Week 7 Questions

 Adorno and Horkheimer in Industry Culture write that pseudo individuality “is the prerequisite for comprehending tragedy and removing its poison: only because individuals have ceased to be themselves and are now merely centres where the general tendencies meet, "and later they claim that the culture industry successfully deals with individuality by presenting heroes and figures that mitigate the effort to strive for individuality and instead imitate. If we examine this idea in the mass culture produced in modern society, does the argument hold up to the ideas of representation in media? Does it produce this imitation factor that tokenized representative figures to “be like” the person they see in media despite their race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation? What does Neoliberalism have to say about the capitalist tendencies of individuality versus the mass media culture industry? 

In Hall, “What is this Black in ‘Black Popular Culture,” Hall explains Black popular culture as “it as come to signify black community, where these traditions were kept, and whose struggles survive in the persistence of the black aesthetic, and the black counternarratives we have struggled to voice.” If we examine Stuart Hall’s ideas of pop culture as a culmination or hybrid of the diasporic experience and aesthetic, how do we qualify Black cultural production as unique and essential, and how do we refuse the binaries of Black cultural production imposed by hegemonic idealities of the high, essential arts?