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

Abstract

This article 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 20th 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 ends – an 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 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 article 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 article argues that the politicisation of consumer culture risks having a reverse effect of facilitating the aestheticising of politics – turning politics into a spectacle.