If considering the context in which the School of Frankfurt flourished, one can find solid ground for the radicalism of Adorno and Horkeimer’s arguments. For example, the 1930s was the era of the big major studios (MGM, Paramount, Fox, Warner Bros) who exploited the star system and controlled local and international markets through vertical integration, block booking, among other strategies. The prevalence of images and dreams imported from Hollywood has been a reality in other countries where the local industry still struggles to release endogenous movies, and I even remember how video stores used to classify genres where American movies were considered the norm while national movies were grouped under their own subcategory based on their origin (Colombian films) and not their genre.

Mass production of cultural goods led to assume the homogeneity of dreams and a top-down determination in the hands of ‘evil’ producers for these two authors that supposedly represents the end of the individual. I am always surprised with the fascination exerted by boy bands all over the world and the disposability of these artists every 3 years, if lucky enough to survive that long.

I think the main contribution of this approach was to reveal the high concentration of the media market and standardization of goods or objective nature of products (1244). As critics have pointed in subsequent years (Miege, Garnham and Hesmondhalgh, among others), there are serious flaws in the main arguments of the Cultural Industry school that deserve further discussion. First, the term of Cultural Industry in singular overlooks the different conditions of cultural sectors or that the terms refers to the way of producing culture rather than a specific economic sector, so Miege (1989) prefers to use the term in plural “Cultural industries”. Right now, the term has even changed to Creative industries and Hesmondhalgh (2007) has argued that this distinction is to please the current neoliberal context.

Another serious observation is the assumption that company directors represent a monolithic and coordinated group free of contradictions or struggle of power or that there are other forces acting in the market (state, civil society, new comers, multiple technology alternatives etc.). We all have witnessed how the arrival of video rental/purchase, cable television, video on demand and streaming.

Last but not least is the role of the public as robotic recipients of the cultural content with no sense of consciousness or imagination (1244) when experiencing cultural goods, especially sound films. That’s why I found Certau’s counter-argument of the gap between those products and the use of them (1250) very interesting because it allows to have a sense of play toward the determination of taste.

References:

Hesmondhalgh, David. The cultural industries. Los Angeles: Sage, 2007.

Miege, Bernard. The Capitalization of Cultural Production. New York, N.Y.: International General, 1989.

When reading Lopez’ Social construction on race, I couldn’t resist thinking about Canada and multiculturalism. In my early years as an immigrant, I read Uzma Shakir’s essay, Demystifying transnationalism: Canadian immigration policy and the promise of nation building, and combined with my personal experience,  the whole positive and romantic image of Canada as a friendly, “neutral” society was permanently damaged.

Shakir revisited the history of Canadian immigration policy to argue that, agreeing with Lopez in many ways, marginalization and racialization are perpetuated through immigration policy and entrenched in Canadian society. The author proceeds to explain the early attempts to encourage immigration of Western European farmers (whites) to Canada as nation builders through the Sifton Plan while ensuring cheap labor and halting any attempts to settle down from non-white immigrants (i.e. Head tax). Even when the point system was introduced in 1966, social barriers still marginalize non-white groups from structures of power. This might be shifting a bit nowadays when the inclusion of one or two people of colour in high-ranked positions, but it’s definitely not a trend.

Credit: Mei-Po Kwan

Some of the questions that I usually ask to myself is that if we have to wait until the second generation can “get rid of the accent” (echoing Anzaldua) for them to get a job that matches his skills and education. But even studies from SFU show that labour racialization still persists for second and third-generation immigrants. Is total immersion a reality? I guess the immigrant will always have the advantage, for some, and burden, for others of that race plasticity that I called “identity negotiation”: you negotiate your identity according to your interest and the situation, as Anzaldua exemplifies with her own experience. In the labour market, competing forces of white and non-white might force us to always prove we can do the job and perform as any other white with the risk of being over qualified (we have to demonstrate we can speak English, follow the rules, etc.), but when the situation changes to our disadvantage, we can pretend not to be so qualified (I usually pretend not to speak English when a stranger talks to me on the bus or when I jump the queue).  Here I am a Latino; in South America, I’m a Colombian; in Colombia, I’m a person from the Caribbean, and so on.

I agree with Lopez on the majority of his arguments and the social formation and competing forces in this society. However, the fact that he, and other authors, tried to oppose only two groups (whites and non-whites) might be seem reductionist. The way I see it is not that all immigrants are united against or around whites or Caucasians, because we oppose to each other as well. We play with stereotypes as well: whenever there is a car accident, I have heard comments from people from other ethnicities, such as “For sure there was a Chinese behind the wheel”, or if there is a party with loud music, “it must be a Latino”.