The Culture Industry and Mass Deception

Doritos Corn-Chips and Mass Deception (On Identity and the Culture Industry as Spectator)

By R.C. Smith

The other day I saw an advertisement for Doritos, a popular brand of (corn-based) crisps. In this ad there were four Hispanic looking individuals dressed fully in what appeared to be traditional Mariachi attire. Narrated by one of ‘The Mariachi Doritos’ to the effect that ‘people don’t understand until they hear it’, the four Hispanic men enter a rather dull made-to-seem-middle-class house-party and begin singing in the fashion of Mexican fiesta. The catch line is that they ‘bring the party to the party’ to which the advert concludes: ‘Doritos, add a little Mexican’.

At first I thought that this ad could be worse – that it could be far more racist in its blatant typification of the Mexican people; or that it could have been more cut-throat in the manner in which it blatantly sets out to commodify Hispanic ‘culture’ on behalf of the spectacle of ‘The Mariachi Doritos’.

But then after several replays it occurred to me that however innocently portrayed and however catchy the musical expressionism of this advertisement, this ad is indeed a perfect example of not only the silent racism that operates in society, or how culture becomes commodity, or even how culture becomes distorted into a form of entertainment. It also illustrates before our very eyes how we administratively reinforce stereotypes as the viewer, and even how the class system can be so present and yet so silent on our television screens.

Each one of these topics could be discussed extensively. But for me, what this ad shows most of all is the process of cultural commodification in its clearest and everyday form. That is to say that it highlights the actual role of culture in late-capitalist society: i.e., the administration of culture.

It shows us how the very designation ‘culture’ itself is a capitalist phenomenon insofar that it already presupposes, as Adorno would say, the process of identifying, cataloguing, and classifying of a people, importing their concrete cultural particularities into the realm of administration and ultimately commodification.

(Here the entire ideological process of capitalism is before us, silently operating in the background of a televised spectacle).

As trained via the habits of thought which themselves represent the abstract powers of the structurally-determined system of capitalism, the four Hispanic individuals become a vulgar generality or stereotype of Mexican particularity. By isolating a few characteristics as the brand of an entire people, the company in question is able to sell them in abstract form on an industrial scale. That is to say that the four Hispanic individuals in question become neutral objects. They become mediated with an objective ideal, stereotype or bad generalization and are ultimately displayed or presented as “neutral and ready-made” like a mass-produced piece of art exhausted of all its uniqueness and diversity.

Ideology itself is in the process of the design and creation of this ad as well as in the exchange between the phenomenon of the ad and the viewer. By promoting a certain form of psyche in the viewer which functions according to a certain structure or pattern of thought (cognition), and which aligns to an almost wholly administrated structure of perception, what unfolds in the experience of this advertisement is the reification of the viewers experience along with the particularities of Mexican ‘culture’.

In other words, on behalf of the ‘objective ideal’ of the commodity of Mexican ‘culture’ as conveyed in the aforementioned ad campaign, the real workings of ideology are in how the viewers cognitive experience is aligned with the abstract powers of identity. The racist core of this process can be seen in how the ad in question takes general characteristics of Hispanic particularity and obscures them in the same way that a white supremacist takes general characteristics of the ‘black man’ and converts them into a violating symbolism of the nature of that man. Henceforth we get the slogan: ‘Add a little Mexican’.

This is because the entire structure, the entire dynamic and operation of this advertisement functions according to an identitarian model of thought, which routinely makes a mockery of the human field of particularity by shaping the individual into a ‘social object’ of the administered world.

The process of identity, moreover, which operates in the background of the viewer’s subjective experience, is in effect the playing out of a type of objectivity which takes cultural particularities (of which many of us can readily distinguish in, for example, the Mariachi) and twists these particularities into abstract, objective (‘bad general’) concepts.

In sum, the true purpose of the Doritos advertisement is to orchestrate an experience that evokes the type of emotions which produce a sense of pleasure (i.e., pleasure associated, however perversely, with eating Doritos).

This artificial pleasure is presented via the object of the Hispanic musicians, who are diluted to such a degree of generality that they can therefore be presented to the mass of society and with the same effect. But while the four Hispanic individuals are dissolved into ‘objective things’ so too is the viewer insofar that the subject of the viewer is dissolved into an objective form abstract relations.

Jeanne Willette summarized this quite well in light of Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the culture industry, when she wrote: the manufacturing, promotion and selling of “culture” on an industrial scale is one of the clearest signs of ideology. “These “social things,” so to speak, these reified people can now be compartmentalized and labeled and thus controlled by the capitalist system that has need of their services. /… Capitalism appears to be “rational” and “logical” and claims to be “inevitable” but in order to function, psychological forces within humans must be both suppressed and deployed /… The enterprises that manufacture and promote and sell “culture” on an “industrial” scale are capitalist in nature and, in the process of selling their product, they sell capitalism and capitalist ideology as well. For example, the creation of the “star” and the “cult” of worship around the star him or herself gives rise to the illusion among the worshipers that a rise to stardom is in her or his grasp. Thus the dull truth of class division and unequal opportunity is overlaid by unrealistic hope.”

If ideology is thus inherent in the process, then the real evil is therefore in the psychological determinants of ideology which, as can be seen in the example of the above advertisement, have always been to some capacity the distortion of human subjectivity.

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R.C. Smith

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R.C. Smith is a researcher in Philosophy of Science. Currently a Teaching-Scholar at the Cooperative Institute of Transnational Studies, he is the founder of Heathwood Institute and Press where he also presently serves as Director / Executive Editor. Robert’s early research has been shaped largely by his interest in “extensively broad critical study”. Having spent most of his twenties researching in Frankfurt School critical theory and in what he describes as “engaged critical social philosophy”, his focus has been particularly honed on a cross-disciplinary and cross-field research programme spanning the many intersections of social sciences, humanities and history. Robert is the author of several books and over 100 academic articles.