106
HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER
fore all cntIcism of the mind industry which is abolitionist in its
essence is inept and beside the point, since the idea of arresting
and liquidating industrialization itself (which such criticism implies)
is suicidal. There is a macabre irony to any such proposal, for it
is indeed no longer a technical problem for our civilization to abolish
itself. However, this is hardly what conservative critics have in mind
when they complain about the loss of "values," the depravity of mass
civilization and the degeneration of traditional culture by the media.
The idea is, rather, to
be
away with all these nasty things, and to
survive, as an elite of happy pundits, in the nicer comforts offered
by a country house.
Nonetheless, the workings of the mind industry have been analysed,
in part, over and over again, sometimes with great ingenuity and
insight. So far as the capitalist countries are concerned the critics have
leveled their attacks mainly against the newer media and commercial
advertising. Conservatives and Marxists alike have been all too ready
to deplore their venial side. It is an objection which hardly touches
the heart of the matter. Apart from the fact that it is perhaps no
more immoral to profit from the mass-production of news or sym–
phonies than from the mass-production of soap and tires, objections
of this kind overlook the very characteristics of the mind industry. Its
more advanced sectors have long since ceased to sell any goods at all.
With increasing technological maturity, the material substrata, paper or
plastic or celluloid, tend to vanish. Only in the more old-fashioned
offshoots of the business, as for example in the book trade, does the
commodity aspect of the product play an important economic role.
In this respect, a ratio station has nothing in common with a match
factory. With the disappearance of the material substratum the pro–
duct becomes more and more abstract, and the industry depends less
and less on selling it to its customers.
If
you buy a book, you pay for
it in terms of its real cost of production; if you pick up a magazine,
you pay only a fraction thereof; if you tune in on a radio or television
program, you get it virtually free; direct advertising and political
propaganda is something nobody buys - on the contrary, it is crammed
down our throats. The products of the mind industry can no longer
be understood in terms of a sellers' and buyers' market, or in terms
of production costs: they are, as it were, priceless. The capitalist ex–
ploitation of the media is accidental and not intrinsic; to concentrate
on their commercialization is to miss the point and to overlook the
specific service which the mind industry performs for modern societies.
This service is essentially the same all over the world, no matter how
