Literature, Romantic System-Building and Porosity

Literature, Romantic System-Building and Porosity

&nbsp;&nbsp;According to Adorno and Horkheimer, the culture industry controls daily lives of the masses by reorganizing their sentiments and desires for economic interest and political need. They acknowledge that although culture seems to get away from politico-economic system, it in reality becomes an object for systematic management.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;This institutionalization of culture moves back to the Romantic age. Although cultural production at the beginning of the twentieth century starts to be electrically-oriented and Romantic literary production at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century is print-oriented, two types of cultural production mirror each other. For, Romantics enthusiastically attempt to regulate the public&quot;s sentiments in the name of the creation of taste as well. Literary production becomes a "moral steam engine" in Coleridge&quot;s phrase.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;It should be noted that cultural production becomes a new site where conflicting positions revolves around the issue of how culture/literature should operate in society. While Adorno disparages the culture industry as a planned deception, Benjamin defends it as a medium for the expansion of human senses. This controversy over whether the culture industry is manipulative or liberating is closely linked to the debate over whether literary education effects moral virtue or moral virus. The Lake School poet Southey defames Byron as the representative of the Satanic School, claiming that Byron disseminates what Southey termed "a moral virus." According to the Lake School poets, say, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, disciplined morals promote national wealth. Byron, as a kind of "moral virus," attempts to unbuild the moral system that the Lake poets wish to build. In an age when literature gets instituted as a moral engine to individualize social regulations, it simultaneously tends to question itself.