#1599—CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY—VOL 33 NO 4—FILE: 33402-reviews
Ideology and Cultural Production–455
and non-profits, artists, and globalization.
The third part on the consumption of culture
includes chapters on “reception approaches,”
“audience studies,” and “social boundaries.”
The fourth part has chapters on “the art
itself,” and a chapter that returns to the issues
with which the book began, “the constitution
of art in society.” This latter chapter builds on
the thesis Alexander has been developing
through the prior chapters, that the meaning
of art is socially constructed and reciprocally
that art facilitates the construction of society.
The fifth part is a brief Conclusion.
Each of the chapters opens with a well
chosen illustrative epigraph and a clear state-
ment of the goals of the perspective being
examined. It then explicates the perspective
by critically reviewing a number of exem-
plary studies drawn from widely different
areas of the arts. Each of the substantive
chapters is followed by an intrinsically inter-
esting five- to eight-page illustrative case
study drawn from one or more linked stud-
ies, and each of these case studies is headed
by three or four “Points for Discussion.” In
the hands of a less skilled writer, this strate-
gy of presentation could be numbingly
mechanical, but Alexander seems to carry it
off effortlessly. One measure of the range
and even-handed exposition of the studies is
that it would be impossible to guess that her
own research has centered on the changing
role of art museums in society.
Is there nothing wrong with the book
then? Well, Alexander follows a current trend
among those who study the patronized fine
arts to lump them together under the gener-
ic term “art” with the popular culture, here
called “popular art,” that flourishes in a mar-
ket economy. In her case study examples,
Alexander illustrates the numerous organiza-
tional differences between the arts that
depend (in part) on patronage and those that
depend (entirely) on a market, but she does
not make clear the many differences between
the two that derive from consumers’ con-
trasting criteria of evaluation. Researchers
have long distinguished between folk/com-
munal, popular, and fine art criteria of evalu-
ation. I think some explicit recognition of the
differing discourses of evaluation would
strengthen the section on the consumption of
culture.
One might well guess that the organiza-
tion and clarity of presentation of this book
FINAL PROOF
come in part from years of teaching courses
in the sociology of art and culture, and in
fact, Alexander points to the role of students’
“innumerable questions” in clarifying her
thinking and organization of the book. She
also acknowledges her intellectual debts to a
number of teachers and professional col-
leagues. That said, Alexander’s way of fram-
ing the field and her careful summaries of
numerous diverse studies should facilitate the
research of scholars for years to come.
Equally, students should enjoy reading this
well illustrated text, and numerous courses
on art and culture may be launched by those
emboldened by having such a teachable
foundation for the course.
Adorno on Popular Culture, by Robert W.
Witkin. London, UK: Routledge, 2003. 200
pp. $90.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-415-26824-9. $22.95
paper. ISBN: 0-415-26825-7.
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University
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212.159.124.238
2004..12..29..14..04..
This is a self-described “critical appreciation”
of the work of the critical theorist, Theodor
Adorno, by a British sociologist who has writ-
ten previously not only about Adorno, but
many of the topics of interest to him, includ-
ing aesthetics, art, jazz, and so on. It has
become commonplace in this age of multi-
culturalism, postmodernism, and even post-
postmodernism to reject out of hand the
thinking of the critical school in general, and
Adorno in particular. Critical theorists have
not only come to be seen as despised “mod-
ernists,” but also as “elitists” who seem not
only to know too much, but also to possess
standards that allow them to critique and dis-
miss many aspects of the contemporary
world. In the parlance of the multiculturalists,
they seem to claim that they possess the
standpoint and that other standpoints are far
less valid, if not irrelevant. It is their standard
that allows the critical theorists, and seem-
ingly only the critical theorists, to assess the
“truth value” of any social phenomenon.
