The Problem With Socialists
I just finished Langdon Winner’s The Whale and the Reactor. By finished, I mean: “I skimmed the last three chapters to see if he had anything interesting to say.” While the first two chapters were pretty groovy, especially his treatment of Wittgenstein (which isn’t quite as groovy a discussion of technology as Bruno Latour’s definition of technology as a “swerve”), Winner soon fell into the common trap of people doing dialectically inflected social philosophy that I like to refer to as “empty hand-wringing.” This is the same problem I have with Adorno and Horkheimer’s (rather classic) essay “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In it Adorno (sort of the quintessential cranky old man), spends quite a few pages discussing why movies and jazz are destroying society. While I might be inclined to agree, so what? Sure, it was pretty amazing in the 1930s for Marxists to start worrying about culture as a battleground of class warfare, but why are we still reading it today? I would suggest the fact that we are still reading it today is why I have such a problem with Winner’s book.
Rather than offer any sort of program, Adorno and Horkheimer author an essay that basically lambastes the culture industry as dirty and dangerous for the entirety of the piece. While that’s all well and good, they never get around to any kind of suggestion as to what might be done. Is it enough to not go to the movies? Or listen to jazz? As Winner smartly points out in The Whale and the Reactor:
