Change of Scene: Surveying the Ruins 349The second project he undertook while he was in Beverly Hills was a
media study. Adorno was among the first to analyse the impact of tele-
vision ‘in the system of the culture industry’. Once again his approach
was to analyse contents, that is to say, he examined the scripts of thirty-
four of the current, highly popular television dramas and concluded that
‘Even the modest development of action and character... is prohib-
ited; everything must be fixed from the outset; the stereotyped approach
and the ideological rigidity profits from the alleged technological neces-
sity, which itself stems from the commercial system.’^102 Adorno’s study
of television went beyond genre analysis inasmuch as he also examined
its cultural effects in the context of a media theory based on systematic
observation. Thus he arrived at the conclusion that media drama cannot
really be taken seriously by its audiences. ‘The little men and women
who are delivered into one’s home become playthings for unconscious
perception. There is much in this that may give the viewer pleasure;
they are, as it were, his property, at his disposal, and he feels superior to
them.’^103 Adorno reflected on the question of the role played by the
mass media in the individual psyche. He came to the conclusion that the
contents of television function as a kind of regulator of the desires and
needs of the audience. This leads to the increase in images and plots
that are aimed directly at internal psychological experiences, unsatisfied
desires. He concluded that ‘this Sisyphean labour of every individual’s
psychic economy appears to be “socialized” today, brought into direct
control by the institutions of the culture industry.’^104 He expressed this
idea more pointedly in the thesis that viewers wished to be deceived by
the beautiful appearance (den schönen Schein) of popular culture, even
though they saw through the deception. ‘In a kind of self-contempt,
they affirmed what was being done to them’.^105 On the other hand,
Adorno saw clearly that the audiences of television shows were per-
fectly well able to distinguish between their real experiences and the
staged experiences of the media. It followed that ‘the real interests
of individuals... are still strong enough to resist, within certain limits,
total inclusion.’^106
Adorno gave greater depth to the multiplicity of his individual
insights into the effects of American popular culture and the changes in
intellectual interests in his ‘Theory of Pseudo-Culture’, which he first
presented to the German Sociology Congress in May 1959 in Berlin and
subsequently published in Der Monat.^107 The distribution of fragments
of cultural knowledge in the mass media leads to the phenomenon of
pseudo-culture. This includes showing off one’s knowledge to prove
one is educated. The element of prestige, of being in the picture,
is decisive in the consumption of culture, not the active engagement
with its contents. Pseudo-culture bears ‘the physiognomy of the lower
middle class. Culture has not simply disappeared from this class; it drags
on by dint of the interests even of those who do not participate in the
privilege of culture.’^108 He summed up the specific decay of education,