Second World War. Nonetheless, the thinkers famously disagreed when it came to the implications of the marriage between technology and mass culture. Discerning its potential for the mobilisation of the masses, Benjamin believed that technology would politicise mass culture, allowing society to employ it for its political endsan idea which Adorno debunked. Technologised consumer culture has noticeably evolved since the time of the debate. Nevertheless, revisiting the debate is necessary to understand a sharp contradiction between the expanded possibilities for political participation and the return of the 'auratic' or cultic function of technologised consumer culture. At the same time, the paper shows that technology does politicise consumer culture. However, the pitfall lies in that the politicisation is done through technology as a tool, which is vulnerable to appropriation, granting those who are in the position to control it a substantial political resource. Consequently, the paper argues that the politicisation of consumer culture risks having a reverse effect of facilitating the aestheticising of politicsturning politics into a spectacle. Keywords Technology, consumer culture, the Adorno-Benjamin debate, politicisation, resistance contemporary technologised consumer culture to become a space for bottom-up political agency and resistance. Indeed, if consumerism is so deeply entrenched into the fabric of modern society, one way to deal with it could be to employ technologised consumer culture for the political empowerment of the masses. In so doing, the paper examines the possibility of, using Benjamin's term, politicisation of consumer culture through its interaction with technology. The paper proceeds as follows. First, it reconstructs the two sides of the debate. Benjamin's insights into the decline of 'the aura' and the transformation of art into a vehicle of political communication are counterpoised with an exegesis of Adorno's critique. In dealing with the debate, the most important is to avoid approaching it from the position of who is right or wrong. As the following section illustrates, the debate reflects the ambiguity of contemporary technologised consumer culture, with its simultaneously progressive and regressive potentiality. On the one hand, in addition to endowing consumers with an agency, the new developments have provided unprecedented possibilities for social communication. On the other, their consumption is an investment into the structures, which, on a wider scale, disempower society. The contradictory nature of technologised consumer culture accounts for the combination of a 'progressive' prosum...

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