Paper presented June 19, 2009 at Portland State University.
EXTRACT:
“In an essay written against Thorstein Veblen’s theory of ‘conspicuous consumption,’ Adorno expressed disagreement with Veblen’s characterization of luxury consumption as an unequivocal manifestation of bad faith, because the consumer does, in fact, derive real satisfaction from the object consumed. This negative appraisal of Veblen is based on the insight that the latter’s critique is one-sided— it understands conspicuous consumption only as the use of products which benefits the needs of the system, but not of people. According to Adorno, luxury consumption must also be seen as “the use of parts of the social product which serve not the reproduction of expended labour, directly or indirectly, but of man in so far as he is not entirely under the sway of the utility principle.” The extent to which Adorno’s Kulturkritik itself maintains this double vision vis-à-vis the sphere of consumption, particularly in regards to cultural or aesthetic consumption, is not immediately clear, especially when one considers that Adorno’s theory of the Culture Industry is a relentless attempt to show that the “utility principle” has, in fact, extended its influence into the domain of the useless.
This paper attempts to think through and critique Adorno’s view of consumption as expressed (with Horkheimer) in Dialectic of Enlightenment and other essays related to the Culture Industry. Marx’s theory of consumption as outlined in the Grundrisse and Moishe Postone’s account of the Frankfurt School’s “critical pessimism” serve as points of departure.”