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The correspondence between Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin – two central figures in the development of critical theory associated with the Frankfurt School – has been called “one of the most significant documents in the history of neo-Marxist literature” (Buck-Morss 1977: 139).[1] Adorno and Benjamin shared an instant intellectual kinship, and throughout his life Adorno was greatly influenced by Benjamin’s method for tracing fragmentary elements into constellations of interconnected relationships (Jameson 1990; Jay 1984). But their correspondence also revealed significant disagreements, especially in an exchange of letters that expressed Adorno’s negative responses Benjamin’s essays on art, Kafka, Baudelaire and nineteenth century Paris (Adorno et al. 2007: 100-41).[2] A “debate” or “dispute” between Benjamin and Adorno has since been identified about everything from aesthetics and mass culture to dialectics and Disney (Arato and Gebhardt 1982; Buck-Morss 1977; Hansen 1993; Lunn 1982; Rosen 2004; Wolin 1982). The ideas of Benjamin and Adorno occupy an increasingly central position in the academic fields of art, literature, media studies, musicology and philosophy (Benjamin 2005; Ferris 2004; Gibson and Rubin 2002; Gumbrecht and Marrinan 2003; Hansen 2011; Hanssen 2006; Hanssen and Benjamin 2002; Huhn 2004; Middleton 2006; Subotnik 1996). However, in another example of how the discipline’s mainstream has failed to incorporate the insights of critical theory and cultural studies (Agger 2007), Benjamin and Adorno have made a smaller impact on sociology – including the sociology of culture and media sociology – although there have been important exceptions on the margins of the discipline (DeNora 2003; Witkin 2003). My argument is that Adorno and Benjamin’s conflicting exchange over mass culture and technological reproducibility has extraordinary sociological implications for understanding contemporary media and the contradictions embedded within them. My specific focus will be the music industry and the consequences of digital technologies for the production, exchange, and consumption of music. While the debate between Adorno and Benjamin spans a wide range of aesthetic, philosophical and political issues, I will focus on their divergent appraisals of the emergent mass culture or “culture industry” (Bronner 2002; Held 1980; Jay 1973; Kellner 1989). Influenced by the playwright Bertolt Brecht, Benjamin maintained that technologies of reproduction were closing the distance that traditionally separates people from culture while also enabling audiences to become involved as participants and producers. Adorno rebuked Benjamin for these optimistic assessments and countered by further developing his critique of popular music, arguing that standardization was an inevitable product of the commodification of music and that all forms of mass culture effectively pacified their viewing or listening audience; his aesthetic and political loyalties remained with the “serious” forms of music he sharply distinguished from popular music. Benjamin, on the other hand, sensed that the capitalist production of culture was inherently contradictory, as he supposed that media technologies based on reproducibility would allow people to appropriate, de-contextualize and re-contextualize cultural forms in ways that had initially been undertaken by the avant-garde. Digital Reproducibility and the Culture Industry: Popular Music and the AdornoBenjamin Debate

Digital Reproducibility and the Culture Industry: Popular Music and the Adorno-Benjamin Debate