These standards permit the critical theorists
to do what they do best, critique society,
especially the only culture most of us know,
mass culture, and more important its produc-
ers, the culture industry. Virtually everyone
feels under assault by the critical theorists
Contemporary Sociology 33, 4
#1599—CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY—VOL 33 NO 4—FILE: 33402-reviews
456–Ideology and Cultural Production
and is made to feel inadequate, not only
because of the latter’s obviously superior
knowledge of high culture (in Adorno’s case,
classical music is one example), but also by
the fact that they, in contrast to most of us,
have clear standards that allow them to ren-
der the kind of judgments (Adorno’s prefer-
ence for Schoenberg, for example) that most
others today would find impossible and in
many cases (e.g., the critique of popular
movies) questionable.
As a result, most sociologists these days,
even many social theorists, are inclined to
dismiss the work of the critical school in gen-
eral and Adorno in particular. Of course, this
rejection is made easy by the fact that few
bother to read the work before rendering
such a judgment. Adorno on Popular Culture
allows the critic to get a better sense of
Adorno’s ideas without having to labor
through his heavy tomes and often incom-
prehensible prose. Robert Witkin’s work is
Delivered
useful in this regard, although it can be seen
User Unknownto hear a favorite tune or aria (or see
as guilty of committing the sin of many of the
IP: 212.159.124.238
cultural works criticized by Adorno—wrest-
2004..12..29..14..04..
ing a few nuggets from the totality of a work
and thereby losing a sense of that totality and
the place of each element in it. Thus, just as
Adorno criticized classical music and opera
for their focus on popular tunes or arias in
isolation from their larger symphonic or
operatic context, Witkin can be critiqued for
isolating a few of Adorno’s ideas from their
larger context. This problem is exacerbated
by the structure of the book, which reads
more like a series of independent essays than
a coherent text, with the result that there is
enormous repetition, including repetition of
the relatively few ideas that were isolated
from Adorno’s corpus for discussion.
That being said, this book makes a useful
contribution, especially in making it clear
that some of the easy assertions about the
elitism of Adorno (and other critical theorists)
are far off the mark. Yes, Adorno was extra-
ordinarily sophisticated and knew a great
deal about many things, but we must not be
critical of him (or anyone) for that. While he
was a critic of mass culture, he liked some of
it (Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, and he
deplored the tendency to intellectualize such
comedy) and, more important, was also crit-
ical of elite culture. Thus, symphonic music
(especially that of Tchaikovsky and
Rachmaninoff), and opera (especially
Contemporary Sociology 33, 4
FINAL PROOF
Wagner), as well as the star system of com-
posers and conductors that has become so
central to those worlds, were also subjected
to a withering critique by Adorno. But these
judgments were not merely a matter of taste,
or more specifically Adorno’ s seemingly
more sophisticated taste, but rather derived
from a theoretical standard, dialectical
Marxian view of the part-whole relationship,
which was applied in a dispassionate way to
all art, high and low. Thus, Adorno cannot be
dismissed as an elitist both because he was
critical of much of “high” culture and because
his judgments were not based on his posses-
sion of better taste than the rest of us. Rather,
he applied a theoretical idea (much like Marx
did with “species being”) to all realms of the
cultural world.
There is a ring of truth in Adorno’s critique
of culture, both high and low. Many of
today’s opera and symphony goers are pret-
ty unsophisticated
by Ingentaand to
attend, among other
reasons,
a star conductor
or singer), and have little
interest in, or understanding
of, the entirety
of which it is (or should be) a part. There is
a similar feeling of truth to Adorno’s critique
of mass culture, for example, in jazz. There is
a tendency among academics to deify jazz as
a truly innovative art form and to applaud the
improvisation characteristic of jazz pieces
and jazz musicians. It appears on the surface
to avoid the “standardization” and “rational-
ization” of which Adorno (and the Frankfurt
School) were so critical. The traditional view
is that after a few minutes of playing a tune,
each member of a jazz band is then free to
improvise making each rendition unique.
While this is true, it is also the case, as
Adorno points out, that there is standardiza-
tion to all of this; after playing together each
member predictably does a riff of his or her
own. Jazz aficionados may not like this view,
but it has much the same kind of truth-value
as Adorno’s critique of much symphonic and
operatic music.
