Course:WMST307:Pseudo-Individualization:Sonia Furstrand

Pseudo-Individualization

In discussing the production of popular culture, Pseudo-Individualization is described by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno to refer to a style of capitalist production. Together they claim that popular culture is characterized by “the standardization of cultural production and of audience reaction to contemporary culture.” Pseudo-individualization is suggested to facilitate the standardization of cultural products, such as music, wherein the audience “is “built in” to the cultural product itself.” They assert that, in this mode of production, “emotions and desires” of consumers “have themselves been coded, created, produced, and reproduced by our experiences with popular culture” and this has important political implications because there exists a false belief that we are actually free to make our own decisions.

O’Brien and Szeman use “pseudo-individualization” to comment on the concept of individual identity. They note that “[p]seudo-individualization implies the production of a false identity: the experience of a sense of individuality and selfhood that doesn’t match up to the experiential depths that these terms usually suggest. To be an “individual,” as both philosophers, and advertisers tell us, is to be separated from the crowds and in control of one’s decisions and actions.” An important question is raised here in that if everyone really is individual then “who exactly forms the mass....that an individual distinguishes him- or herself against [?],” and it is that belief in “one’s own “real” individuality that constitutes pseudo-individualization.” This sense of individuality enables the standardized culture that we interact with and absorb to seem “genuine” and “unique” in an individual way, supposedly to distract us from the “contradictions and problems” in society. Without pseudo-individualization, in other words, it is more difficult for popular culture to “reinforce and maintain the power of the status quo.”

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