In spite of the validity of many of the
muticultural and postmodern critiques, social
theorists and sociologists more generally
need to have standards and to use them to
make judgments. Without such standards and
judgments, theory and sociology become
thoroughly denuded. Adorno develops a
series of standards derived from theory (in
his case, Marxian theory) and uses them to
#1599—CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY—VOL 33 NO 4—FILE: 33402-reviews
critique various cultural (and social) forms.
We may not agree with his particular stan-
dards, theory, or judgments, but we must
agree with his commitment to use theory to
develop standards in order to render judg-
ments about the social and cultural world.
This is not to say that Adorno is faultless.
For example, Witkin points out that Adorno
often did empirical research (on radio pro-
grams, for example) in which he paid little or
no attention to the data and, in any case, did
not and would not let such a “trifling matter”
as data interfere with his preordained theo-
retical judgments.
There is more to this book than merely an
exegesis on Adorno: Witkin offers a number
of criticisms of Adorno, as well as his own
analyses of popular culture. For example, he
offers a positive view of some of Woody
Allen’s movies (many of his recent movies
are mercifully ignored) and argues that
Adorno was generally unable to see the
strength in some popular culture. That cri-
tique seems to be contradicted by Adorno’s
aforementioned appreciation of Chaplin and
the Marx Brothers. In any case, the main rea-
son to read this book is not to learn about the
author’s thinking, but to get a better appreci-
ation for the continuing relevance of Adorno
and his critical thinking, as well as his
uncompromising “negative dialectics” in
which there is acceptance of the impossibili-
ty of a positive reaction to our alienated con-
dition, the rupture is acknowledged, and
resistance is accepted in the form of refusing
to overcome the rupture. It is not a very
romantic conclusion, but Adorno was highly
critical of romanticism not just in classical
music and opera (e.g., Tchaikovsky,
Wagner), but in all of its many guises.
One final note. This book makes it clear
that Adorno was one of those pioneers who
extended theory from production to leisure
and consumption. Sociologists and social the-
orists not only have much to learn from the
specific content of Adorno’s work, but many
more ought to be following his lead and
devoting more attention to the realm of
leisure/consumption, which he had already
recognized as one of growing importance
decades ago.
FINAL PROOF
Ideology and Cultural Production–457
The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound
Reproduction, by Jonathan Sterne. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003. 472 pp.
$69.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-8223-3004-0. $22.95
paper. ISBN: 0-8223-3013-X.
WILLIAM G. ROY
University of California-Los Angeles
billroy@soc.ucla.edu
I tell my undergraduate students that sociol-
ogy can help us see the familiar world in new
ways and introduce us to parts of social life
that are far removed from our own experi-
ence. Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past is a
remarkable book that does both. It addresses
the technology, science, culture, and busi-
ness of sound reproduction; how sound is
mediated by objects, from the stethoscope to
the cell phone. While scholarship has thor-
oughly interrogated vision, as evident in the
literal and by
Delivered metaphorical
Ingenta toprominence of such
termsUnknown
User as gaze, image, vision, and seeing,
IP: 212.159.124.238
there has not been much attention paid to
2004..12..29..14..04..
sound, especially mediated sound. This book
will indelibly change how the reader listens
to the radio, telephone, and CD player. It
achieves this not by elucidating the experi-
ence of listening but by probing the history
of how sound has been mediated. “In mod-
ern life, sound becomes a problem: an object
to be contemplated, reconstructed, and
manipulated, something that can be frag-
mented, industrialized, and bought and sold”
(p. 9). While some authors would be content
to document this important but not terribly
original insight, Sterne brilliantly probes how
and why sound has been problematized and
mediated in the modern world.
Sterne’s basic thesis is that while the ways
in which sound has been mediated by
objects has taken characteristically modern
forms, the particular technology, understand-
ings, institutional settings, and modalities of
sound have not been inevitable, but must be
concretely explained with historical inquiry.
He resists the temptation to describe new
developments as revolutionary, but frequent-
ly emphasizes the continuity beneath appar-
ently novel developments. He astutely avoids
the common tendency to inflate the impor-
tance of the changes he is studying by exag-
gerating the extent of change, frequently
Contemporary Sociology 33, 4